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Laya the open source version of Jev (https://laya.convaiinnovations.com)

589 points by nandakishor_ml about 7 hours ago | 144 comments | View on ycombinator

prometheus1992 about 2 hours ago |

I think the main gripe that people had with Jev and Typesafe was the language used when they launched. To me personally it seemed like a parody/con/shady at first.

"Breakthrough", "our research went in another direction" , "Two years in stealth", "System One thinking model", "Jev can't hallucinate", "RLCD","We are doing very cool stuff, but we will have to hire you to tell you", - these are some of the things that they said on their website on the launch blog.

I had used versions of bert to achieve the same functionality years ago. But to me it seems like they were able to trick the VCs with "can't hallucinate" etc.

To the above author, kudos for sharing your work and making it open. Something like this shouldn't be closed in the first place when it has been available for so many years

Oras about 5 hours 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.

dcow about 3 hours ago |

I can understand why the author feels bitter but it still feels juvenile to me. Certainly both Jev and Laya are based on the research of countless prior papers and academics. Diogo decided to build a product out of the concept. The author didn't. Publishing research papers and model weights is probably part of the problem--it feels academic. If you look at the author's profile they focus on applying AI to healthcare. Not selling general AI type safety to AI pilled companies and devs. There's a big difference there. Whether that's good or bad you can argue all day. But for the author to expect otherwise is pretty weird. I do applaud them for not stewing too much on it and trying to do something about it, though.

kamranjon about 4 hours ago |

It is really interesting to see this claim, because i thought the current theory was that typesafe actually repackaged the work from GLiNER[1] - which does seem to be a closer match, and their original paper[2] predates yours by several years. Curious if you had heard of it before? It is also open source[3] and I think also has some good usage.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18546

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.08526

[3] https://github.com/fastino-ai/GLiNER2

wren6991 about 3 hours ago |

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.

baobabKoodaa 35 minutes ago |

Jev claims to be frontier intelligence. Laya, while claiming to be "the open source version of Jev", is using a tiny open weight model with a tiny context window. Anyone who has experimented with tiny models knows that they are far from "frontier intelligence". It's not plausible that Laya could be "the open source version of Jev", with "frontier intelligence", when it is using these tiny models.

Also, the paper that OP is referring, is not describing anything that sounds like a generalist classifier (which is what Jev is). Their paper describes a tailored solution to one specific business problem. I'm sure it has some similarities with Jev, but it's still a completely different thing, and I'm confused why OP is claiming it to be the same thing.

If you don't believe me, just open the PDF and read the abstract.

hmokiguess about 4 hours ago |

I think the biggest lesson with Jev was the one of communication and understanding for the broader audience, sometimes a lot about innovating involves repeating yourself and translating your own thoughts to an intended audience.

Classical machine learning has been, for the most part, and just by the nature of science, behind academic terms and difficult to engage with as a product.

Jev did really well with coining up “System One” models and defining a standard application interface plus core primitives that landed in the current paradigm of software development.

I think it’s sort of like how Cursor reinvented autocomplete back then as a different UX and suddenly everyone was just using it because of how easy the bar was to understanding it.

Lastly, timing is everything. Just as Cursor had a first mover advantage, despite ML Ops being a thing for a while, they managed to encapsulate the concept behind a “System One” black box that fits the existing mental model for building software and shipping a data contract in the right point in time where the cost of tokens has been an important metric to watch.

mixedbit about 2 hours ago |

The unfortunate true is that getting even the best work in front of an audience is often much harder than solving the problem. Is uploading a paper to arXiv enough to expect the work to be recognized and cited? Unfortunately, it rather is not. arXiv is an open repository which includes plenty of not reviewed and not officially published papers. In a popular field such as machine learning, the number of arXiv papers is overwhelming. Expecting that some machine learning expert will stumble upon an arXiv paper and recognize its value is wishful thinking.

I'm not a researcher, but long time ago I had an idea of a new, seemingly interesting attack on TCP. Having some free time between jobs, I wrote a paper about this, created a proof of concept and decided to send the paper to USENIX Security. I got back two reviews, both in rather positive tone, but rejecting the paper on the grounds that it shows only individual steps of the attack, but it would be much stronger if it showed also the attack working end-to-end. At that point I just uploaded the paper to arXiv and called it a day. I've put a lot of work into that paper, but not enough, I don't consider it properly published and I don't expect anyone to cite it. The paper failed the peer review process and I didn't put the work to improve it further.

cube2222 about 5 hours 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.

samayashar about 1 hour ago |

Great work by the author. Both Laya and Jev showcase how a different class of models can be efficient on tasks that don't require a 'generated output artifact'. I believe the same is true for VLMs where you're not always generating an image, but rather trying to understand more about the input image.

Token consumptions are flying through the roof and optimisation is the way forward.

dwa3592 about 5 hours 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.

lifty 22 minutes ago |

I was wondering, do you think its possible to use something like SAM 3 (segment anything from FB) + Laya to create a super efficient and fast computer use tool?

scottcodie about 1 hour ago |

They're definitely not the only one. I've been building on relational transformers, which does prediction and classification over relational data (it handles numeric types better). It's validating to see that these small models that do prediction tasks are so useful to the community, but also stings a little that it was so hard for me to communicate how game changing they are.

jahala about 1 hour ago |

Is this at all possible to run locally on a MacBook pro m5 (48gb ram)? What kind of performance could I expect? Or would you run this somewhere in the cloud? What HW / which provider would you choose (single user for exploration only)

sandos about 1 hour ago |

How come its completely unable to understand when it does not understand the script? Why was this no in the training, or was it?

The routing feels like such a hack to me...

nandakishor_ml about 7 hours ago |

This project was built on the exact research on jev architecture research one year ago

jamienk about 1 hour ago |

Why do we ("society") need the "frontier" companies at all? Their business goal has settled on trying to CONFUSE the shit out of us so that we don't understand the big pictures about various aspects of AI.

THANK YOU, Nandakishor Mukkunnoth, for putting in the work to help to clarify this stuff!

You are like a firefighter compared to their fire-insurance racket.

edot about 3 hours ago |

I don’t understand Jev or this. I used this since it’s open source (good job btw!) with the following. State: “a 6 sided die rolled a 3”, question (noul): “Is the number odd?”

Answer: 9% chance, with 91% confidence.

Heh???

Ok, even worse. 75% chance a coin landed heads up?

State: I flipped a coin. Question:

{ "noul_result": { "type": "noul", "instructions": "Did the coin land heads up?" }, "choice_result": { "type": "choice", "instructions": "Determine if the coin landed heads or tails up.", "criteria": { "heads": "the coin landed heads up", "tails": "the coin landed tails up" } } }

Ran on: https://huggingface.co/spaces/convaiinnovations/laya-demo

Result: { "model": "laya", "answers": { "noul_result": { "type": "noul", "noul": 0.6839, "rl_agent": { "act_probability": 1.0 } }, "choice_result": { "type": "choice", "choice": "heads", "probabilities": { "heads": 0.7407, "tails": 0.2593 }, "confidence": 0.1743, "rl_agent": { "act_probability": 1.0 } } }, "usage": { "input_tokens": 76, "output_tokens": 0 }, "latency_ms": 93.8 }

Trying to be even more good-faith:

State: "A fair coin was flipped once. The result was not observed. No other information about the outcome is available."

Questions: { "noul_result": { "type": "noul", "instructions": "Given only the supplied state, what is the probability that the coin landed heads up?" }, "choice_result": { "type": "choice", "instructions": "Given only the supplied state, determine which outcome occurred.", "criteria": { "heads": "the coin landed heads up", "tails": "the coin landed tails up" } } }

Result:

{ "model": "laya", "answers": { "noul_result": { "type": "noul", "noul": 0.1265, "rl_agent": { "act_probability": 1.0 } }, "choice_result": { "type": "choice", "choice": "tails", "probabilities": { "heads": 0.2522, "tails": 0.7478 }, "confidence": 0.1853, "rl_agent": { "act_probability": 1.0 } } }, "usage": { "input_tokens": 123, "output_tokens": 0 }, "latency_ms": 154.5 }

someguy101010 about 2 hours ago |

been loving hacking on this. just created a vision version of it here https://huggingface.co/thaitea/laya-vision-smolvlm-256m

skybrian about 2 hours ago |

This sounds cool but it looks like it requires a GPU that I don't have. Is there an API to try it out?

pknerd about 3 hours ago |

Correct me if I am wrong, can I use Jev and this tool for ticket classification? I mean, for instance, a level 1 ticket contains a screenshot of the login page that displays an error, LLM can do it perfectly, can Jev do it?

beeforpork about 1 hour ago |

Is this as good as Laya 3? Unfortunately, it's production was moved from Bremen, Germany, to China, and it is not good anymore, in my opinion.

kburman about 4 hours 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.

petesergeant about 3 hours ago |

There are many, many, open-source versions of Jev, including three distinct projects sharing the name “openjev”

If you’re interested in the basic trick most are using (which is probably also what Jev does) then it’s here: https://sgnt.ai/p/jev/

throwaway63467 about 3 hours ago |

Landing page full of AI fluff, discussion feels very fake here, I would assume this is some upvote bot, nothing makes sense.

srameshc about 4 hours ago |

from https://huggingface.co/convaiinnovations/laya > The policy reports a distribution; exploration adds zero-mean Gaussian noise to the logits; the reward is a strictly proper scoring rule (log + spherical, plus ranked probability score for ordinal questions). Expected reward is maximised only by reporting honest probabilities.

rasmus1610 about 2 hours ago |

I feel strong Schmidhuber vibes here.

tarruda about 3 hours ago |

At this size (~400 million parameters), does it become viable running directly on CPU?

fwlr about 5 hours 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

jwpapi about 1 hour ago |

Where can I subscribe to a hosted version of this? I don’t want to host my own GPU.

badatnames about 3 hours ago |

This is crying out to become an Excel or LibreOffice Calc add-in

verdverm about 2 hours ago |

paper the reddit OP "published" (their words on reddit) to arxiv (before they put the vouching process in place). It's what you expect if you click through.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23303

Does not appear to be like what Jev is doing, they talk about RAG and embeddings and orchestrators (the stuff that was cool 1 year ago), no talk of system 1 vs 2 (before Jev), whereas Jev is apparently just a model.

There is a vLLM PR introducing Jev like capabilities for diffusion models (and more, have not delved deeply)

https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/57250

yogthos about 2 hours ago |

I just built a server based on Jev API to run Laya here https://github.com/jlt-commons/laya-jolt

avaer about 3 hours ago |

> Seeing the hype online feels both validating and deeply frustrating.

The post is conflating hype and money with technical innovation, they are not really correlated. Kurzweil is known for saying most innovations succeed based not on technology but on timing. Today, who talks about it might matter even more than timing.

Superior research often gets overlooked in favor of someone raising millions, sometimes people who have produced literally nothing manage to sell it. Not saying that's happening here, but I've seen this pattern a lot over my career.

Someone riding (or manufacturing) a hype wave is playing a completely different game from a researcher. If you're a researcher you can't really feel dejected when someone is making a business on the back of what seems like your research; legal protections are decades out of date, even ignoring vibe coding. If you want to make money/hype/whatever off of your work, do that. But realize that it's a path that's often orthogonal to research.

moinism about 2 hours ago |

I'm just glad to see focus being shifted (albeit slowly) to conventional ML. Enough with LLM guys

reso_codes about 2 hours ago |

[flagged]

legions-love about 3 hours ago |

[flagged]

Kuyawa about 4 hours ago |

[dead]

rexthonyy about 2 hours ago |

[dead]

zurfer about 5 hours 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.

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