Comment by tolugenius
8 hours ago
I'm not exactly following through with the claim, can someone explain how the built-in classification would not necessitate more tokens used, or be much different from turning on reasoning? Not that I don't see the difference, I just doing see how OpenAI would do it well.
AFAIK Jev is nothing special technically so it's easy to embed it as an another tool for the LLM? For many batch tasks it can still be quite a token saver I think.
Or they can even offer it as a standalone API if deemed worth it.
Jev seems to have three benefits:
1) It's very cheap and fast - you provide one input and many potential classifications, and the compute to ingest the input is shared.
2) It generates structured output natively - guaranteed to be correct
3) It's output probabilities are calibrated to actually mean something
OpenAI, or anyone else, could certainly replicate it - there are already articles guessing how Jev achieves its "parallel" classifications, but it seems the AI companies need to decide are they in the business of providing intelligence/tokens, or are they in the application business trying to compete with all their customers (not that Jev uses OpenAI).
> It's output probabilities are calibrated to actually mean something
Don't fall for marketing BS so easily.
Jev can output drastically different probabilities if you simply reorder the list of choices. And Jev's "confidence" output is fake/redundant - it's just a formula applied to probabilities, it conveys no additional information.
I bet they will eventually "fix" (read hide under the rug) the ordering problem by ordering the list on the backend before feeding to the model.
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Just to clarify:
> 2) It generates structured output natively - guaranteed to be correct
It's not guaranteed to be correct: it's guaranteed to be _formatted in a particular way_. You can get the same thing with grammars on any LLM.
Jev and Jev-like models have other advantages, but I feel like people forget grammars exist for LLMs.
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(3) seems to be the hard one, you have to have training data with accurate probabilities, maybe, but perhaps not since people are primed to trust
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It's hard to say without knowing their architecture, but I'd guess something like block attention. You can process the prompt separately from the classifications into a latent space and then do some kind of late interaction with the encodings from the classifications.
There are plenty of other ways to do zero shot classification that would result in more "token usage" (really just having to reprocess everything for each class), but the pricing and the way they describe it narrows it down somewhat.
Normal LLM will do the classification on the text that is generated. Jev just returns the classification and confidence.
It has the advantage of speed and the confidence not being hallucinated.
But LLMs start to generalise on the pattern, rather than the classification that you want the more examples you have to train on.
LLMs start to break down as well the more classifications you have. Laya (Open source paper Jev is based on) even mentions that over 20 classifications and it starts to fail rapidly.
20 is around the level of sentiment analysis or minor intent routing. There are cheaper, smaller and easier ML models for that level of classification.
Jev is just as non deterministic as any llm.
That is, if you force any llm to return json and a confidence it can also do that too and mostly likely it will he better at any one shot classification task than Jev.
LLMs have the great quality of knowing more due to the depth and richness of the training data. If Jev is trying to classify anything outside of its training data, it’s going to do a terrible job.
I think the idea is that the latent thinking space in the LLM will be roughly the same for similar quality results - so the majority of executing well could be stripping back and fine tuning an existing LLM.
The claim of how they are doing it is likely wrong.... if you had to bet, it's likely an encoder model of some sort.