Jev wasn't first: non-autoregressive decision models built a year earlier

RylanSchaeffer · x · 2026-09-22

As Thinking Machines' Jev classifier goes viral, researcher Rylan Schaeffer points out the core idea already exists — an HN post "I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL" was published a year ago and got no attention until the "Creator of ChatGPT" label appeared.

The HN thread digs into an old ML problem: an idea's fate depends heavily on branding and communication. Commenters note the same idea buried in a jargon-heavy Reddit title versus packaged into an instantly understandable product page yields wildly different outcomes — "Dropbox was just curlftpfs-mounted FTP, but part of a product's definition is communicating it coherently." Others invoke getting "Schmidthuber'd": ML theory is deep while implementations are compact, so for any idea there are likely 20,000 people with the same intuition.

Related event: Jev Classifier Goes Viral, But the Idea Isn't New(2 posts)→

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