In several situations, the empirical measure of a large number of random particles evolving in a heat bath is an approximation of the solution of a dissipative PDE. The evaluation of the probabilities of large deviations of this empirical measure suggests a way of defining a natural ``large deviation cost'' for these fluctuations, very much in the spirit of optimal transport. Some standard Wasserstein gradient flow evolutions are revisited in this perspective, both in terms of heuristic results and a few rigorous ones. This talk gathers several joint works with Julio Backhoff, Giovanni Conforti, Ivan Gentil, Luigia Ripani and Johannes Zimmer.