ChatGPT RLHF Co-Author's Startup Jev in Funding Talks at $10B Valuation
aakashgupta · x · 2026-09-26
Diogo Almeida, co-author of the RLHF training paper behind ChatGPT (ex-Google Brain, ex-OpenAI), is in funding talks at a $10 billion valuation for his new startup.
- Co-founders Erik Gafni and Sasha Sheng; raised a $40M seed led by DCVC at a $200M valuation, spent two years in stealth
- Launched first model Jev on September 15: launch video hit 38M+ views on X, and Jev became the fastest-adopted model in Vercel AI Gateway history with 13% of paid teams using it within 24 hours
- Pricing: $0.042 per million input tokens with free output vs Fable's $10/$50 — making browser-use and instant evals nearly free
- Architecture doesn't generate tokens sequentially; it answers in parallel, returns decisions with probabilities in 70–500ms, and only picks from predefined options, so it doesn't hallucinate
- The author's week of testing didn't even exhaust the $5 free credit
Related event: Jev, by ChatGPT Co-author, in Talks at $10B Valuation(2 posts)→
More from Venture
- Indie label built Pitched: AI listens to your track and writes your Spotify pitch in 20 seconds — demian_ai · 2026-11-11
- Similarweb: Claude logs record 1.253 billion website visits in October — gaganghotra_ · 2026-11-11
- a16z Podcast: Mike Volpi on What the 1990s Internet Boom Teaches Us About the AI Buildout — a16z Podcast · 2026-11-11
- Alibaba files to list chip-design unit T-Head in Hong Kong to fund AI push — pstAsiatech · 2026-11-11
- First traffic snapshot of Muse, Instinct, Hark and Fo: 60M visits in October, Muse leads with 45M — agentaya-ltd · 2026-11-11
- AI killed SEO writing moats; first-hand data is the real edge — sven_ai · 2026-11-11