Jev is 'just a classifier' with frontier-ish zero-shot intelligence — and that's the whole alpha, says its creator
cephaloform · x · 2026-09-22
Reflecting on the surprising response to Jev, creator willdepue notes it is 'just a classifier'—but a zero-shot classifier with frontier-ish intelligence, which nobody had built before. He wonders what other old ML ideas are worth rescuing.
Borrowing Nat Friedman's line about 'invisible orthodoxy', he argues all of Jev's capabilities were possible with existing models—just slower, more expensive, and more tedious. We've acclimated to AI's limitations and forgotten what products remain possible; there's much alpha in that gap.
Related event: OpenAI Researcher's Jev Goes Viral, Reviving Talk of Rescuing Old ML Ideas(7 posts)→
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