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Canonical Markdown source · Oct 20, 2018

Voyage evaluation v3 — technical recommendation

technical-recommendations/voyage-evaluation-v3-2026-08-25.md · 35 lines · SHA-256 b0a4cc30f787

Impact summary

The embedding evaluation now measures six balanced held-out cases over thirty

repeated observations instead of extrapolating from two cases. The trial runner

derives telemetry from the manifest, enforces the registered $0.01 pair-cost

gate, and readiness strictly replays v3 evidence. Runtime embedding behavior and

the deterministic default are unchanged.

Ranked coupling and failure findings

  1. High — two-case overfitting: one representative and one adversarial query

could not support a repeatable general retrieval claim.

  1. High — filename authority: readiness previously counted a matching Voyage

receipt path without validating its schema, manifest digest, counts, gates, or

false-authority boundary.

  1. Medium — hard-coded telemetry: case, observation, provider-call, tool, and

false-friend totals could drift from the manifest while appearing valid.

Actions

| Owner | Action | Acceptance criteria | Validation |

|---|---|---|---|

| Search and relevance | Run v3 with a spend-capped Voyage key | 30 observations, exact v3 replay, no safety failure, pair cost <= $0.01, pair latency <= 3 s | `pnpm ai:embeddings:trial -- --receipt=artifacts/ai-agent-value/trials/voyage-embeddings-latest.json --readiness-receipt=artifacts/ai-agent-value/trials/voyage-embeddings-review-readiness-latest.json --private-dir=artifacts/ai-agent-value/private/voyage-embeddings-latest` |

| Evaluation operations | Assign two genuinely independent cultural-heritage reviewers | Two distinct private timed responses bound to the exact packet; no identity or candidate leakage in public artifacts | `pnpm audit:ai-agent-value:readiness` |

| AI reliability | Retain strict receipt replay and dynamic telemetry | Any count, manifest, ceiling, safety, tool, authority, or extra-key drift fails closed | `node --import tsx --test --test-concurrency=1 tests/services/voyage-embedding-trial.test.ts tests/services/ai-agent-trial-readiness.test.ts` |

Next-cycle hypothesis

Voyage v3 improves independently judged relevance by at least 10 percentage

points over BM25 without increasing reviewer effort, exceeding the cost/latency

ceilings, or selecting an adversarial false friend. The governed provider trial

and two-response blind-review aggregate falsify the hypothesis if any gate fails.