alex7o 53 minutes ago

Guys I have a real q, what is the difference between an instruct based re-ranker and laya/jev I just don't see it.

Edit: One is that jev/laya are tuned to have better probabilities, but a reranker can be fine tuned to do that as well. And jev/laya use RLCD?

  • avereveard 34 minutes ago

    Calibrated probability across multi task with zero shot I guess. A reranker is single task and tuning it make it even more narrow. And I guess some piping to make multiclass efficient since you cannot mask logprob for independent questions in the same output space without throwing calibration away.

  • Swizec 29 minutes ago

    > difference between an instruct based re-ranker and laya/jev I just don't see it

    Main difference is that laya/jev/et-al give you a zero-shot classifier that requires no training. You can prompt engineer your way to a quick fairly reliable cheap enough decision engine that you can use to iterate quickly (by prompt engineering).

    Right now a lot of people are doing this with LLMs and it's too slow and expensive.

    Imo the right iterative approach to productionizing these systems is something like:

        1. Build it with an LLM. Iterate on the prompt
        2. Start building a real-world dataset
        3. When the prompt works, turn it into a clear rubric for Jev or similar
        4. Keep iterating until desired accuracy achieved
        5. Use the real-world evals you've built to train a custom classifier fine-tuned to your needs
    

    You now have a system that has produced useful results in production from the very beginning and by the end it's a reliable super cheap classifier that can make thousands of decisions per second.

george_max 2 hours ago

Has anyone actually seen better or the same results with Laya compared to Jev? From my experience, Laya performs significantly worse. It's less confident and often makes wrong decisions with more complex queries.

  • cobanov 2 hours ago

    Developer here. You're right, Laya is a lot weaker than Jev, especially on harder queries. It's a small model, so it's fast, but that's the trade-off. The open models that get close to Jev are much bigger, and running those is what I'm working on next.

    • mikodin 1 hour ago

      What are the models? I am super curious in these as well

      • simcop2387 20 minutes ago

        Probably Kev and/or the decider models. Kev is trained on one of the 4B qwen models, similar for decider but it ranges from 0.8B through to the 35B-A3B model so far I believe.

  • scronkfinkle 2 hours ago

    Yes. JEV generalizes better because they probably have an enormous corpus and trained on it for a long time. Laya's out of the box model is much weaker. However, in the age of LLM's it's incredibly easy and cheap to generate large datasets to fine tune laya for your task, and the training loop is pretty quick and cheap too.

    It's so easy that I question why I would ever pay for JEV when eventually I'll have done enough random things that I will also have a large corpus and likely a general model as well.

    • mtkd 1 hour ago

      Isn't the point of Jev that it generalises better?

      It's a fast classifier you can use out-the-box, ~1.5bn tokens is about $40 (I've been hammering it)

      It just works ... a whole bunch of low-level/low-importance workflow stuff that was getting farmed out to small/fast LLM models now has a competitive alternative ... and bits that hadn't even been considered to go into some external descision/classifier service can be tested/deployed at ~$0.00003/req

      I don't get this wall of negativity on it, it's genuinely innovative/useful tech ... would expect HN to be more positive, regardless of whether it's the absolute best execution

      • shepardrtc 1 hour ago

        It really does just work. And it works so well I already integrated it into my product. Saves me about 75% of costs for the section its working in, which isn't a small amount. I see a lot of negativity and I don't really get it either. Its so cheap and so fast, why not give it a try?

        • DenisM 48 minutes ago

          I think it’s the infamous Dropbox reaction - anyone can wrap an FTP server, where the innovation?

          Starting from a business POV one should inflate terminology, hack together an MVP, and see if the market demands it before doing hardcore R&D.

          But starting from technical/craftsman POV all you see is a hack and a lot of big words, so it’s easy to become jaded.

      • not_a_bot_4sho 1 hour ago

        I didn't see any negativity in the post you replied to.

        I think the point being made is that Jev is great but it has no competitive moat, and open source versions will very soon catch up if their secret sauce is just synthetic data.

        (Whether or not that is true, I don't know.)

      • digitaltrees 1 hour ago

        I think your point is valid but many are annoyed that it is presented as groundbreaking, revolutionary, novel frontier tech when it is a known classification system. It’s the hype that feels undeserved. Honestly it was one of the best marketing campaigns I’ve seen.

  • iamflimflam1 1 hour ago

    Nothing yet. Unfortunately it sometimes feels like our industry has been overrun by grifters and chancers.

    I’m sure this has been a gradual and long decline. Maybe it even started with the dot com boom and accelerated with crypto. With AI it seems to have got worse.

  • jonmagic 1 hour ago

    I've been following jevbench twice a day for the past week and that's been a lot of fun. Latest update:

    Rank System Score Public / sealed accuracy Evidence

    1 decider-4b v2 64.13 83.5% / 34.7% Evaluator-run, offline

    2 Jev 1.13 63.29 86.6% / 36.7% Evaluator-run API

    3 JevK5 v0.2 62.04 85.3% / 33.1% Evaluator-run

    4 Cygnet 12B 61.76 87.9% / 33.8% Evaluator-run, offline

    5 Hopper 59.43 82.3% / 34.1% Evaluator-run

    28 Kev 4B 36.14 66.2% / 22.4% Evaluator-run

    41 Laya 421M 30.25 58.4% / 30.8% Evaluator-run

    https://benchmarkheaven.com/jev-models

    • philipodonnell 47 minutes ago

      What the best way to see how a homegrown version compares?

  • verdverm 59 minutes ago

    one day, perhaps people will click through to the laya author's arxiv paper content and the why may become clearer, you won't have to read it, a skim will suffice

ranyume 2 hours ago

>Run decision models locally.

>example is a text classification task instead of a decision

  • cobanov 2 hours ago

    Fair point, that example is basically classification. I'll change it to something that looks more like a real decision.

  • OgAstorga 1 hour ago

    text classification is equivalente to decision. This is exactly the same thing Jev does.

    • abirch 1 hour ago

      Jev does it more efficiently because it doesn't use an LLM https://typesafe.ai/blog/introducing-system-one-models-and-j...

      • rockinghigh 53 minutes ago

        Their marketing language is misleading. They must still use some transformer language model backbone to encode the text input (BERT or decoder-only LLM). The biggest difference is the output, instead of auto-regressively generating tokens, they produce probabilities over a bounded set of decisions (more flexible classification).

    • ricardobeat 1 hour ago

      It is not. In a benchmark with actual decisions - navigation, traffic, waypoints - laya does only slightly better than a small classifier.

    • ranyume 1 hour ago

      If it has four legs, a tail and barks why not call it a dog?

      • gchamonlive 1 hour ago

        Because this specific dog only barks in structured text

      • seemaze 45 minutes ago

        This dog only barks when given biscuits

  • hbrn 1 hour ago

    "Decision model" is just marketing jargon.

    decision model = classifier

    system one model = small non-reasoning LLM

    noul = boolean

    confidence = f(probabilities)

    It's sad to see how gullible engineers are today.

    • verdverm 22 minutes ago

      > how gullible ... today

      that laya is even a thing is further evidence, people took that author at face value, the paper contents are incomplete and describe something that does not sound like Jev at all

      this was the period of arxiv history that led to the new vouching system, laya author contributed to that imo

handfuloflight 2 hours ago

Sounds good on latency but how is its actual decision quality vs. Jev?

  • cobanov 1 hour ago

    Depends on the model. The small ones I support today are well below Jev on harder queries, but fine for simple, well-defined questions. The open models that get close to Jev are bigger, and I'm adding support for those next.

mococa 1 hour ago

It would be really cool to have LLMs and System One in a single tool - in this case, if Ollama implemented it.

vorticalbox 52 minutes ago

Does anyone know what laya multi lang is faster than laya en? I would have thought focusing on a single language would be faster.

datadrivenangel 2 hours ago

Are there many models that are comparable to Jev for generic decision making?

Smarter move if you have an eval set is to just train a classifier and call it a day.

  • rgbrgb 2 hours ago

    there's this thing with a bunch of similar models https://huggingface.co/spaces/multimodalart/jev-decision-ind...

    top open one is trained by perplexity cto for $3k, kinda cool https://x.com/denisyarats/status/2102252088067850507

    • physicallyIllfr 1 hour ago

      <<<"i was curious to see if i could train a competitive Jev-like model completely autonomously with a swarm of agents using our internal system."

      Bro is writing off the H200 lol

      On a sidenote I really can't stand the term "swarm" and definately plays into AI doomerism.

  • cobanov 1 hour ago

    The link rgbrgb posted is a good overview. The best open ones are close to Jev now, but they're big models. And I agree, if you have an eval set for a fixed task, a trained classifier is the better choice.

emmettbt 2 hours ago

Cool... but this does seem undermined by the fact that Ollama can add support for decision models at any time.

  • cobanov 1 hour ago

    Fair, and I'd be happy if they did. Ollaya uses the same API as Jev, so your code isn't tied to it either way

  • accountrequired 1 hour ago

    and that ollama is go-llama and not rust, so it's not really the ollama of anything

george_max 2 hours ago

I am fairly confident if Jev-style decision models are seen as prominent (which, they seem to be), Ollama will support them. Surprised the team hasn't implemented this already.

eserozvataf 2 hours ago

great project for empowering open-source alternatives.

  • rkovashikawa 1 hour ago

    open-source is the only way for safe AI development. whoever doesn’t share the weights/code will lag behind.