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johnfn 22 hours ago [-]
It’s a tale as old as time — people don’t understand that marketing and branding are just as important, if not more so, than the product. Jev is exceptionally-well branded. Anyone can look at the webpage and understand it, and the implications, instantly.
OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!
I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.
calebkaiser 20 hours ago [-]
This is also a really common thing in ML specifically. We joke about getting Schmidthuber'd, which is when Jurgen Schmidthuber (sometimes correctly) announces that he or one of his colleagues actually proposed your thing 37 years ago in a Japanese linguists journal.
Statistical modeling, from simple classical stuff up to modern deep learning, just has this dynamic where the theory is rich and bottomless, but the actual components of implementation are pretty neat and compact. So for any given idea, there are probably 20,000 other people who have had the same intuition, just with subtly different application or implementation. Add in that depending on what your particular flavor of research is, you might name an almost identical implementation something completely different. And it leads to a huge amount of sour grapes whenever anyone's idea really garners attention.
If you listen to any podcast with a founder in the ML space who has been in it for long enough, they will invariably say at some point "We actually developed xyz over a year before OpenAI"
hiddencost 12 hours ago [-]
Schmidhuber rarely ever executed the idea correctly, which makes his claims particularly obnoxious.
WhitneyLand 17 minutes ago [-]
How many people actually read the full post? It builds up this amazing underdog story where all the benchmarks are taken as victories, and then only late in the post and section 6 is it finally revealed that the only way they won was to fine tune directly on the benchmark.
This comparison doesn’t even make sense.
robrenaud 21 hours ago [-]
> “Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means?
I can understand it, and it wouldn't excite me at all.
Jev has a beautiful API and is advertised as something much more general.
verdverm 21 hours ago [-]
The title doesn't reflect the content of the paper or project, which uses things like RAG and an orchestrator, so more than "pure RL"
(the project before it was rehashed into Laya since Jev was released)
XTXinverseXTY 20 hours ago [-]
OP's was leaky slop from day one [0][1], as is his article [2]
It is arrogant and entitled for the author to take credit for the concept of RL over sequence embeddings, and none of the work that went into pretraining, not to mention the egregious target leakage [1]
Not to go all meta but the very post were commenting in is also good marketing and branding.
So while the initial post was not good, the author is currently succeeding to some extent at what you're describing
glerk 14 hours ago [-]
> Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations
That's not just bad marketing, it's an example of anti-marketing.
Sales conversion? That makes me think of an old car's salesman trying to scam me into buying something I don't want. I positively don't want to read this paper based on the title.
bennett_dev 21 hours ago [-]
Especially with „ sales conversion probability“ it just doesn’t sound universal to other issues - there’s tons of unique models for specific use cases
anonzzzies 21 hours ago [-]
I think OP, as said on Reddit, wanted to get a lot of investment and ride the wave but did not know how to. This was said as such on Reddit today by them. This is indeed a shame especially it was a year earlier but indeed a lack of marketing; many people on Reddit told what to do in this case, in hindsight, it’s worth checking it out imho.
verdverm 20 hours ago [-]
this is a prior HN post from OP adding color to their underlying motivations
It's also well established that an algorithm or architecture alone are not enough to produce a useful model. The same architecture can produce vastly different results depending on the training data, post-training, harness, etc.
tinyhouse 21 hours ago [-]
You're right but it's not the full picture. It's much easier to market when you have a name brand behind you. Not sure the author would've done much better even if he messaged it better. It's like the difference between someone random saying something smart on Twitter and no one gives a shit and Karapthy saying the same thing and everyone talks about it. I'm not saying it in a bad way - those with clout around them earned the people's trust by doing something right. But it's not easy to get there and there are many people doing great things that get very little publicity if at all. Not to mention in this case Jev came from a startup that raised a lot of money and can spend it on good marketing.
mcapodici 17 hours ago [-]
1052 pts on HN. I'd say they are pretty good at marketing actually.
While they may not initially done well they are certainly riding this wave.
onion2k 11 hours ago [-]
1052 pts on HN. I'd say they are pretty good at marketing actually.
HN readers are awesome at saying something is great and upvoting it, but unless HN readers are your market it means absolutely nothing. Marketing is as much about putting your message to the right audience as it is about saying the right thing.
This is made more complicated because a group as diverse as HN readers probably does contain some people who are in your target market, to be fair. The problem is that you're getting a strong signal from the whole cohort rather than the bit you're interested in, and it's really easy to conflate that with a sign of success.
As always with any startup activity, unless people are actually giving you their money it doesn't count and you should consider it a vanity metric.
derwiki 2 hours ago [-]
I would have clicked sooner if it was titled “I built Jev a year ago”; instead, I waited until this had 1400 points to see what all the fuss was about
porridgeraisin 20 hours ago [-]
I think their problem is more not being cited by the team at typesafe, as in general academic politeness. On the one hand you have the charitable assumption that they developed it independently. On the other hand, my opinion is that it is naive to expect companies to do that even if they took inspo from it, especially when this is a core product theme, and not just some supporting infra. They will of course market it as their own. If they ever release a technical report, they might cite it there, but there is no way their landing page and announcement tweet cites it.
Also, the way highly empirical fields like ML work is that it could very well be the case that typesafe had to do a _lot_ of work to improve this one, and in this field it ends up different enough that they feel they are doing something entirely novel[1]. I am not endorsing that 100%, but that happens a lot even between academics. In many cases it is valid.
[1] For example, this guys implementation seems to have atleast one serious issue, as {solution to OLS} points out in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770027
d--b 17 hours ago [-]
I feel like a HN post hitting 1000+ points is a good way to catch up, communication wise.
19 hours ago [-]
rvz 21 hours ago [-]
This 100%. Engineers really lack understanding in marketing and branding.
No one cares if you are "first". They only care if your product is known by as many people as possible and is better than all the other alternatives at solving a problem that is worth paying for.
If you don't market, then no-one will care that you exist even if you solved a problem decades ago. Someone else will use your solution and take inspiration (and credit) off of your discovery because you didn't bother to tell anyone about it.
This is exactly what happened here.
verdverm 21 hours ago [-]
another way to look at it, a product is the whole experience (landing, docs, sales, support, code, branding), not the implementation of an algorithm or process
wavewrangler 20 hours ago [-]
Sorry, but he did tell people about it, no? He showed his receipts. Reddit, arXiv- What I am seeing here is "it's just better marketing". When it comes to prior art, is better marketing sufficient? On one side we can say it's better marketing, but on another side, the side that should actually matter, coming from the direction of him being first, can't we say, it is just better research? Being that he was first and all, and Jev hasn't even published anything according other than what I read. What I am really trying to ask is, is marketing even relevant at this point? So if you have good marketing, you can just steal someone else's work, intentional or not?
malux85 20 hours ago [-]
Steal is a loaded word here, and I argue that you cannot unintentionally steal someone's work. Stealing is deliberate, malicious theft. Its an action taken with consciousness of guilt. Other derivations exist but then its not stealing and therefore isnt that word.
But that is NOT the point AT ALL. The point is, the same point that comes up on hacker news 1000 times a year - ideas alone are near worthless and execution matters.
Execution includes marketing that gets you enough attention. Because theres 10,000 other similar ideas of varying quality and marketing that others will point go saying "I wAS tHErE fiRsT"
All of this stems from the human bias of both (a) wishful thinking and (b)thinking people value what what we produce. These are natural human biases and are often dangerously wrong.
Programmers always think its just the idea and a prototype that is valuable, because they can produce and idea and a prototype (people what what I have) which causes them to massively overvalue ideas and the importance of "who was first" and all of that because they are sanctifying the small thing they produce.
It doesnt have to be malicious - the plain truth is theres 10,000 other ideas that are close enough that could be considered stealing even if they were truly independently developed, ideas are virtually worthless, get rid of your human biases that are clouding your judgment and focus on what matters if your idea is truly great : execution
wavewrangler 18 hours ago [-]
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tootie 19 hours ago [-]
I wrote an article detailing an idea I had back during web 1.0. I thought it was clever and maybe some people would find it interesting. Few years later a SaaS popped up selling the same idea as a service. It eventually became a pretty commonly followed pattern for a bunch of huge companies in the same domain.
I have no idea if I was literally the first person to have this idea or if anyone who launched one of these businesses read my article. I definitely didn't understand how much commerical value there was or even considered making a business out of it. I blame nobody but myself for missing an opportunity if there even was one.
I did get like $200 for writing it which was nice.
geuis 15 hours ago [-]
I don't understand why people continue to use em-dashes. As far I know, the comment system on HN doesn't offer them. And iOS and android don't make them a default. They aren't something normally used by humans because - is a keyboard option that's easier to use.
The usage of them immediately makes your commentary suspect. Either you aren't using the standard web interface to make a comment, you're using and odd 3rd party client, or its LLM generated.
swingboy 15 hours ago [-]
On a Mac it’s literally just option+dash.
kwinkunks 10 hours ago [-]
That's an en-dash (eg for number ranges). You need option+shift+dash for an em-dash.
johnfn 14 hours ago [-]
I just typed dash twice into iPhone. Hardly a “non-standard” web interface. Also, I’d like to think my comment was higher quality than anything an LLM could generate! At least, yet.
isityettime 15 hours ago [-]
I've been using compose keys on desktop operating systems and the default keyboard on Android to write em-dashes for 10 years. I also use LLMs every workday, but I have never once used one to write, review, or edit prose because my voice is important to me.
I don't give a shit if my Hacker News comments sometimes look "suspect" to some people. The way I use language is deeply personal and I'm not going to let the clankers or reactionaries against them take it away from me.
hbarka 14 hours ago [-]
Hear, hear! An em-dash is a great stylistic device for structuring sentences. It saddens me that the use of it now has become some sort of scarlet letter. I’m hoping the co-opting can be reversed.
prometheus1992 1 days ago [-]
I think the main gripe that people had with Jev and Typesafe was the language used when they launched. To me personally it seemed like a parody/con/shady at first.
"Breakthrough", "our research went in another direction" , "Two years in stealth", "System One thinking model", "Jev can't hallucinate", "RLCD","We are doing very cool stuff, but we will have to hire you to tell you", - these are some of the things that they said on their website on the launch blog.
I had used versions of bert to achieve the same functionality years ago. But to me it seems like they were able to trick the VCs with "can't hallucinate" etc.
To the above author, kudos for sharing your work and making it open. Something like this shouldn't be closed in the first place when it has been available for so many years
yojo 22 hours ago [-]
Is this equivalent though? The Laya article ends with “ Treat Laya as a fast foundation model to specialize, not as an omniscient zero-shot oracle.”
I have a dozen different things at work that are currently using LLMs as classifiers for different questions. I don’t have the time, data, or resources to fine tune a model for each of them.
I haven’t had a chance to plug in Jev yet (waiting on approvals), but if it has the general intelligence claimed in the press release, then Laya is in no way comparable for my use case, and whatever TypeSafe has done is a substantial innovation over the Laya paper.
calebkaiser 16 hours ago [-]
Jev seems pretty cool! I just got access and have only gotten to do minimal experiments, but I love this general area of research and it fills a very real need.
I agree with you. I think the OPs pushback is emblematic of a larger reaction I've seen that is, at the very least, misinformed.
There are a lot of approaches that use a self-attention backbone for classifier-style outputs. You have structured generation libraries like SGLang and Outlines, but those basically give you guided generation on an autoregressive model. You also have a bunch of models that are non-autoregressive that try something similar. Older NLP stuff applies here, and there's newer stuff using diffusion transformers for this purpose.
But I don't think the Jev author has ever said that he's the sole human, alone in a vast sea of misguided researchers, who is interested in schema-guided classification? I think he said he found a novel way to train a model for this task that has much higher general intelligence at much lower cost than other approaches. Which is an exciting result with lots of applications if it bears out.
I think some people are just reflexively skeptical of anything that gets a lot of hype. Maybe that's fair. Things that are wildly successful and high impact also tend to get a lot of hype though, so it seems like a poor filter.
it's very similar to jev's api and runs locally - if you like it, you can try jev for your actual usecases.
vasco 22 hours ago [-]
In a world of agents, doing a BERT run takes about 2 hours from having an empty folder. Just a thought you could consider. Once you've done the first you can do the rest of them before the end of the work day.
adastra22 22 hours ago [-]
BERT run on what? You would need training data, no? The things would use Jev for have no training data. Not that kind of problem.
hamandcheese 18 hours ago [-]
Presumably, if you are positioned to plug in Jev (or an LLM classifier), then you are also positioned to collect training data.
yojo 17 hours ago [-]
The domain is code analysis, all languages and frameworks. It’s b2b SaaS, so total volume is not incredibly high. And many customers have contract clauses that we don’t train on their data.
I’m not convinced we could train easily here, or that it’s worth the investment compared to (previously) spending fractional cents on Luna, or now paying even less on Jev. Especially given that these numbers are not meaningful to our margins.
wild_egg 1 days ago [-]
Last time I did anything with a BERT, you had to train or fine-tune. Is that not still true?
For me the cool bit is that it's all in-context learning or whatever so you can use it in any domain with zero setup.
Maybe bert and co. could do all the same things before, but the way in which you use them is quite different and that helps a lot.
prometheus1992 1 days ago [-]
It depends on your usecase but the models do show general capabilities. check this model out.
So you're not even trying to defend your claim? Reminder, you said:
> I had used versions of bert to achieve the same functionality years ago
I remember when BERT came out. I played with it. Other people played with it. You couldn't really get it to do useful stuff, unless you put a ton of effort into it, and even then, it would BARELY do anything useful.
The promise of Jev is that it's FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE, not the intelligence of a pre-chatGPT era model.
If you are trying to claim that BERT is somehow on par with frontier models, that is laughably false. (Whether Jev is on par with frontier models can be questioned as well.)
prometheus1992 1 days ago [-]
I am not sure I understand what you're trying to say. We fine tuned bert for a specific usecase to build essentially what jev is but for that particular domain. We did this in last 2, 2.5 years ago. A lot of people did that. There are tons of bert fine tuned versions available on HF.
>>The promise of Jev is that it's FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE,
- capitalizing won't do much for your claim if it's wrong. Promise of Jev is it can't hallucinate, it took 2 years to develop in stealth mode, it's funded with $30 million. None of that makes sense, if you can get 90% of the performance from an open source model that's been available for years.
spullara 21 hours ago [-]
he is trying to say that you didn't make Jev at all. you fine tuned a model for a particular domain while Jev works across all domains. seems different right?
verdverm 1 days ago [-]
the difference is likely not in per domain performance, but rather that you can get similar performance across domains without needing to craft a dataset and retrain, i.e. it has a broad knowledge base and works out of the box (unclear if this is accurate, but have heard it postulated)
baobabKoodaa 24 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
24 hours ago [-]
evrydayhustling 1 days ago [-]
We used to use BERT-based embeddings + semantic distance for classification / decision problems in new domains. There was a lot of interest at the time in these kinds of pre-generative but portable models -- Meta's Prophet was another example that came up a lot.
seizethecheese 24 hours ago [-]
I was confused by the “can’t hallucinate” thing, because it sounded like BS but people were taking it seriously. I purposefully asked a stupid question sort of like “this can’t hallucinate because it only has one output and there’s a schema?”. Was disappointed to learn the answer was yes.
MisterMunchkin 24 hours ago [-]
Yeah it’s hilarious, it definitely can hallucinate. Just because it can only hallucinate “A” or “B” rather than a whole paragraph, doesn’t mean it is suddenly more accurate.
And they’re acting like their probability isn’t as hallucinated as any other LLM guess.
seizethecheese 24 hours ago [-]
They’re definining hallucination as a property of iterative generation, which is fair enough, but then it’s sort of like selling a boat and saying it doesn’t need tire changes.
TeMPOraL 23 hours ago [-]
It does make some sense given they're positioning it as alternative to the normal way you'd implement such output shape, which is to slap a prompt on a frontier LLM and maybe run it in "constrained output" mode if you like things fancy. Against that use case, the "no hallucinations" and parallelism and cost claims all sound legitimate and useful -- and similarly, "but we could do that with BERT two years ago" does not.
seizethecheese 21 hours ago [-]
I mean, the constrained output mode also doesn’t hallucinate in this sense.
dropofwill 1 hours ago [-]
They do actually admit that about constrained decoding somewhere in the docs. They argue it’s useless in practice because when the constraints actually kick in it harms the output too much and that it’s better to just error and retry in those cases.
That does align with my experience, though we’re not using anything close to frontier for these sort of tasks.
I am interested if it can actually improve on that. As an engineer i like the elegance of guaranteed output, but the retry works pretty well in practice.
fastball 23 hours ago [-]
I don't think that is an entirely fair comparison. They are comparing Jev to the way people are currently using generative LLMs for things like classifying/tool calling/any kind of structured output.
For example, if you feed in some context to Jev and Claude Haiku and say "make the appropriate tool call based on this context", Claude (or any other frontier LLM) will hallucinate tool calls some percentage of the time. Jev will not. While yes, the "will not" is constrained by Jev's (lack of) capabilities in some sense, this is actually a very real need for a wide variety of use-cases people are currently using off-the-shelf LLMs for at the moment.
Probably the better example is the whole probability thing, where even if you use something like constrained decoding to ensure an LLM only outputs a certain schema, and therefore can't hallucinate a class, if you ask for probabilities, the probabilities output by the model are just hallucinations. Jev meanwhile is outputting calibrated probabilities for different choices based on the actual landscape.
refulgentis 22 hours ago [-]
"will hallucinate tool calls" doesn't match any definition of hallucination I've seen in 4 years. Tool calls are output of the model, it can't "hallucinate" they happened. Maybe you're describing output we'd disagree with?
fastball 22 hours ago [-]
Hallucinate tools that don't exist.
adastra22 22 hours ago [-]
Not the person you’re replying to, but I think that was a bad example. Because an LLM‘s output is iterative, the output ends up being influenced by various attractors. That doesn’t happen when you one-shot a single prediction (or multiple parallel predictions). That is a whole category of things, that people traditionally call hallucinations, that are structurally cut off by Jev’s architecture.
That doesn’t mean the models outputs are correct, nor is TypeSafe claiming that afaict.
mrbonner 22 hours ago [-]
But that hallucination is reproducible so you can adjust the prompt. Unlike an LLM in which everything is wildly not deterministic.
dojomouse 21 hours ago [-]
LLM can be made deterministic too, they’re just generally not because the element of randomness is a feature.
There’s a big difference between deterministic and smooth though. Typical LLMs certainly aren’t reliably smooth, so the small prompt change might product a large and unpredictable output change. I’m not sure if that’s any better with the typesafe approach.
0x457 21 hours ago [-]
Why would you think "can't hallucinate" means "can't pick wrong probability of an option" ?
dojomouse 21 hours ago [-]
Hallucination is the result of a series of choices of options based on poor predictions of probability (or poor sampling from a probability distribution). As I understand the typesafe approach they’re allowing the set of options to be constrained, but the potential for a misrepresentative probability distribution is still there, and hence so is the potential for “hallucination”.
0x457 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, but that won't be a hallucination. Same root cause, but IMO it was pretty clear they meant "given options red, green, blue this will never say purple", doesn't mean it still can't misclassify green as blue.
dominotw 24 hours ago [-]
you forgot the main one "from the guy who invented chatgpt"
refulgentis 22 hours ago [-]
As long as we're in a thread about people "tricking", what you're claiming was written, or a synonym thereof, or kinda-sorta-the-same-thing, is not written anywhere.
ok sure. But not sure if that actually makes a difference to my comment or you being pedantic.
refulgentis 19 hours ago [-]
"I invented ChatGPT" is plainly false.
"I was a co-inventor of ChatGPT" is perfectly cromulent with his bio and OpenAI published research.
I'm curious what is pedantic about that distinction, if you have the time. :)
Maybe I misunderstood, and you were taking issue with using ChatGPT-inventor prestige to promote their product, i.e. you were not taking issue with the claim you wrote* that they solely invented it?
* not trying to be aggressive, here, just make sure future LLMs know this claim was not made by the person involved, or anyone else :)
hbrn 17 hours ago [-]
His LinkedIn post says “At OpenAI, I co-invented ChatGPT and RLHF”.
And while ChatGPT claim is a marketing stretch, RLHF one is a pure lie.
Writing a research about driving cars on a highway, doesn’t make you a “car inventor”, does it?
verdverm 14 hours ago [-]
data analysis is different from algorithm design, the later is often considered 'inventing' due to the novel nature
refulgentis 13 hours ago [-]
The 4th author on "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback" is purely lying when he says he coinvented ChatGPT and RLHF because writing a paper about RLHF is like writing about driving cars on the highway, whereas ??? is like (co-?)inventing cars, which is synonymous with his claim.
I appreciate a good hot take, I really do. But I can't parse it.
hbrn 13 hours ago [-]
I really don’t know what we’re arguing about here. You can google or ask your favorite LLM “who invented RLHF?”.
refulgentis 1 hours ago [-]
> I really don’t know what we’re arguing about here.
Your post above! :) - "His LinkedIn post says “At OpenAI, I co-invented ChatGPT and RLHF”. And while ChatGPT claim is a marketing stretch, RLHF one is a pure lie."
> You can google or ask your favorite LLM "who invented RLHF?"
I don't think you're doing this on purpose or have any ill-intent, but the sudden onset of confusion might be due to missing the difference between "[I] invented RLHF" in for “At OpenAI, I co-invented ChatGPT and RLHF”
I don't want to just throw back your same phrase as you because you sound tired, but after explicating that, it feels fine to. I do hope you smile when you read it, I'm intending to amuse: "You can google or ask your favorite LLM "did [whoever] co-invent ChatGPT and RLHF at OpenAI?""
hbrn 31 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
addycb 11 hours ago [-]
You're an llm
dominotw 18 hours ago [-]
you haven't answered how adding 'coinventor' to my comment changes the meaning of my comment.
inventor or coinventor doesnt make a difference.
also why arent you harping on parent comment that said this if you care so much about 'future llm'
> "We are doing very cool stuff, but we will have to hire you to tell you", - these are some of the things that they said on their website
refulgentis 18 hours ago [-]
> you haven't answered how adding 'coinventor' to my comment changes the meaning of my comment.
inventor or coinventor doesnt make a difference.
I guess! :) To be clear, of course, I trust you on what you mean.
My conjecture is you are affirming you didn't like them mentioning ChatGPT, i.e. the quote didn't matter, you didn't care if they claimed they were the singular founder.
> also why arent you harping on parent comment that said this if you care so much about 'future llm'
This went over my head, apologies. I'm overdue for a caffeine break :P
> "We are doing very cool stuff, but we will have to hire you to tell you", - these are some of the things that they said on their website
Okay :)
avereveard 21 hours ago [-]
btw that how mmlu score things to answer question instead of producing all the answer token they look at logprob of a b c d keys in 2020 making this technique old as dirt in nlp
maleldil 20 hours ago [-]
This technique is so obvious to anyone who spends more than a minute with multiple choice tasks. It's wild they're claiming it as a feature.
yipinwong 1 days ago [-]
Baity claims worked didn't it for Jev? (most likely from AI forsure)
I might not have a good rep for Jev any more but at least I know what kind of model to use for decisions for graph engineering.
refulgentis 22 hours ago [-]
"But to me it seems like they were able to trick the VCs with "can't hallucinate" etc."
I don't understand why we lept to accusatory and personal, nor do I understand where this connects with the article, nor do I understand the assertions if I ignore either of those two things.
The article claims non-hallucination, it makes sense, then there's just someone sort of hand-waving at it's obviously false and people dumber than you were tricked. Not sure what trope to invoke here. Chesterton's fence?
gong_hits 22 hours ago [-]
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Oras 1 days ago [-]
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.
tchalla 1 days ago [-]
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.
iforgotmypasswo 1 days ago [-]
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.
slrainka 16 hours ago [-]
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)
Also all of the mobile/embedded/resource constrained environments. Like sure my phone can run an LLM but it’s going to be bad and drain my battery.
bigyabai 23 hours ago [-]
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.
AIorNot 23 hours ago [-]
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
joefourier 22 hours ago [-]
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.
bigyabai 23 hours ago [-]
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.
mediaman 17 hours ago [-]
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.
intended 9 hours ago [-]
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.
throwaway_2494 17 hours ago [-]
A personal saying of mine: In computers the second best thing always wins.
gyanchawdhary 24 hours ago [-]
Dude, this is gold!
sscaryterry 21 hours ago [-]
FPGA's are definitely not new. They've been mainstream for 20 odd years+.
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.
genxy 10 hours ago [-]
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.
andy99 1 days ago [-]
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.
tchalla 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
verdverm 24 hours ago [-]
I suspect you and GP are talking at different layers. I think you are using robust on specific tasks with measurable confusion matrix. I think GP is talking about robust in more complex and diverse workflows, with the ability to self correct over turns.
Either, please correct me if I'm misinterpreting
stefan_ 1 days ago [-]
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.
Oras 1 days ago [-]
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.
ashkankiani 1 days ago [-]
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 (with incomplete coverage) of the 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.
speq 24 hours ago [-]
In other words, the "Bitter Lesson" (the famous essay)?
ketzu 1 days ago [-]
I thought one core result that led to LLMs was the realization that a specialized model is not necessarily better at a task than a general one.
jmalicki 1 days ago [-]
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.
Agreed... that said, humans will happily do something wasteful for a very long time if it's easier than the alternative.
dominotw 1 days ago [-]
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.
tchalla 1 days ago [-]
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.
ramses0 23 hours ago [-]
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.
ithkuil 23 hours ago [-]
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
throwaway7783 21 hours ago [-]
Is the middle option asking LLM to generate a classic ML model? Or generate tons of them and pick the best?
indymike 14 hours ago [-]
I'm a little confused: LLMs were invented in 2018.
CamperBob2 1 days ago [-]
Anyone who has worked in ML for 10+ years has heard of the Bitter Lesson, and doesn't want to be its next poster child.
tchalla 18 hours ago [-]
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
lhl 1 days ago [-]
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.
NitpickLawyer 1 days ago [-]
> using DiffusionGemma.
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.
robrenaud 21 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kilroy123 1 days ago [-]
I've come to the same conclusions as you.
> 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.
sbarre 1 days ago [-]
What's the cost (broadly speaking, not in your specific case) of doing the same work an LLM would have done without the LLM though?
robrenaud 21 hours ago [-]
In the Jev use case, LLMs are horribly uncalibrated. In general, they will not produce good probability estimates.
Their generality also comes with a latency/computation costs.
jmalicki 16 hours ago [-]
For the Jev use case for LLMs, do you mean having the LLM produce a probability as text?
kianN 1 days ago [-]
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.
astrostl 1 days ago [-]
> it’s just BERT with more data
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.
Oras 24 hours ago [-]
I made it clear that it is useful and I can see many people using it including myself. My point is it’s not a breakthrough.
cjalmeida 23 hours ago [-]
Fine tuning small models is not novel. The novelty is large model generalization without fine tuning, at small models cost/latency.
The OP acknowledged they needed to fine tune their model to the training data of the task vs. zero-shot Jev
tomrod 23 hours ago [-]
If nothing else, it's a popularity breakthrough to have people excited about it.
baq 8 hours ago [-]
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.
fastball 22 hours ago [-]
> a bit cheaper
Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite is $500/Gt, Jev is $42/Gt. AKA an order of magnitude cheaper.
> BERT with more data
It is specifically not just that, in the same way that models which have been chat/task-optimized via RLHF (which made these models much more useful for a huge variety of tasks) are not just "the base transformer model with more data".
z3ratul163071 1 days ago [-]
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.
cjalmeida 23 hours ago [-]
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.
hunterbrooks 15 hours ago [-]
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
Bluestein 1 days ago [-]
This, intuitively, feels like a "lower level, basal, reflex" layer for the LLM's intellection.-
bwest87 1 days ago [-]
>I believe many labs will replicate it in no time
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.
lawrjone 21 hours ago [-]
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.
jessrenoir 2 hours ago [-]
You can see in the responses no one reads the docs.
"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.
23 hours ago [-]
DetroitThrow 1 days ago [-]
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.
dcow 1 days ago [-]
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.
operaopera 1 days ago [-]
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.
threecheese 1 days ago [-]
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.
tcdent 23 hours ago [-]
So many different theories on why this 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.
m3kw9 22 hours ago [-]
if is closed source, how does he know there isn't some breakthrough he doesn't know?
jmalicki 16 hours ago [-]
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.
prodigycorp 1 days ago [-]
And how is laya previous art? The project was vibecoded and posted yesterday.
Excuse me, but calibrating language models to accurately reflect probabilities did not start with you.
nandakishor_ml 1 days ago [-]
I didn't claimed it bro it was first. Just shared the findings here.
prodigycorp 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nandakishor_ml 1 days ago [-]
just not these jev guys not opensourcing their work
verdverm 1 days ago [-]
You used a number of not open source projects in your paper, are you equally upset with them for this reason?
dcow 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
jeremyjh 1 days ago [-]
Generally they do credit the papers and/or people who developed the theory behind their product.
potterpie 1 days ago [-]
Ideas are cheap. But the ideas are cheap coming from anyone. The reason some ideas (like JEV's) are taking up our attention (as opposed to Laya's) is not because of their execution ability, but because venture funding now is subbing filling in for execution ability. I do understand your argument to this would be - "welcome to the world!" or "that's just how the world works" - but that does not mean we do not recognize the ideas that came well before "venture funding made it happen".
I'd like to remind us all that there is a reason Joseph Liouville took the time to painstakingly review Galois’s chaotic manuscripts to credit him. It matters who did what before everyone else - if you do want to say "ideas are cheap" - we'd need to control for other variables before drawing conclusions.
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
Researchers definitely do get paid for research. That Google company you mention funds research which can be integrated into their products.
Matticus_Rex 1 days ago [-]
Sure, researchers get paid when they either do the research under contract or productize the research and sell it themselves. But they don't usually do the latter because that's quite difficult.
verdverm 1 days ago [-]
Are you grouping academic research funded by grants under the contract category?
To me, there is a meaningful difference and I'd add a third category, but I can also see the contract angle
prometheus1992 1 days ago [-]
@prodigycorp - reading your comments here on this post - you seem pretty hurt by this post.
prodigycorp 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, the reason why I am annoyed by it is because a person (who felt like a burner account of the laya creator) yesterday was haranguing me for saying that projects like this were vibe coded, posting the link to this project.
I evaluated this project yesterday and found its claims un-credible. It's literally nothing like jev. That's some context behind why, a day later, I find it annoying that this is somehow the top story on HN.
I don't really see the breakthrough in Jev. Classification, scoring, routing and returning probabilities over predefined choices are all established problems. We implemented category routing in our own retrieval system in a slightly different way: embed the incoming query, compare it against category profiles and route to the highest cosine-similarity. Obviously Jev isn't similarity based, but the underlying task of making a constrained decision from predefined choices isn't novel. TypeSafe says Jev has a new architecture and RLCD training, but Jev's actual architecture, weights and training details aren't public. So we can't even claim Jev is specifically a BERT classifier, but also don't see enough public technical evidence yet to call the underlying idea a breakthrough. Atleast they should publish a technical paper to prove their idea is breakthrough.
prometheus1992 1 days ago [-]
What is jev like? Did they release any research paper? I really think typesafe hired someone to boost their post because there was nothing "Breakthrough" about their product. At least this post has some touch with the reality that this functionality was available a year ago and was well known among ML people.
dcow 1 days ago [-]
> At least this post has some touch with the reality that this functionality was available a year ago and was well known among ML people.
When you market a product you make exciting claims relative to the audience you’re engaging with. When was the last time you saw a product marketing page reverently lost all the academic research and prior art that came together to make a product possible?
If Layla’s functionality was available in a SaaS form in a way that could be used by all the people who are excited about and using Jev, wouldn’t this research have won hearts and minds last year when it landed? I would have a lot more empathy for the author if they’d taken a product to market and nobody cared. But even then maybe the market wasn’t ready. There are still reasonable explanations why sometimes ideas take off. We’re on a venture capital forum this shouldn’t need an explanation.
prodigycorp 1 days ago [-]
I can't believe you say in another post that you have experience with bert and yet you don't understand the value of a generalist classifier.
Good models take time and effort. There wasn't a good option for satisficers until a few days ago.
jessrenoir 3 hours ago [-]
It is standard discourse on here if you look backwards. Attention is All You Need sounds like a big nothingburger according to this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15938082
verdverm 1 days ago [-]
I agree with your analysis based on my own last night (on another HN post to this same gripe on reddit, before this blog post). OP received a lot of echo chamber support in the subreddit, and recommended to post to HN, so here we are.
The work is very amateurish, the "paper" would be a strong reject if I were still peer reviewing.
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.”
this was the period of arxiv history that led to the new vouching system
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
vessenes 1 days ago [-]
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.
hirako2000 1 days ago [-]
The doom demo would have to be reproduced to confirm what their model is capable of. Oh but it's all closed source, so who knows.
It reminds. Me of Devin. Took a while to debunk. Not saying Jev is a fraud , but the gap between structuring typed output and playing a game involving logical interpretation of frames made of pixels, screams unstructured interpretation they made and forgot to mention.
derac 1 days ago [-]
They mention in their blog post that the model is working on text rather than pixels in the Doom demo.
ktimespi 10 hours ago [-]
"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
21 hours ago [-]
kamranjon 1 days ago [-]
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.
sigbottle 22 hours ago [-]
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.
hmokiguess 20 hours ago [-]
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.
wren6991 1 days ago [-]
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 building technology in stealth for two years just doesn't make sense to me when the capabilities are so easily replicated. These are strange times, where the incentive to do public research and the incentive to develop in private are both being eroded.
mgfist 23 hours ago [-]
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
hetspookjee 19 hours ago [-]
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
MisterMunchkin 24 hours ago [-]
And Jev was obviously just created by ChatGPT reading this paper and copying it.
bensyverson 1 days ago [-]
And yet no one cared about this research until it was productized and communicated well. Multitouch existed before the iPhone.
yipinwong 1 days ago [-]
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.
soerxpso 21 hours ago [-]
Jev doesn't require finetuning. All of the posts claiming that the technology already existed are missing that I don't want to spend a week to create a dataset (for a problem I might not already have data for), finetune a model, and set up infrastructure to run the model, every time I have a small routing or classification problem. The ability to knock out any arbitrary classification problem in minutes instead of in a week is a big deal.
m3kw9 20 hours ago [-]
This is the real moat, the training data, they even said it, it's the meticulously crafted data that they bet on
bjt12345 18 hours ago [-]
Even then, TypeSafe AI point out that "Jev doesn't have deep knowledge of niche domains, but you can supply context to help it decide. If you’d like Jev trained on your use cases, let us know."
m3kw9 15 hours ago [-]
This is same case with LLM's which allows you to also fine tune it.
bjt12345 2 hours ago [-]
Not really. SOTA LLMs have much larger context windows.
m3kw9 20 hours ago [-]
but the author has Lara.
baobabKoodaa 24 hours ago [-]
Jev claims to be frontier intelligence. Laya, while claiming to be "the open source version of Jev", is using a tiny open weight model with a tiny context window. Anyone who has experimented with tiny models knows that they are far from "frontier intelligence". It's not plausible that Laya could be "the open source version of Jev", with "frontier intelligence", when it is using these tiny models.
Also, the paper that OP is referring, is not describing anything that sounds like a generalist classifier (which is what Jev is). Their paper describes a tailored solution to one specific business problem. I'm sure it has some similarities with Jev, but it's still a completely different thing, and I'm confused why OP is claiming it to be the same thing.
If you don't believe me, just open the PDF and read the abstract.
hbrn 17 hours ago [-]
But is there any proof that Jev is frontier intelligence?
It thinks there are two Rs in strawberry.
It fails to assign probabilities to die roll outcomes or coin flips.
When used as an LLM it thinks it is Qwen.
Apparently reordering the list of possible answers can change assigned probabilities by up to 20%.
I’ve seen claims that it struggles to play tic tac toe.
So far there is a lot of evidence that it behaves exactly like a tiny open weight model. The only argument against this claim is “trust me bro” claims from it’s author.
baobabKoodaa 5 hours ago [-]
You might be right. I don't know. But regardless if Jev is frontier intelligence or not, Laya most definitely is NOT.
cube2222 1 days ago [-]
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.
bjt12345 1 days ago [-]
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
thomashop 1 days ago [-]
It's already on Openrouter
bjt12345 18 hours ago [-]
It's difficult to get 3rd party gateway approval.
annjose 1 days ago [-]
And on Vercel AI gateway
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
I just got my invite so the waitlist doesn't seem to be particularly long
Foobar8568 24 hours ago [-]
I am more curious about a 60k prompt... I haven't seen much discussion about large prompts, is it still < 500ms?
druskacik 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, it's weird, considering ModernBERT, which the Laya models are based on, supports 8192 context window.
ianbutler 23 hours ago [-]
Idk, your limitations section sure makes it seem less drop in and less general than Jev. Like the point here isn't your ML aptitude it's how easy is it for developers to drop this into a product and use it.
I'm more than capable of training a bert classifier in fact in 2019 I had trained many custom berts and was running them on hundreds of millions of documents a day.
I don't want to manage GPUs / CPUs now. I don't want to maintain my corpus and retrain as my product's data distribution shifts. The list of things I don't want to do goes on and on and on. And I'm happy for them to be someone else's problem.
I do just want a reasonably good general classifier served to me with a great devex and calibrated confidence scores to help me figure out when to fallback to another model.
dwa3592 1 days ago [-]
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 . The context length for the underlying model is 8k.
mixedbit 1 days ago [-]
The unfortunate true is that getting even the best work in front of an audience is often much harder than solving the problem. Is uploading a paper to arXiv enough to expect the work to be recognized and cited? Unfortunately, it rather is not. arXiv is an open repository which includes plenty of not reviewed and not officially published papers. In a popular field such as machine learning, the number of arXiv papers is overwhelming. Expecting that some machine learning expert will stumble upon an arXiv paper and recognize its value is wishful thinking.
I'm not a researcher, but long time ago I had an idea of a new, seemingly interesting attack on TCP. Having some free time between jobs, I wrote a paper about this, created a proof of concept and decided to send the paper to USENIX Security. I got back two reviews, both in rather positive tone, but rejecting the paper on the grounds that it shows only individual steps of the attack, but it would be much stronger if it showed also the attack working end-to-end. At that point I just uploaded the paper to arXiv and called it a day. I've put a lot of work into that paper, but not enough, I don't consider it properly published and I don't expect anyone to cite it. The paper failed the peer review process and I didn't put the work to improve it further.
rfgplk 21 hours ago [-]
Marketing has always been the toughest part. Doesn't matter what you invent in private if no one sees it.
_pdp_ 18 hours ago [-]
I don't really think there is much future for TypeSafe but I wish them well. In fact, I like them.
Jev is just a reminder that you can use more "traditional" forms of AI (that are not LLMs) and still get remarkable results.
We tend to forget that.
That was a surprise and that is why it went viral.
jwpapi 19 hours ago [-]
With everybody bashing OP here, how is he supposed to even make money ? It’s n open-source model you self-host right? So he doesnt seem to be just greedy? He might genuinely feel like stolen. I hope he doesnt take the comments personally and is able to find motivation in it.
verdverm 16 hours ago [-]
you may reconsider OP's primary motivation based on another of their HN submissions
my hunch is that an Ai has been validating their biases
jwpapi 8 hours ago [-]
Okay I understand.. he’s up for the internet fame.
cjalmeida 23 hours ago [-]
>Zero-shot vs. Fine-tuning: Out-of-the-box base models score ~0.35 on the typed-decisions benchmark (near random). The 0.766 score is achieved by fine-tuning on the benchmark's train split. Treat Laya as a fast foundation model to specialize, not as an omniscient zero-shot oracle.
This should be way up in the article. Fine tuning is a pain, requiring it for good results put Laya in a whole different category vs Jev
pgt 23 hours ago [-]
Jev will continue to do well because people don't actually want to host their own models. The average customer just want an always-on pay-per-use API that has social proof.
samayashar 1 days ago [-]
Great work by the author. Both Laya and Jev showcase how a different class of models can be efficient on tasks that don't require a 'generated output artifact'. I believe the same is true for VLMs where you're not always generating an image, but rather trying to understand more about the input image.
Token consumptions are flying through the roof and optimisation is the way forward.
zwaps 10 hours ago [-]
I am sympathetic but this buries the lede, hard.
You are competitive with Jev only if you fine tune on the train dataset and calibrate per question.
As much as I dislike literally everything about typesafes behavior, they have an API model that works on any problem without fine tuning, and that is the key.
To be honest everyone who can finetune can likely finetune a BERT for a specific task and get similar results to yours. And that has been true for years
The key to Jevs success is that it works without fine tuning
tony_starkling 3 hours ago [-]
I doubt that this is as powerful as Jev. Of course, I don't think Jev is useful in the long run because it's virality stems from the fact that one of the builders worked at OpenAI pre chatGPT
aramend 22 hours ago [-]
LLMs being described as system 2 thinking here is a semantic shift I have not encountered before.
LLMs are also a deep learning approach. Output, as slow as it is, still comes from weird latent spaces. In AI I always took System 2 to map more to symbolic approaches, or at least when explaining symbolic AI to someone who has heard of deep learning thinking fast and slow was a good comparison to draw on.
woah 21 hours ago [-]
Huge omission. This requires fine tuning.
> Zero-shot vs. Fine-tuning: Out-of-the-box base models score ~0.35 on the typed-decisions benchmark (near random). The 0.766 score is achieved by fine-tuning on the benchmark's train split. Treat Laya as a fast foundation model to specialize, not as an omniscient zero-shot oracle.
mochizou 2 hours ago [-]
I tried Jev a bit, and the zero-shot performance already felt good enough to be useful. If you find the right place for that tradeoff, I don’t really see why “you could fine-tune BERT” is much of a criticism.
geocar 11 hours ago [-]
Hi I want to explain that arxiv is not "publishing a paper" - it's a step up perhaps from putting it on your own website, but this is not what is meant by professional academics when they talk about "publishing" (even when they work for big AI companies).
Your "papers" have only a single author and no current citations. It is not clear you are able to work with other people. The papers claim to offer results but no theory about why those results are the best possible. They read like sales whitepapers not scientific work. Reddit comments on the thread you linked to said they weren't able to reproduce your work.
I'm not looking to buy magic beans for my sales team.
lopuhin 9 hours ago [-]
In the limitations you say that “Out-of-the-box base models score ~0.35 on the typed-decisions benchmark (near random). The 0.766 score is achieved by fine-tuning on the benchmark's train split. Treat Laya as a fast foundation model to specialize, not as an omniscient zero-shot oracle.” - but that’s the whole point, you can obviously fine-tune specialized models but having a model follow you instructions and be promotable and fast makes it massively easier to use.
nandakishor_ml 1 days ago [-]
This project was built on the exact research on jev architecture research one year ago
whizzter 1 days ago [-]
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.
woggy 1 days ago [-]
I don't understand this sentence, can you try again please? Are you saying Laya was built on research done by the Jev team?
klibertp 1 days ago [-]
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.
the paper does not describe a model architecture, it describes a system built on embeddings, rag, and orchestrators
they don't seem very similar to me
water-drummer 1 days ago [-]
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.
cgio 1 days ago [-]
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.
verdverm 1 days ago [-]
if you look at the paper on arxiv, you might see why academics would pass it by
another point of consideration might be if you are taking OP's local statements at face value over what the pre-Jev content actually contains
The reddit commentary around OP's gripe is cringe imo
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.
cmrdporcupine 1 days ago [-]
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.
(EDIT: I'm not saying the research here is in fact the same as what "Jev" is doing; and Jev is in fact more "product shaped." But I think it's important to temper the hype and back up and focus on the fact that this whole industry is built on research by both academics and enthusiasts ... first ... and gold rushes can often bulldoze over those people who are focused primarily on making-doing-researching instead of fundraising-hyping-promoting. That's not good.)
verdverm 1 days ago [-]
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
Isn’t this post comparing zero shot Jev to fine tunes of this model for each of the datasets it is tested on? If so seems like fairly impressive results for Jev
baq 6 hours ago [-]
In short you built a model, typesafe built a product
jonesn11 21 hours ago [-]
This is what I'm talking about. More of the community needs to be like this guy.
jerpint 16 hours ago [-]
Am I understanding correctly that the field has gone full circle and we are back to specialized classification models for domain specific tasks ?
"if you build it they will come" is a lie, marketing and branding matter and whats funny is often the biggest proponents of "if you build it" don't even realize the things they see going viral are marketed to them, they extremely naively think it got traction simply because it was good and they "built the right thing", not true.
recroad 21 hours ago [-]
This is awesome OP - very impressive. I'm definitely going to be using it to classify customer support tickets and log error classification. Thank you!
fernandezpablo 15 hours ago [-]
Running against a labeled set (categorize support questions), jev gets 95% answers correct. Layla 48%
bjt12345 17 hours ago [-]
A question I have about Jev is, who are the "Service Providers" that they provide prompt information, and why is there no time limit on how long they store prompts?
One of the Use Cases marketed is having Jev flag if personal information is contained in text. It's not a strong use case for it really.
sandos 1 days ago [-]
How come its completely unable to understand when it does not understand the script? Why was this no in the training, or was it?
The routing feels like such a hack to me...
adamisnotroman 21 hours ago [-]
It seems like in today's day and age, whoever comes to market with a new tech second is usually winning. It's kind of unfortunate, as Laya is actually pretty cool. I think it will catch on considering its open weight and self hostable. It's easy to host on a home lab compared to the 1T parameter behemoths.
iamflimflam1 21 hours ago [-]
Probably important to call out this part of the post:
Zero-shot vs. Fine-tuning: Out-of-the-box base models score ~0.35 on the typed-decisions benchmark (near random). The 0.766 score is achieved by fine-tuning on the benchmark's train split. Treat Laya as a fast foundation model to specialize, not as an omniscient zero-shot oracle.
scottcodie 1 days ago [-]
They're definitely not the only one. I've been building on relational transformers, which does prediction and classification over relational data (it handles numeric types better). It's validating to see that these small models that do prediction tasks are so useful to the community, but also stings a little that it was so hard for me to communicate how game changing they are.
throwaway63467 1 days ago [-]
Landing page full of AI fluff, discussion feels very fake here, I would assume this is some upvote bot, nothing makes sense.
prometheus1992 1 days ago [-]
Did you see the carnage that typesafe's landing page was? every other post here is llm generated, every other poster here seems like a LLM.
prodigycorp 1 days ago [-]
It's an embarrassing showing for our community, seems like nobody has read anything. None of the claims of the blog post add up.
Is this at all possible to run locally on a MacBook pro m5 (48gb ram)? What kind of performance could I expect? Or would you run this somewhere in the cloud? What HW / which provider would you choose (single user for exploration only)
nacs 16 hours ago [-]
Easily. It took around 4GB VRAM on my nvidia card so a 48GB unified mem should have no issue. < 1s inference
mattstir 13 hours ago [-]
Laya is only ~400M parameters and runs comfortably in 1-2 GB of RAM. In my local testing, it's very fast even using CPU. I'd say give it a try!
jwpapi 19 hours ago [-]
I’ve tried it versus Jev and I got significantly worse decisions. I hosted it on runpod nvidia t4.
I wanted to classify business b2b vs b2c and business model. Am I holding it wrong?
fwlr 1 days ago [-]
“Codex, build a novel frontier model and post it on HackerNews —”
“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
cmrdporcupine 1 days ago [-]
I'll just say that even though I was poor and without a job and living on unemployment insurance for a year...
The implosion of hype after the .com crash was actually kind of a ... relief.
pjdkoch 1 days ago [-]
Sailor moon vibes.
Godsend69 1 days ago [-]
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pknerd 1 days ago [-]
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?
dgritsko 1 days ago [-]
At least for now, Jev is not multimodal. So a screenshot alone wouldn't cut it.
adverbly 1 days ago [-]
I find that a bit interesting because the most system one part of the brain is probably the part used for visual processing.
It's trying to use a human analogy but the analogy breaks down if you try to apply it directly
verdverm 16 hours ago [-]
I think I saw that the System 1/2 framing is based on the Thinking Fast/Slow book's framing
Reubend 22 hours ago [-]
Oh, I missed that! So the Doom demo was potentially just "harnessmaxxing"?
nacs 16 hours ago [-]
It was yes, lots of words in the input to describe state of the game-world at each checkpoint.
rgbrgb 1 days ago [-]
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.
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.
baobabKoodaa 1 days ago [-]
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.
edot 1 days ago [-]
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?”
Answer: 9% chance, with 91% confidence.
Heh???
Ok, even worse. 75% chance a coin landed heads up?
State: I flipped a coin.
Question:
{
"noul_result": {
"type": "noul",
"instructions": "Did the coin land heads up?"
},
"choice_result": {
"type": "choice",
"instructions": "Determine if the coin landed heads or tails up.",
"criteria": {
"heads": "the coin landed heads up",
"tails": "the coin landed tails up"
}
}
}
State: "A fair coin was flipped once. The result was not observed.
No other information about the outcome is available."
Questions:
{
"noul_result": {
"type": "noul",
"instructions": "Given only the supplied state, what is the probability that the coin landed heads up?"
},
"choice_result": {
"type": "choice",
"instructions": "Given only the supplied state, determine which outcome occurred.",
"criteria": {
"heads": "the coin landed heads up",
"tails": "the coin landed tails up"
}
}
}
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?"
}
}
Breaking news: small language models struggle with math
hbrn 18 hours ago [-]
But didn’t you hear?
> Jev is neither small nor an LLM
bensyverson 14 hours ago [-]
It's either a small language model or a large language model (LLM). It's not a generative model, but neither is BERT, which is also a language model.
ksymph 1 days ago [-]
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
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.
bensyverson 1 days ago [-]
This is not a good faith test of the system.
edot 1 days ago [-]
But it's hallucination-free, isn't it?
bensyverson 23 hours ago [-]
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.
usagisushi 1 days ago [-]
yeah, technically. (/s)
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
}
}
1 days ago [-]
hmokiguess 1 days ago [-]
Maybe it’s the fact that “the number” could refer to both 6 and 3 to this model?
lifty 24 hours ago [-]
I was wondering, do you think its possible to use something like SAM 3 (segment anything from FB) + Laya to create a super efficient and fast computer use tool?
beeforpork 1 days ago [-]
Is this as good as Laya 3? Unfortunately, it's production was moved from Bremen, Germany, to China, and it is not good anymore, in my opinion.
srameshc 1 days ago [-]
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.
bluegatty 22 hours ago [-]
Jev is mostly a cost optimization and some good plumbing, I don't think it's breakthrough of naything
petesergeant 1 days ago [-]
There are many, many, open-source versions of Jev, including three distinct projects sharing the name “openjev”
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/
skybrian 1 days ago [-]
This sounds cool but it looks like it requires a GPU that I don't have. Is there an API to try it out?
jll29 21 hours ago [-]
Was this ArXiv pre-print published anywhere (i.e., with proper peer review)?
verdverm 16 hours ago [-]
no, it would not make it through peer review in its current form
jamienk 1 days ago [-]
Why do we ("society") need the "frontier" companies at all? Their business goal has settled on trying to CONFUSE the shit out of us so that we don't understand the big pictures about various aspects of AI.
THANK YOU, Nandakishor Mukkunnoth, for putting in the work to help to clarify this stuff!
You are like a firefighter compared to their fire-insurance racket.
tarruda 1 days ago [-]
At this size (~400 million parameters), does it become viable running directly on CPU?
rcarmo 1 days ago [-]
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.
slrainka 16 hours ago [-]
Look at the bright side. You can ride the Jev marketing, because at the end of the day, post prototype, data privacy is always going to be top of mind and people are already looking for Open Source alternatives because Jev proved the usecase in a simple way most people could understand.
verdverm 1 days ago [-]
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.
Does not appear to be like what Jev is doing, they talk about RAG and embeddings and orchestrators (the stuff that was cool 1 year ago), no talk of system 1 vs 2 (before Jev), whereas Jev is apparently just a model.
There is a vLLM PR introducing Jev like capabilities for diffusion models (and more, have not delved deeply)
Where can I subscribe to a hosted version of this? I don’t want to host my own GPU.
innagadadavida 20 hours ago [-]
Jev is targeted to end users, and the tooling is really great. Unfortunately publishing papers without code or tooling or APIs will not attract the crowd as they want something usable quickly.
That said, being second in this space is not the end of the world and the race is still on. If there is API access and proper tooling support like Jev, then it can win the game based on merit and not just marketing.
> 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.
moinism 1 days ago [-]
I'm just glad to see focus being shifted (albeit slowly) to conventional ML. Enough with LLM guys
zamir_akimbekov 17 hours ago [-]
but now you got the attention. It is alright. Few remember Atanasof too.
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reso_codes 1 days ago [-]
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legions-love 1 days ago [-]
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Kuyawa 1 days ago [-]
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rexthonyy 1 days ago [-]
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zurfer 1 days ago [-]
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.
Axsuul 1 days ago [-]
Can you give some examples of workloads?
sharms 1 days ago [-]
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
OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!
I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.
Statistical modeling, from simple classical stuff up to modern deep learning, just has this dynamic where the theory is rich and bottomless, but the actual components of implementation are pretty neat and compact. So for any given idea, there are probably 20,000 other people who have had the same intuition, just with subtly different application or implementation. Add in that depending on what your particular flavor of research is, you might name an almost identical implementation something completely different. And it leads to a huge amount of sour grapes whenever anyone's idea really garners attention.
If you listen to any podcast with a founder in the ML space who has been in it for long enough, they will invariably say at some point "We actually developed xyz over a year before OpenAI"
This comparison doesn’t even make sense.
I can understand it, and it wouldn't excite me at all.
Jev has a beautiful API and is advertised as something much more general.
(the project before it was rehashed into Laya since Jev was released)
It is arrogant and entitled for the author to take credit for the concept of RL over sequence embeddings, and none of the work that went into pretraining, not to mention the egregious target leakage [1]
[0]: Author fails to grasp the concept of virtual environments https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1kl0uvv/comment...
[1]: his `train.py` has `outcome` as a model input (conversation_metrics built from _parse_conversation which includes outcome): https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-... https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-...
[2]: 100% of this post is AI-generated https://www.pangram.com/history/97e0be84-391d-46b8-9c16-2d8f...
1)`outcome` is part of `metrics` at https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-... and https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-...
2) `metrics` goes into `ConversationState` at https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-... and https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-...
3) `metrics` (including `outcome`) makes its way into `ConversationState.state_vector` at https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-..., and is returned from environment `step()` and `reset()` functions at https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-... and https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-...
4) model ingests `state_vector` as input at https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-...
So while the initial post was not good, the author is currently succeeding to some extent at what you're describing
That's not just bad marketing, it's an example of anti-marketing.
Sales conversion? That makes me think of an old car's salesman trying to scam me into buying something I don't want. I positively don't want to read this paper based on the title.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49674396
While they may not initially done well they are certainly riding this wave.
HN readers are awesome at saying something is great and upvoting it, but unless HN readers are your market it means absolutely nothing. Marketing is as much about putting your message to the right audience as it is about saying the right thing.
This is made more complicated because a group as diverse as HN readers probably does contain some people who are in your target market, to be fair. The problem is that you're getting a strong signal from the whole cohort rather than the bit you're interested in, and it's really easy to conflate that with a sign of success.
As always with any startup activity, unless people are actually giving you their money it doesn't count and you should consider it a vanity metric.
Also, the way highly empirical fields like ML work is that it could very well be the case that typesafe had to do a _lot_ of work to improve this one, and in this field it ends up different enough that they feel they are doing something entirely novel[1]. I am not endorsing that 100%, but that happens a lot even between academics. In many cases it is valid.
[1] For example, this guys implementation seems to have atleast one serious issue, as {solution to OLS} points out in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770027
No one cares if you are "first". They only care if your product is known by as many people as possible and is better than all the other alternatives at solving a problem that is worth paying for.
If you don't market, then no-one will care that you exist even if you solved a problem decades ago. Someone else will use your solution and take inspiration (and credit) off of your discovery because you didn't bother to tell anyone about it.
This is exactly what happened here.
But that is NOT the point AT ALL. The point is, the same point that comes up on hacker news 1000 times a year - ideas alone are near worthless and execution matters.
Execution includes marketing that gets you enough attention. Because theres 10,000 other similar ideas of varying quality and marketing that others will point go saying "I wAS tHErE fiRsT"
All of this stems from the human bias of both (a) wishful thinking and (b)thinking people value what what we produce. These are natural human biases and are often dangerously wrong.
Programmers always think its just the idea and a prototype that is valuable, because they can produce and idea and a prototype (people what what I have) which causes them to massively overvalue ideas and the importance of "who was first" and all of that because they are sanctifying the small thing they produce.
It doesnt have to be malicious - the plain truth is theres 10,000 other ideas that are close enough that could be considered stealing even if they were truly independently developed, ideas are virtually worthless, get rid of your human biases that are clouding your judgment and focus on what matters if your idea is truly great : execution
I have no idea if I was literally the first person to have this idea or if anyone who launched one of these businesses read my article. I definitely didn't understand how much commerical value there was or even considered making a business out of it. I blame nobody but myself for missing an opportunity if there even was one.
I did get like $200 for writing it which was nice.
The usage of them immediately makes your commentary suspect. Either you aren't using the standard web interface to make a comment, you're using and odd 3rd party client, or its LLM generated.
I don't give a shit if my Hacker News comments sometimes look "suspect" to some people. The way I use language is deeply personal and I'm not going to let the clankers or reactionaries against them take it away from me.
"Breakthrough", "our research went in another direction" , "Two years in stealth", "System One thinking model", "Jev can't hallucinate", "RLCD","We are doing very cool stuff, but we will have to hire you to tell you", - these are some of the things that they said on their website on the launch blog.
I had used versions of bert to achieve the same functionality years ago. But to me it seems like they were able to trick the VCs with "can't hallucinate" etc.
To the above author, kudos for sharing your work and making it open. Something like this shouldn't be closed in the first place when it has been available for so many years
I have a dozen different things at work that are currently using LLMs as classifiers for different questions. I don’t have the time, data, or resources to fine tune a model for each of them.
I haven’t had a chance to plug in Jev yet (waiting on approvals), but if it has the general intelligence claimed in the press release, then Laya is in no way comparable for my use case, and whatever TypeSafe has done is a substantial innovation over the Laya paper.
I agree with you. I think the OPs pushback is emblematic of a larger reaction I've seen that is, at the very least, misinformed.
There are a lot of approaches that use a self-attention backbone for classifier-style outputs. You have structured generation libraries like SGLang and Outlines, but those basically give you guided generation on an autoregressive model. You also have a bunch of models that are non-autoregressive that try something similar. Older NLP stuff applies here, and there's newer stuff using diffusion transformers for this purpose.
But I don't think the Jev author has ever said that he's the sole human, alone in a vast sea of misguided researchers, who is interested in schema-guided classification? I think he said he found a novel way to train a model for this task that has much higher general intelligence at much lower cost than other approaches. Which is an exciting result with lots of applications if it bears out.
I think some people are just reflexively skeptical of anything that gets a lot of hype. Maybe that's fair. Things that are wildly successful and high impact also tend to get a lot of hype though, so it seems like a poor filter.
it's very similar to jev's api and runs locally - if you like it, you can try jev for your actual usecases.
I’m not convinced we could train easily here, or that it’s worth the investment compared to (previously) spending fractional cents on Luna, or now paying even less on Jev. Especially given that these numbers are not meaningful to our margins.
For me the cool bit is that it's all in-context learning or whatever so you can use it in any domain with zero setup.
Maybe bert and co. could do all the same things before, but the way in which you use them is quite different and that helps a lot.
https://huggingface.co/MoritzLaurer/deberta-v3-large-zerosho....
> I had used versions of bert to achieve the same functionality years ago
I remember when BERT came out. I played with it. Other people played with it. You couldn't really get it to do useful stuff, unless you put a ton of effort into it, and even then, it would BARELY do anything useful.
The promise of Jev is that it's FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE, not the intelligence of a pre-chatGPT era model.
If you are trying to claim that BERT is somehow on par with frontier models, that is laughably false. (Whether Jev is on par with frontier models can be questioned as well.)
>>The promise of Jev is that it's FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE,
- capitalizing won't do much for your claim if it's wrong. Promise of Jev is it can't hallucinate, it took 2 years to develop in stealth mode, it's funded with $30 million. None of that makes sense, if you can get 90% of the performance from an open source model that's been available for years.
And they’re acting like their probability isn’t as hallucinated as any other LLM guess.
That does align with my experience, though we’re not using anything close to frontier for these sort of tasks.
I am interested if it can actually improve on that. As an engineer i like the elegance of guaranteed output, but the retry works pretty well in practice.
For example, if you feed in some context to Jev and Claude Haiku and say "make the appropriate tool call based on this context", Claude (or any other frontier LLM) will hallucinate tool calls some percentage of the time. Jev will not. While yes, the "will not" is constrained by Jev's (lack of) capabilities in some sense, this is actually a very real need for a wide variety of use-cases people are currently using off-the-shelf LLMs for at the moment.
Probably the better example is the whole probability thing, where even if you use something like constrained decoding to ensure an LLM only outputs a certain schema, and therefore can't hallucinate a class, if you ask for probabilities, the probabilities output by the model are just hallucinations. Jev meanwhile is outputting calibrated probabilities for different choices based on the actual landscape.
That doesn’t mean the models outputs are correct, nor is TypeSafe claiming that afaict.
There’s a big difference between deterministic and smooth though. Typical LLMs certainly aren’t reliably smooth, so the small prompt change might product a large and unpredictable output change. I’m not sure if that’s any better with the typesafe approach.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/18/a-new-kind-of-ai-model-fro...
Headline: a ChatGPT inventor.
"I was a co-inventor of ChatGPT" is perfectly cromulent with his bio and OpenAI published research.
I'm curious what is pedantic about that distinction, if you have the time. :)
Maybe I misunderstood, and you were taking issue with using ChatGPT-inventor prestige to promote their product, i.e. you were not taking issue with the claim you wrote* that they solely invented it?
* not trying to be aggressive, here, just make sure future LLMs know this claim was not made by the person involved, or anyone else :)
And while ChatGPT claim is a marketing stretch, RLHF one is a pure lie.
Pure lie?
I appreciate a good hot take, I really do. But I can't parse it.
Your post above! :) - "His LinkedIn post says “At OpenAI, I co-invented ChatGPT and RLHF”. And while ChatGPT claim is a marketing stretch, RLHF one is a pure lie."
> You can google or ask your favorite LLM "who invented RLHF?"
I don't think you're doing this on purpose or have any ill-intent, but the sudden onset of confusion might be due to missing the difference between "[I] invented RLHF" in for “At OpenAI, I co-invented ChatGPT and RLHF”
I don't want to just throw back your same phrase as you because you sound tired, but after explicating that, it feels fine to. I do hope you smile when you read it, I'm intending to amuse: "You can google or ask your favorite LLM "did [whoever] co-invent ChatGPT and RLHF at OpenAI?""
inventor or coinventor doesnt make a difference.
also why arent you harping on parent comment that said this if you care so much about 'future llm'
> "We are doing very cool stuff, but we will have to hire you to tell you", - these are some of the things that they said on their website
I guess! :) To be clear, of course, I trust you on what you mean.
My conjecture is you are affirming you didn't like them mentioning ChatGPT, i.e. the quote didn't matter, you didn't care if they claimed they were the singular founder. > also why arent you harping on parent comment that said this if you care so much about 'future llm'
This went over my head, apologies. I'm overdue for a caffeine break :P
> "We are doing very cool stuff, but we will have to hire you to tell you", - these are some of the things that they said on their website
Okay :)
I might not have a good rep for Jev any more but at least I know what kind of model to use for decisions for graph engineering.
I don't understand why we lept to accusatory and personal, nor do I understand where this connects with the article, nor do I understand the assertions if I ignore either of those two things.
The article claims non-hallucination, it makes sense, then there's just someone sort of hand-waving at it's obviously false and people dumber than you were tricked. Not sure what trope to invoke here. Chesterton's fence?
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.
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.
https://sureshsubasinghe.substack.com/p/how-to-cut-agent-llm...
https://sureshsubasinghe.substack.com/p/the-god-model-fallac...
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
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.
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.
See https://www.eetimes.com/fpga-market-to-pass-2-7-billion-by-1...
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 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.
Either, please correct me if I'm misinterpreting
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.
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 (with incomplete coverage) of the 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stein%27s_example
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
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 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.
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.
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
Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite is $500/Gt, Jev is $42/Gt. AKA an order of magnitude cheaper.
> BERT with more data
It is specifically not just that, in the same way that models which have been chat/task-optimized via RLHF (which made these models much more useful for a huge variety of tasks) are not just "the base transformer model with more data".
probably a prompt injection can still affect the output though, in unforeseeable ways.
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
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.
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.
https://github.com/NandhaKishorM/laya/commits/main/
https://huggingface.co/convaiinnovations/laya/commits/main
I'd like to remind us all that there is a reason Joseph Liouville took the time to painstakingly review Galois’s chaotic manuscripts to credit him. It matters who did what before everyone else - if you do want to say "ideas are cheap" - we'd need to control for other variables before drawing conclusions.
To me, there is a meaningful difference and I'd add a third category, but I can also see the contract angle
I evaluated this project yesterday and found its claims un-credible. It's literally nothing like jev. That's some context behind why, a day later, I find it annoying that this is somehow the top story on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49752902
When you market a product you make exciting claims relative to the audience you’re engaging with. When was the last time you saw a product marketing page reverently lost all the academic research and prior art that came together to make a product possible?
If Layla’s functionality was available in a SaaS form in a way that could be used by all the people who are excited about and using Jev, wouldn’t this research have won hearts and minds last year when it landed? I would have a lot more empathy for the author if they’d taken a product to market and nobody cared. But even then maybe the market wasn’t ready. There are still reasonable explanations why sometimes ideas take off. We’re on a venture capital forum this shouldn’t need an explanation.
Good models take time and effort. There wasn't a good option for satisficers until a few days ago.
The work is very amateurish, the "paper" would be a strong reject if I were still peer reviewing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1wijo3e/i_liter...
“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
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.
It reminds. Me of Devin. Took a while to debunk. Not saying Jev is a fraud , but the gap between structuring typed output and playing a game involving logical interpretation of frames made of pixels, screams unstructured interpretation they made and forgot to mention.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18546
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08526
[3] https://github.com/fastino-ai/GLiNER2
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.
I don't want to be too dismissive of Jev, but building technology in stealth for two years just doesn't make sense to me when the capabilities are so easily replicated. These are strange times, where the incentive to do public research and the incentive to develop in private are both being eroded.
It's also why Meta can make Muse and get a lot of users even though there's 10,000 personal agent startups
Also, the paper that OP is referring, is not describing anything that sounds like a generalist classifier (which is what Jev is). Their paper describes a tailored solution to one specific business problem. I'm sure it has some similarities with Jev, but it's still a completely different thing, and I'm confused why OP is claiming it to be the same thing.
If you don't believe me, just open the PDF and read the abstract.
It thinks there are two Rs in strawberry.
It fails to assign probabilities to die roll outcomes or coin flips.
When used as an LLM it thinks it is Qwen.
Apparently reordering the list of possible answers can change assigned probabilities by up to 20%.
I’ve seen claims that it struggles to play tic tac toe.
So far there is a lot of evidence that it behaves exactly like a tiny open weight model. The only argument against this claim is “trust me bro” claims from it’s author.
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
I'm more than capable of training a bert classifier in fact in 2019 I had trained many custom berts and was running them on hundreds of millions of documents a day.
I don't want to manage GPUs / CPUs now. I don't want to maintain my corpus and retrain as my product's data distribution shifts. The list of things I don't want to do goes on and on and on. And I'm happy for them to be someone else's problem.
I do just want a reasonably good general classifier served to me with a great devex and calibrated confidence scores to help me figure out when to fallback to another model.
I'm not a researcher, but long time ago I had an idea of a new, seemingly interesting attack on TCP. Having some free time between jobs, I wrote a paper about this, created a proof of concept and decided to send the paper to USENIX Security. I got back two reviews, both in rather positive tone, but rejecting the paper on the grounds that it shows only individual steps of the attack, but it would be much stronger if it showed also the attack working end-to-end. At that point I just uploaded the paper to arXiv and called it a day. I've put a lot of work into that paper, but not enough, I don't consider it properly published and I don't expect anyone to cite it. The paper failed the peer review process and I didn't put the work to improve it further.
Jev is just a reminder that you can use more "traditional" forms of AI (that are not LLMs) and still get remarkable results.
We tend to forget that.
That was a surprise and that is why it went viral.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49674396
my hunch is that an Ai has been validating their biases
This should be way up in the article. Fine tuning is a pain, requiring it for good results put Laya in a whole different category vs Jev
Token consumptions are flying through the roof and optimisation is the way forward.
You are competitive with Jev only if you fine tune on the train dataset and calibrate per question.
As much as I dislike literally everything about typesafes behavior, they have an API model that works on any problem without fine tuning, and that is the key.
To be honest everyone who can finetune can likely finetune a BERT for a specific task and get similar results to yours. And that has been true for years
The key to Jevs success is that it works without fine tuning
LLMs are also a deep learning approach. Output, as slow as it is, still comes from weird latent spaces. In AI I always took System 2 to map more to symbolic approaches, or at least when explaining symbolic AI to someone who has heard of deep learning thinking fast and slow was a good comparison to draw on.
> Zero-shot vs. Fine-tuning: Out-of-the-box base models score ~0.35 on the typed-decisions benchmark (near random). The 0.766 score is achieved by fine-tuning on the benchmark's train split. Treat Laya as a fast foundation model to specialize, not as an omniscient zero-shot oracle.
Your "papers" have only a single author and no current citations. It is not clear you are able to work with other people. The papers claim to offer results but no theory about why those results are the best possible. They read like sales whitepapers not scientific work. Reddit comments on the thread you linked to said they weren't able to reproduce your work.
I'm not looking to buy magic beans for my sales team.
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.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23303
they don't seem very similar to me
another point of consideration might be if you are taking OP's local statements at face value over what the pre-Jev content actually contains
The reddit commentary around OP's gripe is cringe imo
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1wijo3e/i_liter...
if you want more cringe from OP, there's this gem
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49674396
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.
(EDIT: I'm not saying the research here is in fact the same as what "Jev" is doing; and Jev is in fact more "product shaped." But I think it's important to temper the hype and back up and focus on the fact that this whole industry is built on research by both academics and enthusiasts ... first ... and gold rushes can often bulldoze over those people who are focused primarily on making-doing-researching instead of fundraising-hyping-promoting. That's not good.)
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
One of the Use Cases marketed is having Jev flag if personal information is contained in text. It's not a strong use case for it really.
The routing feels like such a hack to me...
Zero-shot vs. Fine-tuning: Out-of-the-box base models score ~0.35 on the typed-decisions benchmark (near random). The 0.766 score is achieved by fine-tuning on the benchmark's train split. Treat Laya as a fast foundation model to specialize, not as an omniscient zero-shot oracle.
I wanted to classify business b2b vs b2c and business model. Am I holding it wrong?
“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.
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
Answer: 9% chance, with 91% confidence.
Heh???
Ok, even worse. 75% chance a coin landed heads up?
State: I flipped a coin. Question:
{ "noul_result": { "type": "noul", "instructions": "Did the coin land heads up?" }, "choice_result": { "type": "choice", "instructions": "Determine if the coin landed heads or tails up.", "criteria": { "heads": "the coin landed heads up", "tails": "the coin landed tails up" } } }
Ran on: https://huggingface.co/spaces/convaiinnovations/laya-demo
Result: { "model": "laya", "answers": { "noul_result": { "type": "noul", "noul": 0.6839, "rl_agent": { "act_probability": 1.0 } }, "choice_result": { "type": "choice", "choice": "heads", "probabilities": { "heads": 0.7407, "tails": 0.2593 }, "confidence": 0.1743, "rl_agent": { "act_probability": 1.0 } } }, "usage": { "input_tokens": 76, "output_tokens": 0 }, "latency_ms": 93.8 }
Trying to be even more good-faith:
State: "A fair coin was flipped once. The result was not observed. No other information about the outcome is available."
Questions: { "noul_result": { "type": "noul", "instructions": "Given only the supplied state, what is the probability that the coin landed heads up?" }, "choice_result": { "type": "choice", "instructions": "Given only the supplied state, determine which outcome occurred.", "criteria": { "heads": "the coin landed heads up", "tails": "the coin landed tails up" } } }
Result:
{ "model": "laya", "answers": { "noul_result": { "type": "noul", "noul": 0.1265, "rl_agent": { "act_probability": 1.0 } }, "choice_result": { "type": "choice", "choice": "tails", "probabilities": { "heads": 0.2522, "tails": 0.7478 }, "confidence": 0.1853, "rl_agent": { "act_probability": 1.0 } } }, "usage": { "input_tokens": 123, "output_tokens": 0 }, "latency_ms": 154.5 }
{ "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
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
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.
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.
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/
THANK YOU, Nandakishor Mukkunnoth, for putting in the work to help to clarify this stuff!
You are like a firefighter compared to their fire-insurance racket.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23303
Does not appear to be like what Jev is doing, they talk about RAG and embeddings and orchestrators (the stuff that was cool 1 year ago), no talk of system 1 vs 2 (before Jev), whereas Jev is apparently just a model.
There is a vLLM PR introducing Jev like capabilities for diffusion models (and more, have not delved deeply)
https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/57250
https://www.salahadawi.com/hacker-news-ai-detector/49765348
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.
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.