Laya the open source version of Jev

(laya.convaiinnovations.com)

156 points | by nandakishor_ml 2 hours ago

7 comments

  • Oras 1 hour ago
    I played around with Jev last night and did it for classification tasks that I used Gemini 2.5 flash lite with.

    It’s a bit faster and bit cheaper, but this is compared to LLM. The consistency was nice to see, BUT, as someone who trained NLP models prior to LLMs, it’s just BERT with more data. I can see why people would want ready made one shot classifier, and I can see the value of sending multiple classifier in one call, but I wouldn’t call it breakthrough. And I believe many labs will replicate it in no time and might have it as part of their harness.

    I see it as a wake up call for the tech community to go back to basics for most tasks instead of relying solely on generic LLMs.

    • tchalla 21 minutes ago
      Anyone who has worked in ML for 10+ years would already know that the usage of LLMs for everything is lazy, wasteful and a high degree of marketing on it.
      • Oras 6 minutes ago
        I wouldn’t say lazy, LLMs are fast to use and much more cost effective especially if you factor the cost and time of training (data preparation, data cleaning, … etc).

        It’s hard to justify several months to business when there is something off-shelf ready to use and doesn’t require domain specialists to run.

      • dominotw 10 minutes ago
        why would you waste your time messing around with a team of expensive ml engineers and data scientists that produce vastly inferior to a llm.

        We ripped out custom homegrown ml models that were developed in last 10 yrs and put an llm in its place. Its the opposite of wasteful. Even local gemma models are vastly superior.

    • kilroy123 41 minutes ago
      I've come to the same conclusions as you.

      > I see it as a wake up call for the tech community to go back to basics for most tasks instead of relying solely on generic LLMs.

      I always say the cheapest LLM request is no request at all.

    • DetroitThrow 14 minutes ago
      It would be amazing to have big BERTha with per-token pricing on GCP or AWS. There are many times I am reaching for a cheap classifier with the general behavior of an LLM.
  • dwa3592 1 hour ago
    Love it. I was really surprised to see the traction typesafe got in the first place. I had built something similar a year ago for a client and thought it was nothing groundbreaking. The client bought it, still uses it and that was it. I had also spent considerable time training and fine tuning zero shot NLI classifiers. Anyway, after typesafe was launched I decided to start building this open source library - https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/OpenDecision . The context length for the underlying model is 8k.
  • kburman 19 minutes ago
    Loved the idea, but I don’t think it would be able to handle real-world data effectively. There are a lot of nuances that actually require a reasoning model to think through, connect the dots, and make sense of the broader context.
  • cube2222 1 hour ago
    Quickly reading the article, one notable limitation seems to be that these checkpoints are 512-1024 tokens context size models, while Jev is seemingly 32k.

    That's a pretty big limitation, I would argue, unless I'm misunderstanding and it can be worked around easily somehow? I'm surprised it isn't surfaced more prominently in the comparison.

    • bjt12345 36 minutes ago
      Jev has 64k total token request budget and I do wonder how it will handle highly specialised inputs.

      This Jev waitlist that Typesafe AI are utilising is surely going to raise questions pretty soon - it's hard to sell this to bosses when it looks like a pop-up restaurant

  • nandakishor_ml 2 hours ago
    This project was built on the exact research on jev architecture research one year ago
    • whizzter 47 minutes ago
      I'm reading your year old Reddit post and Typesafe's description, and while they probabably say that they can do what you do the main point is that it's different things really as far as I can tell?

      Laya seems to be focused on sales/conversations?

      Reading quickly about TypeSafe, it seems to be about creating _type-safe_ outputs from AI tools for downstream systems to consume, we actually have a system in production that's probably a glove-fit for that, it's for scanning receipts to be ingested into a system and we also have other systems in a sales-pipe that isn't too far off Laya but still sounds more pertient to TypeSafe.

      You did a special case well, but just because they cover (perhaps badly) that case doesn't mean that it's the same thing.

    • woggy 1 hour ago
      I don't understand this sentence, can you try again please? Are you saying Laya was built on research done by the Jev team?
      • klibertp 1 hour ago
        Jev was built using the same architecture Laya's author proposed[1] in March 2025. Laya is an open-source system based on that research from a year ago. Whether Jev is also based on the OP's materials or independently invented is hard to say.

        [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23303

      • water-drummer 1 hour ago
        No, OP thinks they independently discovered Jev's architecture a year ago and published a paper. I am not an expert but I don't think Typesafe has published Jev's architecture so OP's claims cannot be taken at face value.
        • cgio 1 hour ago
          It’s the other way around for me. OP has published everything in the open, so I can take him at face value. A PR media release on the other hand, I can accept with some reservations. The objective and non-conspiratorial reading I could offer is, this is most probably two independent discoveries of the same idea, maybe with different implementation. I still think the Jev team should look at prior art before going so hard on the marketing.
        • cmrdporcupine 23 minutes ago
          Jev is only on people's mouths because they made friends with venture capitalists and used the publicity blowhorns that come with that.

          Whereas the other guy went through the unglorious but formerly respectable path of publishing software and papers for other professionals to look at. A year ago.

          We're in a bad place where the latter looks less reliable than the former.

          (EDIT: I'm not saying the research here is in fact the same as what "Jev" is doing; and Jev is in fact more "product shaped." But I think it's important to temper the hype and back up and focus on the fact that this whole industry is built on research by both academics and enthusiasts ... first ... and gold rushes can often bulldoze over those people who are focused primarily on making-doing-researching instead of fundraising-hyping-promoting. That's not good.)

  • fwlr 40 minutes ago
    “Codex, build a novel frontier model and post it on HackerNews —”

    “Claude, roast this noob, tell him that his model isn’t novel or frontier —”

    both in unison “— and make no mistakes!”

    It’s all so tiresome

    • cmrdporcupine 22 minutes ago
      I'll just say that even though I was poor and without a job and living on unemployment insurance for a year...

      The implosion of hype after the .com crash was actually kind of a ... relief.

  • zurfer 1 hour ago
    I've been deeply impressed with Jev as it made a bunch of workloads we had on Luna or Gemini 10x cheaper and 2x faster (previously used non reasoning version for latency reasons).

    Now Laya promises another speed up and it's open source. Tbh if it can't run on a CPU I anyway want to buy it from an inference provider. Managing gpus in production is a non trivial problem.

    What I also wondered about Jev is how different it is from something like tabular foundation models. They seem to overlap in use cases. Which then leads to the question, what is actually learned? A lot of people in machine learning spend time to making things explainable and always struggled to move beyond data induced biases.

    Having it open source is awesome as fine tuning might give additional performance on the task we care about.

    • dominotw 6 minutes ago
      This is your brain on ai influencer twitter