Comment by bigglebear

Agreed. It's a wildly dishonest presentation of their product from many perspectives, which is a shame because it might actually have some good use cases.

The comparison between LLM speed and Jev speed is misleading, because they're using autoregression to generate all of the type names, all of the schema, etc. A closer comparison would be if the LLM was purely outputting the raw numbers. Even then, comparisons to LLMs are pointless because you could train a transformer on the same sort of task that Jev is doing and get even better performance yet again, and a smaller model. I suspect this is some form of stripped down diffusion language model.

You really have to do a lot of hand holding here, and map out your problem space manually, and very carefully, to get any sort of accuracy. For example:

> Keep each Score to one dimension. If a description says “punctual and smart and experienced”, the question is measuring three things, and an input that is high on one and low on another can’t be placed. Confidence drops and the score means less. Split it into one Score per thing and combine them in code

If you don't perfectly represent the distributions of possible answers then you'll likely get garbage results. As far as probabilistic state machines are concerned, I'd say creating the distributions of possible answers, and their hierarchy, is the actual hard part.

One of their examples is:

- "state": "I have asked three times now. Can I please just talk to a real person?"

- "Is the customer asking for a human agent?"

Imagine the users request is: "I want your human agent to call me tomorrow at 5pm."

Human conversation is fuzzy, getting useful reliable results out of this is going to be a challenge. Of course, you could add follow up checks like: "Do they want that now, or later?" -> if later -> "Do they want that tomorrow, or the day after?" and so on... But now you're building an LLM out of if statements. I am skeptical of whether this model has much utility for fluid language interpretation - I suspect it'll only be useful for scenarios where you've tightly constrained the answer space but want to use fuzzy language to describe it. Like:

- Question to human: "Would you like a support agent RIGHT NOW?"

- Their response: Yes | Yeah | Mhmm | ye sure (any possible yes signal)

Model input: "Did they ask for a support agent?"

Still... a tiny LLM could accomplish this sort of thing without problem. And that doesn't stop someone from saying: "No, not right now. But tomorrow." - and the tomorrow would get missed. I think this is why people haven't really tried this approach much already.

Also their Doom demo is on structured state, not on images. Meaning, the enemies must be being served to the model as coordinates (or the exact angle of projectiles that hit the player), otherwise it'd have to scan every pixel of the 360 degrees to know whether an enemy is in front of the crosshair or not. You can see from the map below that it's also choosing travel checkpoints/destinations through walls. So they've severely cooked this to make it look far more capable than it is in practice, and any speed advantage that is offered here is not factoring in the shortcuts it is taking, the training on the map, and the fact that it can cheat because the structured state it is using is not bound by obstructions.

Here is their docs by the way: https://docs.typesafe.ai/ - so you can understand how it works.