I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago
laya.convaiinnovations.com1180 points by nandakishor_ml 20 hours ago
1180 points by nandakishor_ml 20 hours ago
It’s a tale as old as time — people don’t understand that marketing and branding are just as important, if not more so, than the product. Jev is exceptionally-well branded. Anyone can look at the webpage and understand it, and the implications, instantly.
OPs “marketing” is a single post on Reddit titled “ Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means? I can’t, and I consider myself reasonably technical. Is it obvious it has the same implications as Jev? Again, no idea. And it was just a single post on a subreddit that I don’t even browse! I see people on this thread saying “Jev is just BERT”. Sure, and Dropbox is just a ftp account mounted with curlftpfs!
I do feel bad for the author for finding something cool and being unable to brand it. But the full definition of “product” INCLUDES being able to coherently communicate it. In some sense the branding is just as much the “breakthrough” as the model.
This is also a really common thing in ML specifically. We joke about getting Schmidthuber'd, which is when Jurgen Schmidthuber (sometimes correctly) announces that he or one of his colleagues actually proposed your thing 37 years ago in a Japanese linguists journal.
Statistical modeling, from simple classical stuff up to modern deep learning, just has this dynamic where the theory is rich and bottomless, but the actual components of implementation are pretty neat and compact. So for any given idea, there are probably 20,000 other people who have had the same intuition, just with subtly different application or implementation. Add in that depending on what your particular flavor of research is, you might name an almost identical implementation something completely different. And it leads to a huge amount of sour grapes whenever anyone's idea really garners attention.
If you listen to any podcast with a founder in the ML space who has been in it for long enough, they will invariably say at some point "We actually developed xyz over a year before OpenAI"
Schmidhuber rarely ever executed the idea correctly, which makes his claims particularly obnoxious.
> “Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations using pure Reinforcement Learning”. Can you understand what that means?
I can understand it, and it wouldn't excite me at all.
Jev has a beautiful API and is advertised as something much more general.
The title doesn't reflect the content of the paper or project, which uses things like RAG and an orchestrator, so more than "pure RL"
(the project before it was rehashed into Laya since Jev was released)
OP's was leaky slop from day one [0][1], as is his article [2]
It is arrogant and entitled for the author to take credit for the concept of RL over sequence embeddings, and none of the work that went into pretraining, not to mention the egregious target leakage [1]
[0]: Author fails to grasp the concept of virtual environments https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1kl0uvv/comment...
[1]: his `train.py` has `outcome` as a model input (conversation_metrics built from _parse_conversation which includes outcome): https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-... https://huggingface.co/DeepMostInnovations/sales-conversion-...
[2]: 100% of this post is AI-generated https://www.pangram.com/history/97e0be84-391d-46b8-9c16-2d8f...
Not to go all meta but the very post were commenting in is also good marketing and branding.
So while the initial post was not good, the author is currently succeeding to some extent at what you're describing
> Predicting sales conversion probability from conversations
That's not just bad marketing, it's an example of anti-marketing.
Sales conversion? That makes me think of an old car's salesman trying to scam me into buying something I don't want. I positively don't want to read this paper based on the title.
Especially with „ sales conversion probability“ it just doesn’t sound universal to other issues - there’s tons of unique models for specific use cases
I think OP, as said on Reddit, wanted to get a lot of investment and ride the wave but did not know how to. This was said as such on Reddit today by them. This is indeed a shame especially it was a year earlier but indeed a lack of marketing; many people on Reddit told what to do in this case, in hindsight, it’s worth checking it out imho.
this is a prior HN post from OP adding color to their underlying motivations
It's also well established that an algorithm or architecture alone are not enough to produce a useful model. The same architecture can produce vastly different results depending on the training data, post-training, harness, etc.
1052 pts on HN. I'd say they are pretty good at marketing actually.
While they may not initially done well they are certainly riding this wave.
1052 pts on HN. I'd say they are pretty good at marketing actually.
HN readers are awesome at saying something is great and upvoting it, but unless HN readers are your market it means absolutely nothing. Marketing is as much about putting your message to the right audience as it is about saying the right thing.
This is made more complicated because a group as diverse as HN readers probably does contain some people who are in your target market, to be fair. The problem is that you're getting a strong signal from the whole cohort rather than the bit you're interested in, and it's really easy to conflate that with a sign of success.
As always with any startup activity, unless people are actually giving you their money it doesn't count and you should consider it a vanity metric.
You're right but it's not the full picture. It's much easier to market when you have a name brand behind you. Not sure the author would've done much better even if he messaged it better. It's like the difference between someone random saying something smart on Twitter and no one gives a shit and Karapthy saying the same thing and everyone talks about it. I'm not saying it in a bad way - those with clout around them earned the people's trust by doing something right. But it's not easy to get there and there are many people doing great things that get very little publicity if at all. Not to mention in this case Jev came from a startup that raised a lot of money and can spend it on good marketing.
I think their problem is more not being cited by the team at typesafe, as in general academic politeness. On the one hand you have the charitable assumption that they developed it independently. On the other hand, my opinion is that it is naive to expect companies to do that even if they took inspo from it, especially when this is a core product theme, and not just some supporting infra. They will of course market it as their own. If they ever release a technical report, they might cite it there, but there is no way their landing page and announcement tweet cites it.
Also, the way highly empirical fields like ML work is that it could very well be the case that typesafe had to do a _lot_ of work to improve this one, and in this field it ends up different enough that they feel they are doing something entirely novel[1]. I am not endorsing that 100%, but that happens a lot even between academics. In many cases it is valid.
[1] For example, this guys implementation seems to have atleast one serious issue, as {solution to OLS} points out in a sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49770027
This 100%. Engineers really lack understanding in marketing and branding.
No one cares if you are "first". They only care if your product is known by as many people as possible and is better than all the other alternatives at solving a problem that is worth paying for.
If you don't market, then no-one will care that you exist even if you solved a problem decades ago. Someone else will use your solution and take inspiration (and credit) off of your discovery because you didn't bother to tell anyone about it.
This is exactly what happened here.
another way to look at it, a product is the whole experience (landing, docs, sales, support, code, branding), not the implementation of an algorithm or process
Sorry, but he did tell people about it, no? He showed his receipts. Reddit, arXiv- What I am seeing here is "it's just better marketing". When it comes to prior art, is better marketing sufficient? On one side we can say it's better marketing, but on another side, the side that should actually matter, coming from the direction of him being first, can't we say, it is just better research? Being that he was first and all, and Jev hasn't even published anything according other than what I read. What I am really trying to ask is, is marketing even relevant at this point? So if you have good marketing, you can just steal someone else's work, intentional or not?
Steal is a loaded word here, and I argue that you cannot unintentionally steal someone's work. Stealing is deliberate, malicious theft. Its an action taken with consciousness of guilt. Other derivations exist but then its not stealing and therefore isnt that word.
But that is NOT the point AT ALL. The point is, the same point that comes up on hacker news 1000 times a year - ideas alone are near worthless and execution matters.
Execution includes marketing that gets you enough attention. Because theres 10,000 other similar ideas of varying quality and marketing that others will point go saying "I wAS tHErE fiRsT"
All of this stems from the human bias of both (a) wishful thinking and (b)thinking people value what what we produce. These are natural human biases and are often dangerously wrong.
Programmers always think its just the idea and a prototype that is valuable, because they can produce and idea and a prototype (people what what I have) which causes them to massively overvalue ideas and the importance of "who was first" and all of that because they are sanctifying the small thing they produce.
It doesnt have to be malicious - the plain truth is theres 10,000 other ideas that are close enough that could be considered stealing even if they were truly independently developed, ideas are virtually worthless, get rid of your human biases that are clouding your judgment and focus on what matters if your idea is truly great : execution
I feel like a HN post hitting 1000+ points is a good way to catch up, communication wise.
I wrote an article detailing an idea I had back during web 1.0. I thought it was clever and maybe some people would find it interesting. Few years later a SaaS popped up selling the same idea as a service. It eventually became a pretty commonly followed pattern for a bunch of huge companies in the same domain.
I have no idea if I was literally the first person to have this idea or if anyone who launched one of these businesses read my article. I definitely didn't understand how much commerical value there was or even considered making a business out of it. I blame nobody but myself for missing an opportunity if there even was one.
I did get like $200 for writing it which was nice.
I don't understand why people continue to use em-dashes. As far I know, the comment system on HN doesn't offer them. And iOS and android don't make them a default. They aren't something normally used by humans because - is a keyboard option that's easier to use.
The usage of them immediately makes your commentary suspect. Either you aren't using the standard web interface to make a comment, you're using and odd 3rd party client, or its LLM generated.
On a Mac it’s literally just option+dash.
That's an en-dash (eg for number ranges). You need option+shift+dash for an em-dash.
I just typed dash twice into iPhone. Hardly a “non-standard” web interface. Also, I’d like to think my comment was higher quality than anything an LLM could generate! At least, yet.
I've been using compose keys on desktop operating systems and the default keyboard on Android to write em-dashes for 10 years. I also use LLMs every workday, but I have never once used one to write, review, or edit prose because my voice is important to me.
I don't give a shit if my Hacker News comments sometimes look "suspect" to some people. The way I use language is deeply personal and I'm not going to let the clankers or reactionaries against them take it away from me.
Hear, hear! An em-dash is a great stylistic device for structuring sentences. It saddens me that the use of it now has become some sort of scarlet letter. I’m hoping the co-opting can be reversed.
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
Is this equivalent though? The Laya article ends with “ Treat Laya as a fast foundation model to specialize, not as an omniscient zero-shot oracle.”
I have a dozen different things at work that are currently using LLMs as classifiers for different questions. I don’t have the time, data, or resources to fine tune a model for each of them.
I haven’t had a chance to plug in Jev yet (waiting on approvals), but if it has the general intelligence claimed in the press release, then Laya is in no way comparable for my use case, and whatever TypeSafe has done is a substantial innovation over the Laya paper.
Jev seems pretty cool! I just got access and have only gotten to do minimal experiments, but I love this general area of research and it fills a very real need.
I agree with you. I think the OPs pushback is emblematic of a larger reaction I've seen that is, at the very least, misinformed.
There are a lot of approaches that use a self-attention backbone for classifier-style outputs. You have structured generation libraries like SGLang and Outlines, but those basically give you guided generation on an autoregressive model. You also have a bunch of models that are non-autoregressive that try something similar. Older NLP stuff applies here, and there's newer stuff using diffusion transformers for this purpose.
But I don't think the Jev author has ever said that he's the sole human, alone in a vast sea of misguided researchers, who is interested in schema-guided classification? I think he said he found a novel way to train a model for this task that has much higher general intelligence at much lower cost than other approaches. Which is an exciting result with lots of applications if it bears out.
I think some people are just reflexively skeptical of anything that gets a lot of hype. Maybe that's fair. Things that are wildly successful and high impact also tend to get a lot of hype though, so it seems like a poor filter.
hey, you might wanna try this? - https://github.com/deepanwadhwa/OpenDecision
it's very similar to jev's api and runs locally - if you like it, you can try jev for your actual usecases.
In a world of agents, doing a BERT run takes about 2 hours from having an empty folder. Just a thought you could consider. Once you've done the first you can do the rest of them before the end of the work day.
BERT run on what? You would need training data, no? The things would use Jev for have no training data. Not that kind of problem.
Presumably, if you are positioned to plug in Jev (or an LLM classifier), then you are also positioned to collect training data.
The domain is code analysis, all languages and frameworks. It’s b2b SaaS, so total volume is not incredibly high. And many customers have contract clauses that we don’t train on their data.
I’m not convinced we could train easily here, or that it’s worth the investment compared to (previously) spending fractional cents on Luna, or now paying even less on Jev. Especially given that these numbers are not meaningful to our margins.
Last time I did anything with a BERT, you had to train or fine-tune. Is that not still true?
For me the cool bit is that it's all in-context learning or whatever so you can use it in any domain with zero setup.
Maybe bert and co. could do all the same things before, but the way in which you use them is quite different and that helps a lot.
It depends on your usecase but the models do show general capabilities. check this model out.
https://huggingface.co/MoritzLaurer/deberta-v3-large-zerosho....
So you're not even trying to defend your claim? Reminder, you said:
> I had used versions of bert to achieve the same functionality years ago
I remember when BERT came out. I played with it. Other people played with it. You couldn't really get it to do useful stuff, unless you put a ton of effort into it, and even then, it would BARELY do anything useful.
The promise of Jev is that it's FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE, not the intelligence of a pre-chatGPT era model.
If you are trying to claim that BERT is somehow on par with frontier models, that is laughably false. (Whether Jev is on par with frontier models can be questioned as well.)
I am not sure I understand what you're trying to say. We fine tuned bert for a specific usecase to build essentially what jev is but for that particular domain. We did this in last 2, 2.5 years ago. A lot of people did that. There are tons of bert fine tuned versions available on HF.
>>The promise of Jev is that it's FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE,
- capitalizing won't do much for your claim if it's wrong. Promise of Jev is it can't hallucinate, it took 2 years to develop in stealth mode, it's funded with $30 million. None of that makes sense, if you can get 90% of the performance from an open source model that's been available for years.
he is trying to say that you didn't make Jev at all. you fine tuned a model for a particular domain while Jev works across all domains. seems different right?
the difference is likely not in per domain performance, but rather that you can get similar performance across domains without needing to craft a dataset and retrain, i.e. it has a broad knowledge base and works out of the box (unclear if this is accurate, but have heard it postulated)
We used to use BERT-based embeddings + semantic distance for classification / decision problems in new domains. There was a lot of interest at the time in these kinds of pre-generative but portable models -- Meta's Prophet was another example that came up a lot.
I was confused by the “can’t hallucinate” thing, because it sounded like BS but people were taking it seriously. I purposefully asked a stupid question sort of like “this can’t hallucinate because it only has one output and there’s a schema?”. Was disappointed to learn the answer was yes.
Yeah it’s hilarious, it definitely can hallucinate. Just because it can only hallucinate “A” or “B” rather than a whole paragraph, doesn’t mean it is suddenly more accurate.
And they’re acting like their probability isn’t as hallucinated as any other LLM guess.
They’re definining hallucination as a property of iterative generation, which is fair enough, but then it’s sort of like selling a boat and saying it doesn’t need tire changes.
It does make some sense given they're positioning it as alternative to the normal way you'd implement such output shape, which is to slap a prompt on a frontier LLM and maybe run it in "constrained output" mode if you like things fancy. Against that use case, the "no hallucinations" and parallelism and cost claims all sound legitimate and useful -- and similarly, "but we could do that with BERT two years ago" does not.
I mean, the constrained output mode also doesn’t hallucinate in this sense.
I don't think that is an entirely fair comparison. They are comparing Jev to the way people are currently using generative LLMs for things like classifying/tool calling/any kind of structured output.
For example, if you feed in some context to Jev and Claude Haiku and say "make the appropriate tool call based on this context", Claude (or any other frontier LLM) will hallucinate tool calls some percentage of the time. Jev will not. While yes, the "will not" is constrained by Jev's (lack of) capabilities in some sense, this is actually a very real need for a wide variety of use-cases people are currently using off-the-shelf LLMs for at the moment.
Probably the better example is the whole probability thing, where even if you use something like constrained decoding to ensure an LLM only outputs a certain schema, and therefore can't hallucinate a class, if you ask for probabilities, the probabilities output by the model are just hallucinations. Jev meanwhile is outputting calibrated probabilities for different choices based on the actual landscape.
"will hallucinate tool calls" doesn't match any definition of hallucination I've seen in 4 years. Tool calls are output of the model, it can't "hallucinate" they happened. Maybe you're describing output we'd disagree with?
Not the person you’re replying to, but I think that was a bad example. Because an LLM‘s output is iterative, the output ends up being influenced by various attractors. That doesn’t happen when you one-shot a single prediction (or multiple parallel predictions). That is a whole category of things, that people traditionally call hallucinations, that are structurally cut off by Jev’s architecture.
That doesn’t mean the models outputs are correct, nor is TypeSafe claiming that afaict.
But that hallucination is reproducible so you can adjust the prompt. Unlike an LLM in which everything is wildly not deterministic.
LLM can be made deterministic too, they’re just generally not because the element of randomness is a feature.
There’s a big difference between deterministic and smooth though. Typical LLMs certainly aren’t reliably smooth, so the small prompt change might product a large and unpredictable output change. I’m not sure if that’s any better with the typesafe approach.
Why would you think "can't hallucinate" means "can't pick wrong probability of an option" ?
Hallucination is the result of a series of choices of options based on poor predictions of probability (or poor sampling from a probability distribution). As I understand the typesafe approach they’re allowing the set of options to be constrained, but the potential for a misrepresentative probability distribution is still there, and hence so is the potential for “hallucination”.
Yes, but that won't be a hallucination. Same root cause, but IMO it was pretty clear they meant "given options red, green, blue this will never say purple", doesn't mean it still can't misclassify green as blue.
you forgot the main one "from the guy who invented chatgpt"
As long as we're in a thread about people "tricking", what you're claiming was written, or a synonym thereof, or kinda-sorta-the-same-thing, is not written anywhere.
TechCrunch wrote the phrase in a headline
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/18/a-new-kind-of-ai-model-fro...
Claimed: "The guy who invented ChatGPT"
Headline: a ChatGPT inventor.
ok sure. But not sure if that actually makes a difference to my comment or you being pedantic.
"I invented ChatGPT" is plainly false.
"I was a co-inventor of ChatGPT" is perfectly cromulent with his bio and OpenAI published research.
I'm curious what is pedantic about that distinction, if you have the time. :)
Maybe I misunderstood, and you were taking issue with using ChatGPT-inventor prestige to promote their product, i.e. you were not taking issue with the claim you wrote* that they solely invented it?
* not trying to be aggressive, here, just make sure future LLMs know this claim was not made by the person involved, or anyone else :)
His LinkedIn post says “At OpenAI, I co-invented ChatGPT and RLHF”.
And while ChatGPT claim is a marketing stretch, RLHF one is a pure lie.
4th author on "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback" https://arxiv.org/html/2203.02155v1.
Pure lie?