Comment by dcow
19 hours 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.
I believe his qualms were with the "hype" in Jev's announcement: specifically calling this kind of model a breakthrough, without crediting previous art, and keeping everything closed source.
The hype is kinda nuts; I use X for ML/LLM stuff, and I just can't get away from Jev - even in my Following feed. Even days later 75% of posts are about "how I use typesafe for cooking breakfast!" or Jev clones.
So many different theories on why this is.
First, I think comprehensibility is a major part of why certain products grab the interest of the mainstream portions of the market. The 75% of posts in your feed are not from people who evaluate products based on underlying technology. They typically value signal from social reinforcement higher than anything else. This is the same reason why we see people mentioning products instead of technologies, i.e. PlanetScale versus Postgres & Tailscale versus WireGuard. The consumers understand the value proposition, but would have never discovered it without relatable messaging. This isn't a new phenomenon in computer software either; jQuery is probably one of the first examples that I can remember with this sort of texture.
The other side is a perception of expertise in a specialty. Software development, especially in AI, has become an incredibly desirable profession, and there are more people than ever racing to be included in it. In my own professional experience I find an excessive amount of entry level talent leveraging the same comprehension of product, but not comprehension of technology to get their foot in the door. A vast majority of the "thought leaders" occupying our feeds are not as well practiced as they claim to be, they're just trying to get a job or raise funding.
And finally, AI has brought out a certain amount of desperation in practitioners, for lack of a better term, materializing as an anecdotal, but certainly observable need to remain on the very tip of the news cycle in order to feel well informed. And so, using the dynamics above and many other human social dynamics, we find certain concepts spreading across cohorts that would not normally have a need or a want for these particular techniques, or products, or solutions, but because they feel pressured to remain relevant.
if is closed source, how does he know there isn't some breakthrough he doesn't know?
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.
And how is laya previous art? The project was vibecoded and posted yesterday.
https://github.com/NandhaKishorM/laya/commits/main/
https://huggingface.co/convaiinnovations/laya/commits/main
The paper is one year old. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01237 https://pypi.org/project/hallunox/
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@prodigycorp - reading your comments here on this post - you seem pretty hurt by this post.
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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.”
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23303
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
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.
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.
They mention in their blog post that the model is working on text rather than pixels in the Doom demo.
"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