A pre-trained universal classifier that can replace specifically-trained ones would have been considered just as much science fiction in the 2010's as the capabilities of modern LLMs. I'm not sure Jev is actually there yet, but at least it sounds theoretically doable today.
That being said, one thing having been unrealistic 10 years ago and just about possible today doesn't mean that it's going to change the world the same way another technically related, previously-impossible thing did. The Jev hype gives me a bit of the "you're still early to crypto" vibes of some later altcoins. I really like the idea, I think it's going to open up possibilities for using classifiers where we wouldn't or couldn't have trained one before. I'm crossing my fingers for an open weights version to drop. But it's still just a classifier, people have built similar things before Jev, the one thing that really stands out about it is their ability to generate hype.
> but at least it sounds theoretically doable today
why
We have a bad universal classifier now (via Jev). 0->1, one might say.
A bad universal classifier does suggest a good one later. And that is exactly what I would call "theoretically doable"
That said, I don't think that Jev is a magic breakthrough or anything. I think it is just a particularly good narrative with an easy way to try it out.
LLMs are like lossy compression of ~all of written text ever produced, with useful recall. To the extent that the corpus contains labelled examples of the given classification task, it's not unreasonable to think that we'll be able to build a decoder for that, just like we already have a useful decoder for next-token prediction. Extend to image classification the same way we already have multimodal LLMs.