What's the equivalent of a benchmark in a forest?

Heard about Nvidia paying an AI startup six billion for a license, and it got me thinking about how we measure things in my line of work. I measure a stand by what it actually yields—board feet, biodiversity, resilience. But these models seem to get valued by how they perform on some abstract test. For people who work outside the tech bubble: what's the metric you trust that outsiders never understand?