Tobi Lütke sparks debate: why discriminative models can't be universal classifiers

caglar_ee · x · 2026-09-19

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke quote-posted a former OpenAI employee's remark noting that post-ChatGPT people are baffled that the pre-ChatGPT era failed to build generic universal classifiers.

Engineer caglaree pushed back on the technical merits: he wonders how well Jev actually works and whether any benchmarks exist, arguing that discriminative / decision-boundary models are inherently bad at building generic or universal classifiers — you can't learn a large probabilistic generative model and marginalize out missing parts depending on the task.

The exchange captures the core post-launch debate around Jev: whether the discriminative "decision model" route is even sound in principle.

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