Every major AI shop has a ton of in-house classifiers already, big, small, generalist, specialized. Some are used in inference pipelines (e.g. safeguards), some are used in data preparation, training, analysis and investigation, research, various one-off and intermediate tasks etc. Offering them on a public API doesn't always make business sense. I don't see much substance to this buzz, looks like people that are new to all this are discovering that classifiers exist, they are more efficient at classification, and many tasks commonly done with generative models are classification in disguise. Which is not bad at all, a fresh look at their use is great to have.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but a zero-shot classifier like Jev is fundamentally different to a classifier with a fixed task (e.g. for safeguards), unless they trained a general purpose system to complete the safeguard task, which seems unlikely.
This whole thing reminds me of DeepMind’s Variational Bayesian Last Layers[0], which never gained much traction in the broader “AI” world, but is a remarkably useful tool. And a relatively obvious one that anyone with experience in SVI and with transformer pretraining, seems to independently rediscover (including me) before finding this paper.
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11599
Correct, but zero-shot classifiers are also not new.
But zero-shot classifiers with this level of intelligence, world knowledge, ergonomics, cost profile, and ease of use are new.
I feel like good engineering doesn't just ignore those things, or at least it didn't before recently. Now I guess social media has added a pressure to reduce everything to a hot take.
> Ergonomics, cost profile, and ease of use are new.
Following AI from the academic papers side; jev really feels silly. They one-pass the LLM tranformer stack and tune the output network for a probability value.
(some clever pararellization optimisations to make it viable to offer as an api, since the normal kv cashing no longer works if you oneshot the tranformer)
The largest change is the packaging; An api with a tolken based pricing, and a schema to define the output structure for quick setup.
Previous projects would probably involve installing pytorch, running a converter script on Qwen, and write a fair bit of matrix math to change the output shape.
I'm kinda amused that it took this long though.
They almost certainly would perform worse than more specialized classifiers trained with less data. It’s kind of a paradox of generalization. I think there’s an interesting space where you use generalized models to generate ad hoc specialized classifiers.
Depends what you man by "more specialised". You wont train very good language understanding without alot of data. It probably uses the core tranformer stack from an LLM.
Classic classifiers are regularly just tuned general models; Training a CCN on ImageNet and tune it for cats and dogs gives better results than just training it on cats and dogs.
There is likley a small network used to tranform model output vector to probabilities, but that wouldn't be massive. Retraining that small network for specific task may beat jev; but that's bairly considered training by modern standards.
Fixed guard today is not very fixed. For ex, the safeguard qwen released is a full 4b llm model. It has no different to normal llm model arch except tuned for this specific purpose,
So it is tuned specifically to classify content for safeguarding? I'm not familiar with this particular model, but it most likely has a specific classifier head that is tuned for the safeguard task. This is completely different to zero-shot classification.
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.
I'd also add that they're hoping Jevon's Paradox also leads to a whole new segment of users who would have never reached for a classifier in the first place, given the barrier to entry.
Yes this is what I'm interested in. I think they might be right. I'm already finding myself thinking "well maybe a classifier would be useful here now that it's so easy to do...".
This probably just means that I could have been reaching for that tool more often already. But in practice I wasn't, and this has opened my eyes to the potential opportunities there.
And if you do get complaints or feedback on the classification, have a dev log into the user's account, tweak the Jev prompt a little until the issue goes away, and push it to production
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.
Scripts and debugging, one-off log parsing or filtering.
I saw an article about 2+ years ago of a researcher using a small local AI strapped into excel to evaluate the abstract and intro of 10000 papers for "papers that research X in domain of Y", and let it loose.
jev is probably more capable avd faster than that workflow was, but saved one dude a few very grindy weeks for a litteratur review.
It's amusing how long it took, and much hype it gets for someone releasing the least revolutionary ML architecture in a new package. But i can see a fair few uses.
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!
This. It’s machine learning vs. “AI” for the uninitiated. Soon there will be a new ground breaking model that does k-means clustering and will get a billon dollar funding (but only if you're young and live in SF)
The good news is it’s fun to see people discover and get excited about things that I like as well.
Its in a modern and easily to deploy package. The hype is a bit wierd. "0 cost output tolkens" is such a silly phrasing.
I would have never considered importing pytorch for filtering through log files before even knowing my way around it. But if i can type a filtering condition by text and hit enter; i may actually use that to save some time.
Id want something local though, but thats hardly a difficult demand for what it is.
Entertainingly, OpenAI had a general purpose zero-shot classifier API built on GPT-3! Just no one ever cared that much about it, so I guess it got dropped somewhere along the way since 2020/2021.
"I don't see much substance to this buzz..."
Agreed. This isn't new. I led a research team at a Fortune 500 that used a transformer based classifier approach in a commercial product as far back as 2022 and we didn't come up with it. It was already common enough that we found the inspiration for our implementation on some web forum. Models like RouteLLM have been around for a long time. The news here isn't that a new model type came about, its that a large percentage of people messing around with this stuff that are new to AI just learned that not all transformer based implementations need to be autoregressive.
> Agreed. This isn't new. ...
It doesn't have to be new, it just has to be consumable by devs.
You could send text before Twilio. You could process credit cards before Stripe.
Jev, at the end of the day is an easy to use API.
Everyone seems to forget that usability is a thing.
It took us a few hours to implement that one we used in 2022. This isn't about usability its about a huge population working on this stuff not really knowing what is available until it becomes a meme.
For me, I think the big deal is that it promises to be general and broadly applicable and high quality. That's new and special. But we'll wait to see if the claims actually hold.
> Every major AI shop has a ton of in-house classifiers already, big, small, generalist
I think building generalist classifier is some open ended research task, where frontier labs can contribute: different internal reasoning, instruction tuning, building datasets and benchmarks, building and distilling super large models.
If your "master AI" is good enough, it should be able to find and learn about and use specialized tech AI like Jev if it suits your goals
and then whatever tech it is will be absorbed/assimilated/Sherlocked into the leading products anyway