This is just anecdotal and I might be doing it wrong but I made jev and laya versions of a simple semantic grep tool (https://github.com/lgastako/jevplay) and played with them a bit, and at first it seemed like laya was comparable (eg on queries like "this is a mans name" or "this is a womans name" on names.txt) but the more I played with it, eg. "this is a vegetable" on foods.txt the further the gap widened in favor of jev. Then I started trying variations of the query eg simply "mans name" and for the most part laya just fell apart and didn't return anything useful for a lot of stuff. I was hoping to find that laya was competitive because it's much faster to have the model running locally but it's just not, yet.