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.