Validation during fitting in Keras
If you don't define the validation set/ validation split for your model, then it has no way to check for it's performance because you have not provided anything to the model on which it can validate its performance. In this case, the model will run through training examples, will learn a way to minimize the cost function as per your code and that's it. You get a model which has learned a hypothesis from your data but how good  the model is, it can only  be checked by making predictions for the test set.