Comment by EagnaIonat
7 hours ago
I fed into the hype at first. Testing Jev and Laya, they both suffer from the same issues as LLMs that stop them being useful beyond limited classifications.
I can't see any benefits that a typical ML classifier would not be better at.
Agreed. I tested Jev on OpenRouter this past weekend and it’s “okay” but a specific classifier is significantly better. It used to require skill to import sklearn (ok, not really), but now it’s literally one prompt and upload your Excel file or whatever and you can get your classifier out. It’ll run free, instant, more accurate.
This is predicated on you having training data already. I approach Jev more like Langchain -- you can prototype something new extremely fast and cheap, and if the use case works well enough, rip it out and build something bespoke. If it doesn't, you didn't spend a bunch of time curating a training dataset anyway.
Yeah I think that's right. It's actually nice to have a better-than-nothing placeholder that can be replaced if it becomes valuable to do so.
I think the main argument would just be that because the model is general, you don't need to retrain it from scratch for a new problem - just tweak the input prompt. For a typical classifier there's a lot more hassle - collecting the data, training it yourself, retraining under distribution shift... In that sense Jev seems great for prototyping or small-scale use cases.
Counterargument: this works for quick prototyping, but for any serious business, you will eventually develop a benchmark/eval to track how well the general model is working, and once you have that dataset, you might as well train a specific model
Jev's bet is that if it works well enough for random use cases that nobody complains, then management won't feel a need to develop a benchmark/eval, and they won't need to employ all those data science guys.
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Or not. And replace the generalist with the next generalist that gets you +15% on that benchmark for the same price, or gives you the same benchmark performance for half the price.
One advantage of using generalist models is that the generalists are improving - regardless of whether you're doing anything about it.
Training a classification model is trivial these days, even for a number far bigger than what Jev can do.
I guess I'm circling toward this view. The question is, are there things that are 1. worth doing, 2. for which jev (or jev-like systems) works well, and 3. are not worth the effort to train a custom classifier. Probably yes, but it seems like it might be a pretty narrow path. But a lot depends on #2. The trade-off between #1 and #3 is less stark the more successful one shot models are at handling use cases successfully.
Using Jev as a plain classifier is the least interesting case. See robotic control, navigation, computer use examples, none of it possible with a classifier.
That's the point, they're classification in disguise. Agentic game engines/mods started doing this long ago due to the latency requirements (although they're typically using small BERT-like models that need to be finetuned, or low TTFT generative models and structured outputs). New or newly discovered use cases are great, sure.
Prompt ingestion is going to be the biggest differentiator.
Being able to route prompt to features that then route to special models would be a really solid implementation.
It starts to break down once you go over 20 classifications. Which is very basic routing that can easily be done with typical ML models for cheaper and faster.
Thanks for the breadcrumb!