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)→
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