Performs on-par with SemIf which was built in a couple days and apparently uses raw Qwen, with no fine-tuning. SemIf runs in your freaking browser. Oh and Jev is twice as expensive?
Is it surprising that Jev consistently thinks it's Qwen?
I'm almost convinced that Jev is a scam. Take Qwen, fine tune it a little, tell investors it cost $10m, spend $1m on advertising, profit.
Think of it this way: there’s some time needed to optimize / design an architecture, and the world gets that for free when it’s described. As to the rest of the last two years spent, is it more likely a former oAI lead spent them fucking around, or adding as many RL environments as possible to its model that is supposed to be a generalized classifier?
Right now my prior is that jev is probably better than these rando weekend models, whether or not we know how to test and demonstrate that in a benchmark. It’s also super cheap, so I don’t think there’s a strong reason not to try out building with it first, then walk down the ladder to an open model if you need to for some reason.
Funny enough, when I tell people that Jev cannot play tic-tac-toe I hear a similar argument - it's not what Jev was built for. Jev has this elusive use case that noone can describe, so when Jev fails, it's just because it wasn't built for it. Convenient.
Don't you find it suspicious that Jev cannot play tic-tac-toe or checkers, but can play Doom? Don't you find it suspicious that nothing of the Doom demo was shared: no harness, no control loop, no state encoding, no prompts - nothing.
And the explanation is obvious - Jev isn't playing doom. The harness is. They essentially built a Doom bot, dumbed down it's control loop for Jev, and gave reins to Jev. Look mom, Jev is playing Doom!
The state says "you're pointing at the cacodemon" or "you're not pointing at the cacodemon" and Jev has to decide whether to press fire. Frontier intelligence!
You can build a harness where a coin flip is playing Doom.
I just went ahead and built some stuff with Jev to get a feel for it, including a small chat harness — in this case the harness sends out like 40 parallel API calls to get a probability distribution against the 800 or so tokens in that call, and then combines up the likely ones and runs it through another narrowing process. With that in place, Jev can talk. Although it’s not very talkative, but it definitely can respond to queries.
I tried it out for some computer use usecases, and it has potential to be very fast there — it had enough comprehension to do the selecting and tool calling and pass back control to the harness at the right times.
So, upshot - useful and interesting tool. I didn’t benchmark it against any of the open jev clones because a) it’s cheap, b) I’m not using it for anything major right now and c) like I said above, I’d be surprised if that team just spent two years wasting time on a weekend project.
I’ll double down and say that if this arch turns out to be genuinely useful, (and I think it could be), then when we get good broad benchmarks, this release of Jev will benchmark higher against the weekend clones than it does now.