We've all seen "this meeting could have been an email"; now get ready for "this VC-backed firm could have been a single arXiv preprint."
I don't want to be too dismissive of Jev, but building technology in stealth for two years just doesn't make sense to me when the capabilities are so easily replicated. These are strange times, where the incentive to do public research and the incentive to develop in private are both being eroded.
All this means is that brand and distribution matters more than ever. There's 1000 chatgpt clones but everyone still uses chatgpt. There might be 1000 jev clones soon enough but people won't switch unless there's something significantly better about it.
It's also why Meta can make Muse and get a lot of users even though there's 10,000 personal agent startups
In jevs case I think the competing offerings will rear their head rather fast. The ability to label data like it does now leans itself well for distillation. And to switch out a model like fable for Astra is really not all that difficult. Yea jev is alone now. But before the end of the year another lab with the same offering will rear it’s head
And Jev was obviously just created by ChatGPT reading this paper and copying it.
And yet no one cared about this research until it was productized and communicated well. Multitouch existed before the iPhone.
Bringing up iphone, I see how Jev pulled an Apple for making claims that their model is a breakthrough in research and 2 years of making like other iPhone features that's been around in other phones.