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> but at least it sounds theoretically doable today

why

We have a bad universal classifier now (via Jev). 0->1, one might say.

A bad universal classifier does suggest a good one later. And that is exactly what I would call "theoretically doable"

That said, I don't think that Jev is a magic breakthrough or anything. I think it is just a particularly good narrative with an easy way to try it out.

Jev is interesting in that it's much cheaper and faster than a frontier LLM.

But I've seen nothing to indicate that the upper bound on classification tasks of a Jev-like model can exceed a frontier LLM with reasoning tokens. That seems nearly impossible even in principle (since Jev-style models are still based on LLM pretraining).

So while they're definitely on the Pareto frontier, which is valuable, they're at the "cheap" end of the spectrum more than the "good" end and I don't expect that to change.

LLMs are like lossy compression of ~all of written text ever produced, with useful recall. To the extent that the corpus contains labelled examples of the given classification task, it's not unreasonable to think that we'll be able to build a decoder for that, just like we already have a useful decoder for next-token prediction. Extend to image classification the same way we already have multimodal LLMs.

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