Jev was built using the same architecture Laya's author proposed[1] in March 2025. Laya is an open-source system based on that research from a year ago. Whether Jev is also based on the OP's materials or independently invented is hard to say.
No, OP thinks they independently discovered Jev's architecture a year ago and published a paper. I am not an expert but I don't think Typesafe has published Jev's architecture so OP's claims cannot be taken at face value.
It’s the other way around for me. OP has published everything in the open, so I can take him at face value. A PR media release on the other hand, I can accept with some reservations. The objective and non-conspiratorial reading I could offer is, this is most probably two independent discoveries of the same idea, maybe with different implementation. I still think the Jev team should look at prior art before going so hard on the marketing.
I don’t mind the cringe. I have access to the information, so I can tell for myself. That’s my definition of face value, not necessarily that I agree, but I am given all the information to make a judgement.
Jev is only on people's mouths because they made friends with venture capitalists and used the publicity blowhorns that come with that.
Whereas the other guy went through the unglorious but formerly respectable path of publishing software and papers for other professionals to look at. A year ago.
We're in a bad place where the latter looks less reliable than the former.
posting to arxiv is not publishing, it's a preprint site, and what's there I would not call professional work of academic quality
This was a year ago, when we were all complaining about the arxiv slop, which led to the new vouching system. This paper would not make it to arxiv today, it would be a zenodo link since they have not instituted any gatekeeping
I'm reading your year old Reddit post and Typesafe's description, and while they probabably say that they can do what you do the main point is that it's different things really as far as I can tell?
Laya seems to be focused on sales/conversations?
Reading quickly about TypeSafe, it seems to be about creating _type-safe_ outputs from AI tools for downstream systems to consume, we actually have a system in production that's probably a glove-fit for that, it's for scanning receipts to be ingested into a system and we also have other systems in a sales-pipe that isn't too far off Laya but still sounds more pertient to TypeSafe.
You did a special case well, but just because they cover (perhaps badly) that case doesn't mean that it's the same thing.
I've been deeply impressed with Jev as it made a bunch of workloads we had on Luna or Gemini 10x cheaper and 2x faster (previously used non reasoning version for latency reasons).
Now Laya promises another speed up and it's open source. Tbh if it can't run on a CPU I anyway want to buy it from an inference provider. Managing gpus in production is a non trivial problem.
What I also wondered about Jev is how different it is from something like tabular foundation models. They seem to overlap in use cases. Which then leads to the question, what is actually learned? A lot of people in machine learning spend time to making things explainable and always struggled to move beyond data induced biases.
Having it open source is awesome as fine tuning might give additional performance on the task we care about.
I have 10000+ inventory items to categorize but I need an intelligent model (not just if statements). Using LLMs has been slow and expensive and I needed to queue it to run for hours. Jev did it in minutes and for less than 1 cent
Love it. I was really surprised to see the traction typesafe got in the first place. I had built something similar a year ago for a client and thought it was nothing groundbreaking. The client bought it, still uses it and that was it. I had also spent considerable time training and fine tuning zero shot NLI classifiers. Anyway, after typesafe was launched I decided to start building this open source library - https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/OpenDecision .
I played around with Jev last night and did it for classification tasks that I used Gemini 2.5 flash lite with.
It’s a bit faster and bit cheaper, but this is compared to LLM. The consistency was nice to see, BUT, as someone who trained NLP models prior to LLMs, it’s just BERT with more data. I can see why people would want ready made one shot classifier, and I can see the value of sending multiple classifier in one call, but I wouldn’t call it breakthrough. And I believe many labs will replicate it in no time and might have it as part of their harness.
I see it as a wake up call for the tech community to go back to basics for most tasks instead of relying solely on generic LLMs.
Anyone who has worked in ML for 10+ years would already know that the usage of LLMs for everything is lazy, wasteful and a high degree of marketing on it.
why would you waste your time messing around with a team of expensive ml engineers and data scientists that produce vastly inferior to a llm.
We ripped out custom homegrown ml models that were developed in last 10 yrs and put an llm in its place. Its the opposite of wasteful. Even local gemma models are vastly superior.
There’s a middle option. Once you figure that out, you’d soon understand my point today or tomorrow. I’ve been in this field for 21 years and I use LLMs everyday. I also know when to not use them.
It's the transportation "mode shifting" difficulty. Per the AI, the term of art is "Pure Transfer Penalty". It's the "ick" when doing bike => bus => bike instead of "only bike" or "only car".
Mode switching has a cost. Usually std::sort is good enough compared to picking the prime optimal algorithm for your expected shape. Just call the function and get on with your day.
I think both your arguments are true. It all depends on the velocity of the capability growth and the fact that opportunity cost is expensive.
Once we get out of this hypergriwth phase the very same AI companies that now are giving you llms will provide a service that employed a rich mixture of optimized models that will reduce the operational costs to achieve the required results
I wouldn’t say lazy, LLMs are fast to use and much more cost effective especially if you factor the cost and time of training (data preparation, data cleaning, … etc).
It’s hard to justify several months to business when there is something off-shelf ready to use and doesn’t require domain specialists to run.
People have been having this same debate in a very similar way on typed languages vs untyped interpreted languages. I think that, in a similar vein, if you look at the trend over time:
- the addition and standardization post-hoc (and incomplete) solution of adding typing to Python
- how much people are re-discovering the value of performance + typing (e.g. Rust)
then I'm going to take a small leap and extrapolate that the trend will be similar here.
The equivalent of the "one off script in python" will be the LLM, and the long term stable and maintainable solution will be something much more structured and focused like Jev.
I have, LLMs are less fragile, that’s why I like them. The ability to generalize isn’t just about being general purpose, it’s super robust, and so assuming the budget is there (I agree they are inefficient) end up performing better on many classical tasks that have ood inputs. Before LLMs / foundation models we all struggled with generalization and at least in the work I was doing people were independently converging to using bigger more general models for tasks anyway as compute got cheaper. LLMs are just the most popular version of this.
That's part of the irony here I guess. In specialized fields, think computer vision, there were lots of teams whose innovative state of the art model was essentially just a function of the limitless compute they could throw at the problem. Now there are just people with even bigger sticks.
There are lots of scenarios where specialized models still are the only option for real time, power efficiency, and so on. And transformers and other tech behind LLMs can equally produce better specialized models. But no sympathy for those who confused compute with innovation.
> The ability to generalize isn’t just about being general purpose, it’s super robust
I work with LLMs daily. 5 of my specialized tasks are outperformed by a custom model than a general purpose frontier model. The performance of my custom models not only beat them but are orders of magnitude low in costs and thus are able to be used by more customers.
I suspect you and GP are talking at different layers. I think you are using robust on specific tasks with measuable confusion matrix. I think GP is talking about robust in more complex and diverse workflows, with the ability to self correct over turns.
I would rate using LLM for tasks more specific ML can handle as a lot like using one's smartphone to snap photos, listen to music, set alarms, and play video games in preference to carrying around a fun cam, ipod, watch, and switch 2 everywhere.
For those who need to dive really deep into each specific avenue and squeeze maximal quality out, the photographers will be packing DSLRs and intense gamers will wait til they get home to strap into a PS5 or a gaming rig or VR or whatever.
But "can get 90% of anyone's needs met in this field, and can do the same in dozens or hundreds of other fields simultaneously" will remain the killer solution for anyone with lots needs that each have bounded depth.
I prototyped an NLP pipeline using an LLM because setting up the whole NLP skeleton was way too much of a pain. It was able to adequately simulate each piece. The nice part was that I could attack the problem from above, at any point I could just have the full intelligence of the LLM at my disposal.
Anyone who has designed circuits will consider CPUs wasteful compared to ASICs. This new FPGA technology is just a less efficient ASIC.
That’s roughly what I’m hearing.
The fact that general purpose intelligent classifiers can be dynamically hacked together by an LLM in real time to allow them to build evolving labeled and understandable networks that perform substantially faster than the LLM, and can act as an intermediate sorting and organizing layer for caching context or handling simple tasks, and a complete layman like me can assemble a teachable layer of these in a few days from an inexpensive service…
That’s wild!
And then you can identify where an expert system needs a more specific ML technique for efficiency within this network that overlays the SOTA model. Or manually adjust the stored context in each secondary “neuron”. And paths forward can run programs or take actions at relative high speed.
And you can share these with others and improve them as a group.
You could insert this at the datacenters at scale with a local supervising expert to prune and encourage proper growth. You could identify specific gaps in capability that need more training, and patch over them temporarily.
Then you train those corrections back into the general purpose model, or you identify highly efficient subsystems for specific purposes.
And this is just one way to use it. High speed intelligent workflows can live in this. There’s a spot for a local LLM to learn on the fly.
Maybe I’m way off base, but for the non-experts Jev seems extremely valuable.
I don't think either of you are wrong. The parent's assertion is that we've known this for almost a decade. BERT was highly usable for classification and sentiment analysis a whopping 9 years ago, despite being less than 0.5B parameters large. Similar-scale models like FLAN-T5 showed that it could be improved without substantially scaling up.
Today, we're extremely spoiled by trillion parameter-scale models. Our conceptualization of vibe coding relies on wasteful tool-calling paradigms, the one-size-fits-all mentality of LLMs is part of the marketing blitz to make people buy more tokens. It's lazy on the part of frontier labs, but also wastes electricity, time and money.
Lol your argument is the same as programmers who complain about Javascript and internet browsers being the most common interface for all solutions on a computer
You guys dont understand that the Lowest common denominator ALWAYS wins - its why excel is the linga franca for most companies
LLMS and AI coding are the new javascript easy way to build amazing things and that trumps the tool specializers
Years of Big Data and Data Engineers building fit for purpose ML pipelines expensively working in a shadowy corner of the company have been replaced by the PM vibe coding a tool to categorize his emails by relevance
Again - you are right, but it still doesn't refute the grandparent's claim that today's AI is lazy, wasteful and marketing-driven. There is room to improve, and if US labs don't take the initiative then Chinese ones will.
It is lazy and wasteful if you ignore the costs of specialized skills in doing it the "right way." If you stop looking at things in a narrow technical frame, and look at it as an organization, it's not wasteful. And lazy is a useless pejorative used against products that let people do things easily. Lazy is good. When you learn how to make products that allow people to be more lazy, you will become successful.
What results though. The people seeing measurable improvements to their core work with LLMs are coders.
Everyone else is taking over intern level work from someone else’s team. They are reducing the friction costs of talking to someone else, for about a 30% productivity gain.
Firms are trying desperately to automate their white collar workers, and that is following the same trend as all other automation projects, and ML/deep learning efforts in history.
There's no need for black and white thinking. Javascript and the internet browser are the most common interface sure, but there's still room for specialised desktop software, especially those that require serious performance like anything to do with 3d graphics or real-time audio.
But also, frontier LLMs are enormously expensive and slow. Using Astra for things like simple text classification is not going to scale, and you're likely to end up in the same boat as those people who saw their Vercel bill shoot up to $96k/week when their site got traction, if not worse.
That's the thing. LLM's can be used as a real-time teaching layer and build systems that can operate at deterministic speeds and escape hatch into a LLM when confidence levels drop. This approach has helped us save more than $1 Million annually against the straight LLM classifiers at scale (and pass that on to the customers)
That goes all the way back to at least to Stein's Paradox in 1955, sadly too few people get educated about Statistics and keep thinking specialized models will necessarily be better. If you want to estimate the batting averages of 3 MLB baseball players from samples, you are better off building a model to predict all of their batting averages than computing the mean from a sample of each one separately.
This is why you shouldn't assume that my comment was a juxtaposition of LLMs in comparison with hand crafted feature ML models. The binary thinking is highly problematic IMO
It would be amazing to have big BERTha with per-token pricing on GCP or AWS. There are many times I am reaching for a cheap classifier with the general behavior of an LLM.
The data labeling objection baffles me. Even if you don’t need labels for training, how do you know your model is working if you’re not evaluating it?
My company specializes in statistical long document text classification, but nowadays we mainly work with audit trail requirements because we got tired of hearing complaints about our 5 example learning curve. Seems like the industry standard is telling an llm to label and telling an llm to eval, and crossing your fingers that it’s correct.
the huge benefit in real systems for Jev like solutions i see is the cybersecurity / prompt injection mitigation. since the output will always be well structured, there is no way prompt injection might make the system do something crazy.
probably a prompt injection can still affect the output though, in unforeseeable ways.
You can use structured outputs and validate them against a schema today. I do agree making it a hard constraint instead of best practice for developers closes a whole class of bugs.
There have been other "universal"/general classifiers like GLiNER, GLiFormer, etc based on BERTs (Laya itself is based on ModernBERT!), but I do think there's something underrated about slapping classification on a "big" model like I've seen post-Jev announcement, lots of Qwen stuff, but the most interesting to me so far is razorback16/openjev using DiffusionGemma. There's a level of generalization that lots and lots of parameters get you that you can't really get out of small models.
That's an interesting choice. One question I had when looking at the jev copy on their blog is if one "line" in their output looks / attends to other lines. I think not, since they say it's parallel and not autoregressive. In that regard, it would be interesting to play with diffusion, and see if you'd get better results by playing with types, locking some, and so on.
> That's an interesting choice. One question I had when looking at the jev copy on their blog is if one "line" in their output looks / attends to other lines. I think not, since they say it's parallel and not autoregressive.
I don't understand the connection between the lack of autoregression and options attending to each other.
Non autoregressive models can attend to all the inputs simultanously.
An autogregressive model can can attend to all the options in the context of each other by simply writing the options out twice. Autoregressive models actually requires this, since one of them will come later, and the earlier prefill inputs can't attend to the later ones.
I really doubt this actually. To me, Jev is a great example ofcounter positioning. When you consider just how hyper optimized the labs are around auto regressive LLMs, and just how much money they have already invested and are pre committed to investing in an entire stack for auto regressive transformers... then responding to Jev becomes nearly impossible actually. They would just be giving up too much.
Just think, everything from their current sources of revenue, the sales use cases they tout, the marketing on the websites, the messaging to customers, then technically to the APIs, their internal batching and scheduling algos, their GPU configs, the chips themselves. ALL OF IT is designed with generative text models in mind. Jev breaks all of it.
I think basically no chance of a response any time soon.
I don’t understand how you’ve reasoned your way here.
How could Jev have possibly built something out of reach of a frontier lab providing the same or 5x as much resourcing to one of their teams to achieve? Which they can do because Jev has only received $40M of funding recently, so a round that is approximately what OpenAI is spending per math problem they try cracking.
In addition to that, these frontier labs have got extremely good at generating synthetic data and running generalised training pipelines. I can only imagine how easy it would be for them to build this internally vs Jev building it from scratch.
And then the final thing: one of the best places you might apply Jev is within a harness, behind layers that customers increasingly have abstracted from them. Frontier labs have huge incentives to do this as it could make their offering much better and cheaper. And whoever gets this first wins another big attraction for users.
My take on this is Jev is either acquired almost immediately for the benefit of the next 1-3 months head start for whichever lab acquires them or we get a similar model offered from all labs in 3-6 months or sooner.
Let's take that as a given. Is BERT with more data not useful?
> I can see why people would want ready made one shot classifier, and I can see the value of sending multiple classifier in one call, but I wouldn’t call it breakthrough
Are those things that people want less useful because of what someone else calls it?
> I see it as a wake up call for the tech community to go back to basics for most tasks instead of relying solely on generic LLMs.
Maybe, or maybe to use Jev, which is useful?
Whether something is overmarketed or undermarketed, novel or derivative, it does not change its function.
Agreed, refreshing to hear others share this feeling.
Timing is important here, LLM's raised awareness of ML techniques but we need to remember that most don't have traditional ML educations, so there'll be some "rediscovery" like Jev
The breakthrough is the product (maybe, haven’t tried it yet) just like the LLM breakthrough was ChatGPT. People were using the gpt completion api flying low for months if not years before, but it took that particular launch to reorient everyone.
Quickly reading the article, one notable limitation seems to be that these checkpoints are 512-1024 tokens context size models, while Jev is seemingly 32k.
That's a pretty big limitation, I would argue, unless I'm misunderstanding and it can be worked around easily somehow? I'm surprised it isn't surfaced more prominently in the comparison.
Jev has 64k total token request budget and I do wonder how it will handle highly specialised inputs.
This Jev waitlist that Typesafe AI are utilising is surely going to raise questions pretty soon - it's hard to sell this to bosses when it looks like a pop-up restaurant
Loved the idea, but I don’t think it would be able to handle real-world data effectively. There are a lot of nuances that actually require a reasoning model to think through, connect the dots, and make sense of the broader context.
If you need a reasoning model, then that is a System 2 decision, not a System 1 decision. This thread is about "Laya", a "Jev" competitor/precursor, which is a System 1 thing.
from https://huggingface.co/convaiinnovations/laya
> The policy reports a distribution; exploration adds zero-mean Gaussian noise to the logits; the reward is a strictly proper scoring rule (log + spherical, plus ranked probability score for ordinal questions). Expected reward is maximised only by reporting honest probabilities.
It is really interesting to see this claim, because i thought the current theory was that typesafe actually repackaged the work from GLiNER[1] - which does seem to be a closer match, and their original paper[2] predates yours by several years. Curious if you had heard of it before? It is also open source[3] and I think also has some good usage.
I think the biggest lesson with Jev was the one of communication and understanding for the broader audience, sometimes a lot about innovating involves repeating yourself and translating your own thoughts to an intended audience.
Classical machine learning has been, for the most part, and just by the nature of science, behind academic terms and difficult to engage with as a product.
Jev did really well with coining up “System One” models and defining a standard application interface plus core primitives that landed in the current paradigm of software development.
I think it’s sort of like how Cursor reinvented autocomplete back then as a different UX and suddenly everyone was just using it because of how easy the bar was to understanding it.
Lastly, timing is everything. Just as Cursor had a first mover advantage, despite ML Ops being a thing for a while, they managed to encapsulate the concept behind a “System One” black box that fits the existing mental model for building software and shipping a data contract in the right point in time where the cost of tokens has been an important metric to watch.
Furthermore, it's not about the current innovation right now - if you sell yourself on a broader mission, your core product can evolve and change with it, and you're more selling yourself as the guy who will make that abstract vision possible no matter what.
No matter how much we pretend, that's how a lot of abstractions work. Things that touch the real world can change; there's a risk that the change could be as something as simple as a bugfix to changing the underlying implementation but preserving a higher level goal; you generally want a human in the loop to make sure the semantics work out and everybody's agreeing.
Well said, once you put it out there in the world, then it's also about how will the customer react to it and having to own that relationship going forward.
The relationship aspect of a business has a lot to do with how effective it is at continuing to justify its core value in an easy and relatable way; especially so when the decision makers that front the bill may not be as engaged with the underlying machinery behind the why it works how it does.
Yep. Not instantly though. I am hacking away at these things over on https://github.com/rcarmo/go-pherence (I do SIMD versions of common inference algos) and trying to improve that.
Correct me if I am wrong, can I use Jev and this tool for ticket classification? I mean, for instance, a level 1 ticket contains a screenshot of the login page that displays an error, LLM can do it perfectly, can Jev do it?
It can’t do images but it can do a pretty good job of triaging urgency or choosing when to escalate. So I’d guess yes but it depends how detailed your classification is.
This post is either majorly astroturfed or nobody upvoting this has read past a couple sentences.
Thee author of this post has a specialized model that does routing for his sales pipeline.
After jev came out, the author adapted his model to produce jev-shaped output: choice, noul, and score primitives.
Then, author writes a post about how jev copied him. (even though this was released in the past couple days, after jev was released)
If I were to download this model, I would get nothing like jev. I would get a model that is able to beat jev in a very small domain that this model has been fine tuned for.
We've all seen "this meeting could have been an email"; now get ready for "this VC-backed firm could have been a single arXiv preprint."
I don't want to be too dismissive of Jev BUT I'm gonna do it anyway: building technology in stealth for two years just doesn't make sense when the capabilities are so easily replicated.
Bringing up iphone, I see how Jev pulled an Apple for making claims that their model is a breakthrough in research and 2 years of making like other iPhone features that's been around in other phones.
All this means is that brand and distribution matters more than ever. There's 1000 chatgpt clones but everyone still uses chatgpt. There might be 1000 jev clones soon enough but people won't switch unless there's something significantly better about it.
It's also why Meta can make Muse and get a lot of users even though there's 10,000 personal agent startups
In jevs case I think the competing offerings will rear their head rather fast. The ability to label data like it does now leans itself well for distillation. And to switch out a model like fable for Astra is really not all that difficult. Yea jev is alone now. But before the end of the year another lab with the same offering will rear it’s head
> There's 1000 chatgpt clones but everyone still uses chatgpt. There might be 1000 jev clones soon enough but people won't switch unless there's something significantly better about it.
The fact that Jev will be cloned is exactly why brand and distribution matter even more. When 1,000 products do the same thing, you'll use the one you know.
> Seeing the hype online feels both validating and deeply frustrating.
The post is conflating hype and money with technical innovation, they are not really correlated. Kurzweil is known for saying most innovations succeed based not on technology but on timing. Today, who talks about it might matter even more than timing.
Superior research often gets overlooked in favor of someone raising millions, sometimes people who have produced literally nothing manage to sell it. Not saying that's happening here, but I've seen this pattern a lot over my career.
Someone riding (or manufacturing) a hype wave is playing a completely different game from a researcher. If you're a researcher you can't really feel dejected when someone is making a business on the back of what seems like your research; legal protections are decades out of date, even ignoring vibe coding. If you want to make money/hype/whatever off of your work, do that. But realize that it's a path that's often orthogonal to research.
I can understand why the author feels bitter but it still feels juvenile to me. Certainly both Jev and Laya are based on the research of countless prior papers and academics. Diogo decided to build a product out of the concept. The author didn't. Publishing research papers and model weights is probably part of the problem--it feels academic. If you look at the author's profile they focus on applying AI to healthcare. Not selling general AI type safety to AI pilled companies and devs. There's a big difference there. Whether that's good or bad you can argue all day. But for the author to expect otherwise is pretty weird. I do applaud them for not stewing too much on it and trying to do something about it, though.
I believe his qualms were with the "hype" in Jev's announcement: specifically calling this kind of model a breakthrough, without crediting previous art, and keeping everything closed source.
The hype is kinda nuts; I use X for ML/LLM stuff, and I just can't get away from Jev - even in my Following feed. Even days later 75% of posts are about "how I use typesafe for cooking breakfast!" or Jev clones.
So many different theories on why this actually is.
First, I think comprehensibility is a major part of why certain products grab the interest of the mainstream portions of the market. The 75% of posts in your feed are not from people who evaluate products based on underlying technology. They typically value signal from social reinforcement higher than anything else. This is the same reason why we see people mentioning products instead of technologies, i.e. PlanetScale versus Postgres & Tailscale versus WireGuard. The consumers understand the value proposition, but would have never discovered it without relatable messaging. This isn't a new phenomenon in computer software either; jQuery is probably one of the first examples that I can remember with this sort of texture.
The other side is a perception of expertise in a specialty. Software development, especially in AI, has become an incredibly desirable profession, and there are more people than ever racing to be included in it. In my own professional experience I find an excessive amount of entry level talent leveraging the same comprehension of product, but not comprehension of technology to get their foot in the door. A vast majority of the "thought leaders" occupying our feeds are not as well practiced as they claim to be, they're just trying to get a job or raise funding.
And finally, AI has brought out a certain amount of desperation in practitioners, for lack of a better term, materializing as an anecdotal, but certainly observable need to remain on the very tip of the news cycle in order to feel well informed. And so, using the dynamics above and many other human social dynamics, we find certain concepts spreading across cohorts that would not normally have a need or a want for these particular techniques, or products, or solutions, but because they feel pressured to remain relevant.
If it's closed source, how do you know it's not technology given by aliens from the 43rd dimension running on quantum computers enabled by discovering that P=NP and finding a linear time reduction from NP to P?
Occam's razor is that it's probably not all that different unless there is some specific reason to believe otherwise.
Agreed. Another difficulty here is there are not good benchmarks for this new architecture yet, so it’s easy to potshot and snipe, where jev seems to be pretty broadly intelligent/at least have had a lot of rl in different domains.
We haven’t seen any of these copy cats play doom or street fighter for instance; just categorize email.
I imagine once the author cools down and evaluates on a broad harness of tasks he may find that his new thing has a lot of engineering work ahead.
I’m not filled with confidence when the author’s first paper takes an RL approach but then doesn’t use it to change the action taken in the next turn. Seems like simple classification would achieve the same end. And this quote from the paper isn’t overly reassuring:
“I personally found that this sequential approach captured
sales dynamics much more effectively than traditional classification models.”
imagine years of thankless open source work. only to see hyper-capitalism arrive with the bulldozers, take everything, hype the company, enclose the model, strip mine the data, cash out and leave.
jev has arrived with its cult founder, the san francisco office, dubious marketing and $40 million of venture capital lying in wait and trying to fatten the calf.
so says jev's 'manifesto':
"Our mission is to pave the shortest path to an AI-based economic revolution² by making intelligence composable to catalyze a Cambrian explosion³ of intelligent software"
"Juvenile" is a weird label to assign to someone whose work is re-presented by someone else and not attributed properly. People here had a very different take on the Navier-Stokes situation XD
I don’t understand Jev or this. I used this since it’s open source (good job btw!) with the following. State: “a 6 sided die rolled a 3”, question (noul): “Is the number odd?”
python3 - <<'EOF'
import json, urllib.request
body = json.dumps({
"state": "The car wash is only 100 meters away from my house.",
"model": "jev-1.13-free",
"questions": {"q": {"type": "choice",
"instructions": "Should I drive or walk to the car wash?",
"criteria": {"drive a car": None, "walk": None}}}
}).encode()
req = urllib.request.Request("https://opencode.ai/zen/v1/systemone", data=body,
headers={"Content-Type": "application/json", "User-Agent": "opencode/1.18.31"})
with urllib.request.urlopen(req, timeout=60) as r:
print(json.dumps(json.load(r)["answers"]["q"], indent=2))
EOF
{
"type": "choice",
"choice": "walk",
"confidence": 0.66,
"probabilities": {
"walk": 0.83,
"drive a car": 0.17
}
}
I guess we’ve just reached the point where everyone has to state the obvious, and common sense is extremely uncommon.
So here goes: you should not use an AI model to validate a claim which is trivial to calculate deterministically. That is (obviously?) not what a model like Jev is for, thus it is not a good test of Jev.
I don't think calculating mathematical odds from natural language is the sort of problem this is trying to solve. A typical LLM hooked up to a calculator would be more appropriate for that.
Jev (and similar) is more for data processing and sentiment analysis. Moderation, search engines, that sort of thing. Jev has a page of proposed use cases where you can get an idea of what they're going for: https://docs.typesafe.ai/concepts/use-case-map
Jev says you should restate state in the question and I tried it:
{
"decision": {
"type": "noul",
"instructions": "Is the rolled number in state odd?"
},
"question": {
"type": "noul",
"instructions": "Is the number odd?"
},
"question-3": {
"type": "noul",
"instructions": "a 6 sided dice rolled a 3 Is the number odd?"
},
"question-4": {
"type": "noul",
"instructions": "a 6 sided dice rolled a 3 Is the rolled number odd?"
}
}
paper the reddit OP "published" (their words on reddit) to arxiv (before they put the vouching process in place). It's what you expect if you click through.
289 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] thread[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23303
they don't seem very similar to me
Whereas the other guy went through the unglorious but formerly respectable path of publishing software and papers for other professionals to look at. A year ago.
We're in a bad place where the latter looks less reliable than the former.
This was a year ago, when we were all complaining about the arxiv slop, which led to the new vouching system. This paper would not make it to arxiv today, it would be a zenodo link since they have not instituted any gatekeeping
Laya seems to be focused on sales/conversations?
Reading quickly about TypeSafe, it seems to be about creating _type-safe_ outputs from AI tools for downstream systems to consume, we actually have a system in production that's probably a glove-fit for that, it's for scanning receipts to be ingested into a system and we also have other systems in a sales-pipe that isn't too far off Laya but still sounds more pertient to TypeSafe.
You did a special case well, but just because they cover (perhaps badly) that case doesn't mean that it's the same thing.
Now Laya promises another speed up and it's open source. Tbh if it can't run on a CPU I anyway want to buy it from an inference provider. Managing gpus in production is a non trivial problem.
What I also wondered about Jev is how different it is from something like tabular foundation models. They seem to overlap in use cases. Which then leads to the question, what is actually learned? A lot of people in machine learning spend time to making things explainable and always struggled to move beyond data induced biases.
Having it open source is awesome as fine tuning might give additional performance on the task we care about.
It’s a bit faster and bit cheaper, but this is compared to LLM. The consistency was nice to see, BUT, as someone who trained NLP models prior to LLMs, it’s just BERT with more data. I can see why people would want ready made one shot classifier, and I can see the value of sending multiple classifier in one call, but I wouldn’t call it breakthrough. And I believe many labs will replicate it in no time and might have it as part of their harness.
I see it as a wake up call for the tech community to go back to basics for most tasks instead of relying solely on generic LLMs.
> I see it as a wake up call for the tech community to go back to basics for most tasks instead of relying solely on generic LLMs.
I always say the cheapest LLM request is no request at all.
Their generality also comes with a latency/computation costs.
We ripped out custom homegrown ml models that were developed in last 10 yrs and put an llm in its place. Its the opposite of wasteful. Even local gemma models are vastly superior.
Mode switching has a cost. Usually std::sort is good enough compared to picking the prime optimal algorithm for your expected shape. Just call the function and get on with your day.
Once we get out of this hypergriwth phase the very same AI companies that now are giving you llms will provide a service that employed a rich mixture of optimized models that will reduce the operational costs to achieve the required results
It’s hard to justify several months to business when there is something off-shelf ready to use and doesn’t require domain specialists to run.
- the addition and standardization post-hoc (and incomplete) solution of adding typing to Python - how much people are re-discovering the value of performance + typing (e.g. Rust)
then I'm going to take a small leap and extrapolate that the trend will be similar here.
The equivalent of the "one off script in python" will be the LLM, and the long term stable and maintainable solution will be something much more structured and focused like Jev.
There are lots of scenarios where specialized models still are the only option for real time, power efficiency, and so on. And transformers and other tech behind LLMs can equally produce better specialized models. But no sympathy for those who confused compute with innovation.
I work with LLMs daily. 5 of my specialized tasks are outperformed by a custom model than a general purpose frontier model. The performance of my custom models not only beat them but are orders of magnitude low in costs and thus are able to be used by more customers.
For those who need to dive really deep into each specific avenue and squeeze maximal quality out, the photographers will be packing DSLRs and intense gamers will wait til they get home to strap into a PS5 or a gaming rig or VR or whatever.
But "can get 90% of anyone's needs met in this field, and can do the same in dozens or hundreds of other fields simultaneously" will remain the killer solution for anyone with lots needs that each have bounded depth.
That’s roughly what I’m hearing.
The fact that general purpose intelligent classifiers can be dynamically hacked together by an LLM in real time to allow them to build evolving labeled and understandable networks that perform substantially faster than the LLM, and can act as an intermediate sorting and organizing layer for caching context or handling simple tasks, and a complete layman like me can assemble a teachable layer of these in a few days from an inexpensive service…
That’s wild!
And then you can identify where an expert system needs a more specific ML technique for efficiency within this network that overlays the SOTA model. Or manually adjust the stored context in each secondary “neuron”. And paths forward can run programs or take actions at relative high speed.
And you can share these with others and improve them as a group.
You could insert this at the datacenters at scale with a local supervising expert to prune and encourage proper growth. You could identify specific gaps in capability that need more training, and patch over them temporarily.
Then you train those corrections back into the general purpose model, or you identify highly efficient subsystems for specific purposes.
And this is just one way to use it. High speed intelligent workflows can live in this. There’s a spot for a local LLM to learn on the fly.
Maybe I’m way off base, but for the non-experts Jev seems extremely valuable.
Today, we're extremely spoiled by trillion parameter-scale models. Our conceptualization of vibe coding relies on wasteful tool-calling paradigms, the one-size-fits-all mentality of LLMs is part of the marketing blitz to make people buy more tokens. It's lazy on the part of frontier labs, but also wastes electricity, time and money.
You guys dont understand that the Lowest common denominator ALWAYS wins - its why excel is the linga franca for most companies
LLMS and AI coding are the new javascript easy way to build amazing things and that trumps the tool specializers
Years of Big Data and Data Engineers building fit for purpose ML pipelines expensively working in a shadowy corner of the company have been replaced by the PM vibe coding a tool to categorize his emails by relevance
Everyone else is taking over intern level work from someone else’s team. They are reducing the friction costs of talking to someone else, for about a 30% productivity gain.
Firms are trying desperately to automate their white collar workers, and that is following the same trend as all other automation projects, and ML/deep learning efforts in history.
But also, frontier LLMs are enormously expensive and slow. Using Astra for things like simple text classification is not going to scale, and you're likely to end up in the same boat as those people who saw their Vercel bill shoot up to $96k/week when their site got traction, if not worse.
https://sureshsubasinghe.substack.com/p/how-to-cut-agent-llm...
https://sureshsubasinghe.substack.com/p/the-god-model-fallac...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stein%27s_example
My company specializes in statistical long document text classification, but nowadays we mainly work with audit trail requirements because we got tired of hearing complaints about our 5 example learning curve. Seems like the industry standard is telling an llm to label and telling an llm to eval, and crossing your fingers that it’s correct.
probably a prompt injection can still affect the output though, in unforeseeable ways.
That's an interesting choice. One question I had when looking at the jev copy on their blog is if one "line" in their output looks / attends to other lines. I think not, since they say it's parallel and not autoregressive. In that regard, it would be interesting to play with diffusion, and see if you'd get better results by playing with types, locking some, and so on.
I don't understand the connection between the lack of autoregression and options attending to each other.
Non autoregressive models can attend to all the inputs simultanously.
An autogregressive model can can attend to all the options in the context of each other by simply writing the options out twice. Autoregressive models actually requires this, since one of them will come later, and the earlier prefill inputs can't attend to the later ones.
I really doubt this actually. To me, Jev is a great example ofcounter positioning. When you consider just how hyper optimized the labs are around auto regressive LLMs, and just how much money they have already invested and are pre committed to investing in an entire stack for auto regressive transformers... then responding to Jev becomes nearly impossible actually. They would just be giving up too much.
Just think, everything from their current sources of revenue, the sales use cases they tout, the marketing on the websites, the messaging to customers, then technically to the APIs, their internal batching and scheduling algos, their GPU configs, the chips themselves. ALL OF IT is designed with generative text models in mind. Jev breaks all of it.
I think basically no chance of a response any time soon.
How could Jev have possibly built something out of reach of a frontier lab providing the same or 5x as much resourcing to one of their teams to achieve? Which they can do because Jev has only received $40M of funding recently, so a round that is approximately what OpenAI is spending per math problem they try cracking.
In addition to that, these frontier labs have got extremely good at generating synthetic data and running generalised training pipelines. I can only imagine how easy it would be for them to build this internally vs Jev building it from scratch.
And then the final thing: one of the best places you might apply Jev is within a harness, behind layers that customers increasingly have abstracted from them. Frontier labs have huge incentives to do this as it could make their offering much better and cheaper. And whoever gets this first wins another big attraction for users.
My take on this is Jev is either acquired almost immediately for the benefit of the next 1-3 months head start for whichever lab acquires them or we get a similar model offered from all labs in 3-6 months or sooner.
"Confidence gives you a built-in mechanism for the model to say “I’m not sure about this one.”
I don't know, that seems like a huge deal.
The race is probably on to acquire this company right now.
Let's take that as a given. Is BERT with more data not useful?
> I can see why people would want ready made one shot classifier, and I can see the value of sending multiple classifier in one call, but I wouldn’t call it breakthrough
Are those things that people want less useful because of what someone else calls it?
> I see it as a wake up call for the tech community to go back to basics for most tasks instead of relying solely on generic LLMs.
Maybe, or maybe to use Jev, which is useful?
Whether something is overmarketed or undermarketed, novel or derivative, it does not change its function.
The OP acknowledged they needed to fine tune their model to the training data of the task vs. zero-shot Jev
Timing is important here, LLM's raised awareness of ML techniques but we need to remember that most don't have traditional ML educations, so there'll be some "rediscovery" like Jev
That's a pretty big limitation, I would argue, unless I'm misunderstanding and it can be worked around easily somehow? I'm surprised it isn't surfaced more prominently in the comparison.
This Jev waitlist that Typesafe AI are utilising is surely going to raise questions pretty soon - it's hard to sell this to bosses when it looks like a pop-up restaurant
“Claude, roast this noob, tell him that his model isn’t novel or frontier —”
both in unison “— and make no mistakes!”
It’s all so tiresome
The implosion of hype after the .com crash was actually kind of a ... relief.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18546
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08526
[3] https://github.com/urchade/GLiNER
Classical machine learning has been, for the most part, and just by the nature of science, behind academic terms and difficult to engage with as a product.
Jev did really well with coining up “System One” models and defining a standard application interface plus core primitives that landed in the current paradigm of software development.
I think it’s sort of like how Cursor reinvented autocomplete back then as a different UX and suddenly everyone was just using it because of how easy the bar was to understanding it.
Lastly, timing is everything. Just as Cursor had a first mover advantage, despite ML Ops being a thing for a while, they managed to encapsulate the concept behind a “System One” black box that fits the existing mental model for building software and shipping a data contract in the right point in time where the cost of tokens has been an important metric to watch.
No matter how much we pretend, that's how a lot of abstractions work. Things that touch the real world can change; there's a risk that the change could be as something as simple as a bugfix to changing the underlying implementation but preserving a higher level goal; you generally want a human in the loop to make sure the semantics work out and everybody's agreeing.
The relationship aspect of a business has a lot to do with how effective it is at continuing to justify its core value in an easy and relatable way; especially so when the decision makers that front the bill may not be as engaged with the underlying machinery behind the why it works how it does.
It's trying to use a human analogy but the analogy breaks down if you try to apply it directly
https://huggingface.co/thaitea/laya-vision-smolvlm-256m
If you’re interested in the basic trick most are using (which is probably also what Jev does) then it’s here: https://sgnt.ai/p/jev/
Thee author of this post has a specialized model that does routing for his sales pipeline.
After jev came out, the author adapted his model to produce jev-shaped output: choice, noul, and score primitives.
Then, author writes a post about how jev copied him. (even though this was released in the past couple days, after jev was released)
If I were to download this model, I would get nothing like jev. I would get a model that is able to beat jev in a very small domain that this model has been fine tuned for.
I don't want to be too dismissive of Jev BUT I'm gonna do it anyway: building technology in stealth for two years just doesn't make sense when the capabilities are so easily replicated.
It's also why Meta can make Muse and get a lot of users even though there's 10,000 personal agent startups
Specifically this part:
> There's 1000 chatgpt clones but everyone still uses chatgpt. There might be 1000 jev clones soon enough but people won't switch unless there's something significantly better about it.
The fact that Jev will be cloned is exactly why brand and distribution matter even more. When 1,000 products do the same thing, you'll use the one you know.
The post is conflating hype and money with technical innovation, they are not really correlated. Kurzweil is known for saying most innovations succeed based not on technology but on timing. Today, who talks about it might matter even more than timing.
Superior research often gets overlooked in favor of someone raising millions, sometimes people who have produced literally nothing manage to sell it. Not saying that's happening here, but I've seen this pattern a lot over my career.
Someone riding (or manufacturing) a hype wave is playing a completely different game from a researcher. If you're a researcher you can't really feel dejected when someone is making a business on the back of what seems like your research; legal protections are decades out of date, even ignoring vibe coding. If you want to make money/hype/whatever off of your work, do that. But realize that it's a path that's often orthogonal to research.
First, I think comprehensibility is a major part of why certain products grab the interest of the mainstream portions of the market. The 75% of posts in your feed are not from people who evaluate products based on underlying technology. They typically value signal from social reinforcement higher than anything else. This is the same reason why we see people mentioning products instead of technologies, i.e. PlanetScale versus Postgres & Tailscale versus WireGuard. The consumers understand the value proposition, but would have never discovered it without relatable messaging. This isn't a new phenomenon in computer software either; jQuery is probably one of the first examples that I can remember with this sort of texture.
The other side is a perception of expertise in a specialty. Software development, especially in AI, has become an incredibly desirable profession, and there are more people than ever racing to be included in it. In my own professional experience I find an excessive amount of entry level talent leveraging the same comprehension of product, but not comprehension of technology to get their foot in the door. A vast majority of the "thought leaders" occupying our feeds are not as well practiced as they claim to be, they're just trying to get a job or raise funding.
And finally, AI has brought out a certain amount of desperation in practitioners, for lack of a better term, materializing as an anecdotal, but certainly observable need to remain on the very tip of the news cycle in order to feel well informed. And so, using the dynamics above and many other human social dynamics, we find certain concepts spreading across cohorts that would not normally have a need or a want for these particular techniques, or products, or solutions, but because they feel pressured to remain relevant.
Occam's razor is that it's probably not all that different unless there is some specific reason to believe otherwise.
We haven’t seen any of these copy cats play doom or street fighter for instance; just categorize email.
I imagine once the author cools down and evaluates on a broad harness of tasks he may find that his new thing has a lot of engineering work ahead.
“I personally found that this sequential approach captured sales dynamics much more effectively than traditional classification models.”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23303
that first person phrase stuck out to me, especially given it had plural versions on either side, the author never edited for clarity or consistency
jev has arrived with its cult founder, the san francisco office, dubious marketing and $40 million of venture capital lying in wait and trying to fatten the calf.
so says jev's 'manifesto':
"Our mission is to pave the shortest path to an AI-based economic revolution² by making intelligence composable to catalyze a Cambrian explosion³ of intelligent software"
Answer: 9% chance, with 91% confidence.
Heh???
So here goes: you should not use an AI model to validate a claim which is trivial to calculate deterministically. That is (obviously?) not what a model like Jev is for, thus it is not a good test of Jev.
a 6 sided die rolled a 3
possible class names - the number is odd, the number is even
result:
the number is odd 0.945 the number is even 0.055
as someone else said, that 0.055 is probably bc of 6 and 3 being there.
Jev (and similar) is more for data processing and sentiment analysis. Moderation, search engines, that sort of thing. Jev has a page of proposed use cases where you can get an idea of what they're going for: https://docs.typesafe.ai/concepts/use-case-map
{ "decision": { "type": "noul", "instructions": "Is the rolled number in state odd?" }, "question": { "type": "noul", "instructions": "Is the number odd?" }, "question-3": { "type": "noul", "instructions": "a 6 sided dice rolled a 3 Is the number odd?" }, "question-4": { "type": "noul", "instructions": "a 6 sided dice rolled a 3 Is the rolled number odd?" } }
=>
decision,0.168,0.83 question,0.141,0.86 question-3,0.029,0.97 question-4,0.021,0.98
so im confused too..
A weakness with numbers?
> Jev is neither small nor an LLM
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23303
Does not appear to be like what Jev is doing