I think the answers are "a lot" and "a lot more"? But what I'm saying is that Jev's virality isn't because people didn't have access to classifiers before it. Jev's general claims about capability and performance vs. cost would have been a very big deal 5 years ago too. In a vacuum, the idea that you can get a general classifier that is very accurate across any domain and on any modality with minimal latency and a very low price point is wild.

In early 2016, Clarifai's core product was basically just an image classifer exposed via an API. And at that point, they'd raised $40 million--the same amount as TypeSafe.ai/Jev--and they were experiencing viral growth among developers + signing contracts with a bunch of flashy logos. The demand was so high that Amazon launched Rekognition and Google launched their similar APIs to compete.

The AI hype cycle and the number of people thinking about using AI certainly puts more wind at Jev's back, but even in an alternative universe where we don't have contemporary LLMs, Jev's core claims would be remarkable and there would be a big market for it.