- Verification: Are we building the product right?
- Validation: Are we building the right product?
My intuition was different. To me verification is a process while validation is that the outcome of that process. As in: to validate the "+" operator, you verify that 1+2=3.
Looking at the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verification_and_validation the definitions are not very clear and seem to depend on the context, tough the general idea is that of the LLM answer.
Funnily enough, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_validation_test Wikipedia article is introduced with "An engineering verification test (EVT)..."
It seems to be the kind of thing where everyone has a different idea and they are often conflated, making the distinction almost meaningless without context. You can give a precise definition for your project, but it may not apply elsewhere.
Note about using LLMs: I often like to use LLMs to settle these questions. Not because LLMs are flawless, far from it, but because they work by generalizing the content of their training dataset, they should do a pretty good job on extracting consensus. It fact, it is all they do; when a LLM tells the truth, as it is often the case, it is because the consensus is often the truth.