> what software was doing this prior to Jev

BeRT, BART and FLAN-T5, for text classification. All of those models are ~half a decade old now, are based on the transformer model, and small enough to run locally. They're not perfectly SOTA, but perform quite well in embedded applications. Fine for low-stakes stuff, I think.

Image classifiers are a hugely competitive space. You've got BeiT, DeiT, MobileOne, ConvNext, FastViT and several more models that all support image classification pipelines.