Comment by Aurornis
13 hours ago
Jev's launch was the best AI era marketing campaign I've seen so far. It was executed and timed so perfectly that Jev became synonymous with decision models overnight.
I think it reveals how many people were only familiar with LLMs as the generic AI tool for everything. It only took one ambitious marketing campaign for someone to come along and present a simpler technology as a new breakthrough to audiences that hadn't considered anything else.
The largest LLMs are really amazing for how much they can accomplish on unseen tasks. That is undeniably remarkable. The mistake that gets made everywhere is thinking that they're the best tool for every task, because LLMs are the only AI tool in most developer's AI toolbelt right now.
>many people were only familiar with LLMs as the generic AI tool for everything
That’s exactly how the biggest vendors have been marketing them, it’s no wonder non-experts think of them that way. I’m not an expert myself but have a passing familiarity with theory as a SWE and grad student who did some research for machine translation and currently am in a computing-adjacent field. I use LLMs heavily for work and have never come across any coder-oriented tutorial, guide, etc. encouraging use of LLMs as decision models specifically, even if they are being used that way “beneath the hood.” Jev’s announcement seemed sort of new functionality to me but even in the first post about it on HN (where I heard about it), iirc people were pointing out that LLMs do the same thing, at least to some extent.
I think you have a very narrow and specific experience with people claiming to be "devs".
I don't know of any devs in real life who would loudly and publicly get excited about anything unless it was their own completed project to show off.
The tools are a footnote. It's precisely because it's so hard to get a project that far along that they would be familiar with many more tools than they would ever speak about. I suppose some people have a low bar. I wouldn't really call them "devs", especially now in this "AI era".
> I don't know of any devs in real life
I think you're coming at this from a very narrow and specific experience with a few people you know.
Jev really went from the announcement to being discussed all over overnight. We're discussing how popular things are in general, not among your narrow and specific group of people you work with.
I agree with what you said above, but not this. Jev was discussed "all over" by people chasing hype. I think that is actually a narrow set of people.
"No you!" :-)
I think it's clear we're at the tail end of this cycle. I'm very glad to see it.