I believe his qualms were with the "hype" in Jev's announcement: specifically calling this kind of model a breakthrough, without crediting previous art, and keeping everything closed source.
First, I think comprehensibility is a major part of why certain products grab the interest of the mainstream portions of the market. The 75% of posts in your feed are not from people who evaluate products based on underlying technology. They typically value signal from social reinforcement higher than anything else. This is the same reason why we see people mentioning products instead of technologies, i.e. PlanetScale versus Postgres & Tailscale versus WireGuard. The consumers understand the value proposition, but would have never discovered it without relatable messaging. This isn't a new phenomenon in computer software either; jQuery is probably one of the first examples that I can remember with this sort of texture.
The other side is a perception of expertise in a specialty. Software development, especially in AI, has become an incredibly desirable profession, and there are more people than ever racing to be included in it. In my own professional experience I find an excessive amount of entry level talent leveraging the same comprehension of product, but not comprehension of technology to get their foot in the door. A vast majority of the "thought leaders" occupying our feeds are not as well practiced as they claim to be, they're just trying to get a job or raise funding.
And finally, AI has brought out a certain amount of desperation in practitioners, for lack of a better term, materializing as an anecdotal, but certainly observable need to remain on the very tip of the news cycle in order to feel well informed. And so, using the dynamics above and many other human social dynamics, we find certain concepts spreading across cohorts that would not normally have a need or a want for these particular techniques, or products, or solutions, but because they feel pressured to remain relevant.
Occam's razor is that it's probably not all that different unless there is some specific reason to believe otherwise.
I evaluated this project yesterday and found its claims un-credible. It's literally nothing like jev. That's some context behind why, a day later, I find it annoying that this is somehow the top story on HN.
Good models take time and effort. There wasn't a good option for satisficers until a few days ago.
When you market a product you make exciting claims relative to the audience you’re engaging with. When was the last time you saw a product marketing page reverently lost all the academic research and prior art that came together to make a product possible?
If Layla’s functionality was available in a SaaS form in a way that could be used by all the people who are excited about and using Jev, wouldn’t this research have won hearts and minds last year when it landed? I would have a lot more empathy for the author if they’d taken a product to market and nobody cared. But even then maybe the market wasn’t ready. There are still reasonable explanations why sometimes ideas take off. We’re on a venture capital forum this shouldn’t need an explanation.
The work is very amateurish, the "paper" would be a strong reject if I were still peer reviewing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1wijo3e/i_liter...