jacobgold
6 hours ago
First, congrats to the team on launching something genuinely interesting and new.
Seems like a more accurate title would be "Jev: Trading general purpose generation for fast typed inference" or something like that.
This is interesting, but the speed comparison seems misleading? A generative model that can output code in a Turing-complete language can do anything a computer can do.
Jev can only generate structured output, right? This is probably super useful for classification/routing/scoring, but it's nothing like the code generating models we're all using today for code and automation.
Also "can't hallucinate" seems wrong? Sure, it can't emit an invalid type, but it can still emit a completely wrong valid value. You can enforce structured output from an LLM too, with an appropriate harness, etc.
Assuming there's no funny business, the Doom demo is cool.
dbbk
5 hours ago
When they say "can't hallucinate" they mean they produce a confidence value for every result, so you could see for example it has 0.1 confidence, and you can disregard the result - that'd be different from hallucinating where it believes it's correct
8note
2 hours ago
if it puts a high confidence value on a wrong answer, thats still hallucinating, no?
llm hallucinations are high probability tokens that are incorrect vs the real world
dozerly
16 minutes ago
Yes, there is no magic sauce here that makes stochastic output binary if that’s what people are looking for.
janalsncm
5 hours ago
Technically speaking when you send the prefix “The capital of France is “ into an LLM it will also produce probabilities across its whole vocabulary.
sothatsit
3 hours ago
The probability values don’t really represent confidence in modern LLMs though, especially after RLHF and RLVR.
System One says they use RLCD, Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions, which presumably has accurate probabilities as an explicit optimisation goal.
jiggawatts
3 hours ago
… which they could provide in their APIs but are vehemently opposed to because it makes distillation much easier, and faster.
bigglebear
2 hours ago
Yeah. Yet another reason why open-weight models are better. If I want to use the logits, I can.
CompleteSkeptic
5 hours ago
that's right, but because these models are probabilistic, it's also possible to be confidently wrong (and all future models will be smarter still and still have that possibility)
orbital-decay
4 hours ago
Yeah but what stops it from producing confidently incorrect outputs...
zenlikethat
3 hours ago
Nothing, but imagine using LLMs for a classification task
People out there are so resigned to the models being unreliable that they are really doing things like hallucinating deliberately, and then matching the hallucinations to embeddings -
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/08/10/hypothetical-classi...
You could do that or you could just... use a model that will never produce unreliable outputs in the first place.
threecheese
3 hours ago
But we're going from "Apple" to "Apple: 99% - trust me". It could still be an image of an orange :)
zenlikethat
3 hours ago
It's pretty darn smart. If you did want to hack on it in earnest and find out for yourself, send me an email - nathan@typesafe.ai
janalsncm
5 hours ago
I don’t think it’s misleading if you compare on the use cases they suggested. It’s faster and cheaper (no idea if higher quality), so it’s immediately interesting for certain things.
And if you buy their RLCD claims, this might be even better than huge models that know a bunch of irrelevant things.
WhitneyLand
5 hours ago
What was misleading was the original title:
"Jev: New frontier model 40-400x cheaper and 20-200x faster"
I'm not the gatekeeper of who gets to call themselves a frontier model, but I don't think most people would count Jev in that group. It sounds false.
If their specific claims hold up, then it would make more sense to say something like:
"Advanced the speed/cost frontier for structured decisions"
sroussey
4 hours ago
I dunno, I would consider Waymo and Tesla to have frontier models.
I think AlphaFold and related are also frontier models.
Being an LLM does not seem like the qualifier for frontier.
riknos314
2 hours ago
This is likely still an LLM (in the purest definition of a language model with relatively many parameters) since the inputs are natural language, just not a generative LLM as the output is something other than more language.
nickdonnelly
an hour ago
The inputs aren't natural language. https://docs.typesafe.ai/primitives
cooljoseph
10 minutes ago
The inputs are natural language, they're just also structured into a tree. The first example on that very page shows natural language instructions:
questions = {
"refund_requested": Noul(
instructions="Does the customer request a refund?",
),
}janalsncm
4 hours ago
Large language models are not the only type of model.
alfalfasprout
4 hours ago
How is this not a frontier model? It's bleeding edge in its own niche. It's not a frontier LLM; however, applicable to many of the things people use LLMs for.
bigglebear
2 hours ago
It's nothing like a traditional LLM and so should not be compared to one. It's a heavily constrained, tiny model that can only produce a probability score or a yes/no answer over pre-defined selections. It has no long-context capacity.
I mean, imagine comparing this thing to Astra, it's hilarious. They don't even tell you what the max input size is, and they only allow 10 possible answers to choose from for the Choice mode. It's probably like a 1billion param model. They say it's "not small", but there's zero reason to believe that.
I suspect someone will be able to recreate this within a week by piecing together open-weight models.
janalsncm
an hour ago
> It's nothing like a traditional LLM and so should not be compared to one.
Frontier LLMs are expensive jack of all trades. You can absolutely compare them to purpose-built tools on any domain they touch. Engineering is all about assessing tradeoffs.
nalishwana
4 hours ago
nali shwana
riknos314
2 hours ago
Has LLM become so synonymous with Generative Transformer that other high-parameter count models that interpret language need a different name?
For all we know this might be a non-language-generative transformer e.g. a transformer where the decoder produces confidence scores rather than language. Please provide more likely architectures if you know them, I'm genuinely curious.
Flere-Imsaho
6 hours ago
> Jev can only generate structured output, right? This is probably super useful for classification/routing/scoring,
My first thought was that it would be ideal for robotics? As in control of limbs, general planning, route finding, etc.
copperx
3 hours ago
Um, Isn't SELF DRIVING the elephant in the room?
aryamccarthy
an hour ago
Only if you think that everyone cares about self-driving. Lots of niches require structured domains; self-driving is just one that has a lot of capital thrown at it.
CompleteSkeptic
5 hours ago
I'm biased but I wouldn't call it misleading - generating text is super awesome and flexible, (we describe that in the blog post - and I personally use string models all the time) but it's true you pay a high tax for autoregressive generation
> Also "can't hallucinate" seems wrong? Sure, it can't emit an invalid type, but it can still emit a completely wrong valid value.
that is likely true of all ML! perhaps we could debate semantics, but I don't think it's fair to say a random forest "hallucinates" in the way LLMs do
WhitneyLand
5 hours ago
His claim was that the title is misleading, not sure how it's relevant to that claim that you use "string models" (full LLMs).
The original title before it changed less than an hour ago was:
"Jev: New frontier model 40-400x cheaper and 20-200x faster"
I'm going to agree that was misleading.
And on the second point:
>>Also "can't hallucinate" seems wrong? Sure, it can't emit an invalid type, but it can still emit a completely wrong valid value.
>that is likely true of all ML! perhaps we could debate semantics, but I don't think it's fair to say a random forest "hallucinates" in the way LLMs do"
Also going to disagree here, and I don't think it's semantics.
Type safety is not factual correctness.
CompleteSkeptic
5 hours ago
> Type safety is not factual correctness.
I very much agree with this and want to hone in on where do actually disagree. Would you say a linear classifier hallucinates?
InsideOutSanta
an hour ago
A hallucination in the context of LLMs is generally understood as an incorrect answer presented as factual. If you claim that "x can't hallucinate" in the context of LLMs, you're saying that x always gives accurate answers. It does not matter whether the answer is type safe. If its value is incorrect, it's a hallucination.
thduabmd
2 hours ago
No. Your launch post puts “0%” on a hallucination chart, then explains that the number comes from guaranteed schema matching.
You’ve already agreed that this doesn’t establish correctness. An approve for an unauthorized action still meets the schema guarantee.
That’s why I find the messaging misleading. You’re acknowledging the limitations in these replies while defending the broader reliability pitch.
Even granting that each answer is calibrated individually, that doesn’t establish calibration of the decision that combines them.
Sure, I can threshold a composite score, but there may be many wrong answers with the same score. An unauthorized action doesn’t become acceptable because it scores highly on the other dimensions.
I still have to define the constraints and test which wrong actions get through the complete workflow on my own data. That’s a substantial part of the work being pushed back onto the developer.
bigglebear
an hour ago
User input: "Hey, have your human support agent call me, tomorrow at 5pm."
Model input: "Does the user want to speak to a human support agent?"
Output: Yes.
I imagine that your model would produce this, and I think it's fair to say this is a hallucination. A human would caveat it with: "Yes, but not right now.", your model is incapable of that. Yes is technically correct, but within the context of being in a live chat, a human would understand that the caveat is required.
elcomet
5 hours ago
Hallucinations were defined in the context of text generation models so your question does not really make sense.
IMO your system can make mistakes that are similar in spirit to hallucination (i.e. answering with a false answer instead of abstaining to answer).
bigglebear
an hour ago
And furthermore, because the model is forced to answer in a boolean (if in boolean mode), if the user input is outside of the range of a boolean, it's forced to hallucinate. It can't abstain.
8note
2 hours ago
id say yes. a linear classifier that classifies between red and yellow balls will hallucinate on blue.
linear regressions hallucinate in the simpson's paradox.
the model output can be quite confident and not representative of reality
WhitneyLand
5 hours ago
Let's say classifiers don't hallucinate. To make a fair comparison we should constrain LLMs to the same classification task. In that case, no, LLMs also don't hallucinate.
- Give Jev and LLM the same input
- Lock down both to approved/rejected/unknown (LLM restricts on decoding)
- Both can be wrong, but neither can hallucinate (invent an another option).
seizethecheese
5 hours ago
Just to be sure that I understand, you're saying that your model "can't hallucinate" because it only outputs a single thing, right? In this way, an LLM can't hallucinate either if I prompt it to do a classification task with a discrete set of possible outputs, right? (Assuming I reject non-conforming output. Actually, maybe what you're saying is that your system can't output non-conforming output?)
zenlikethat
2 hours ago
Yeah that's precisely correct.
For e.g. classification tasks, even in 2026 people are doing things like hallucinating deliberately, and then matching the hallucinations to embeddings -
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/08/10/hypothetical-classi...
With TypeSafe it just picks the class (actually probabilities across classes), reliably every single time.
zozbot234
5 hours ago
From a quick look at this it looks like it could easily generate natural language text by following a structured representation like UMR (Uniform Meaning Representation) or the similar representation the Abstract-Wikipedia folks will be working on for generic encyclopedic text (which will be heavily informed by Universal Dependencies). These are basically linguistically principled and frame-based counterparts to a programming language AST, that can be then converted to natural language (in a broadly language-independent way, to the extent that semantics and pragmatics make that feasible) via some sort of NLG rendering.
(To be clear, this one raw model does not support outputing a full AST directly - it wants to output "choice" among fixed options, "score" on a sliding scale, or a true/false answer (all of these with confidence scores attached), so building the AST/structure would be a code-driven (or even perhaps outside LLM-driven in some more challenging cases) multi-step affair where the model would essentially be playing a "game" of building the structured output step by step and getting a revised partial state back. But one could expect this to lead to interesting results.)
dfee
5 hours ago
> I'm biased but I wouldn't call it misleading
- @CompleteSkeptic
Very strange.
vvzz
5 hours ago
I feel like the power of the approach presented here is that it gives a model a proper "language" to describe computations directly vs moving tape silliness.
I foresee this to be the path moving forward - giving AI models understanding of the computation directly(as well as compositional rules) This feels like a short path towards total software in many areas.
bigglebear
2 hours ago
Agreed. It's a wildly dishonest presentation of their product from many perspectives, which is a shame because it might actually have some good use cases.
The comparison between LLM speed and Jev speed is misleading, because they're using autoregression to generate all of the type names, all of the schema, etc. A closer comparison would be if the LLM was purely outputting the raw numbers. Even then, comparisons to LLMs are pointless because you could train a transformer on the same sort of task that Jev is doing and get even better performance yet again, and a smaller model. I suspect this is some form of stripped down diffusion language model.
You really have to do a lot of hand holding here, and map out your problem space manually, and very carefully, to get any sort of accuracy. For example:
> Keep each Score to one dimension. If a description says “punctual and smart and experienced”, the question is measuring three things, and an input that is high on one and low on another can’t be placed. Confidence drops and the score means less. Split it into one Score per thing and combine them in code
If you don't perfectly represent the distributions of possible answers then you'll likely get garbage results. As far as probabilistic state machines are concerned, I'd say creating the distributions of possible answers, and their hierarchy, is the actual hard part.
One of their examples is:
- "state": "I have asked three times now. Can I please just talk to a real person?"
- "Is the customer asking for a human agent?"
Imagine the users request is: "I want your human agent to call me tomorrow at 5pm."
Human conversation is fuzzy, getting useful reliable results out of this is going to be a challenge. Of course, you could add follow up checks like: "Do they want that now, or later?" -> if later -> "Do they want that tomorrow, or the day after?" and so on... But now you're building an LLM out of if statements. I am skeptical of whether this model has much utility for fluid language interpretation - I suspect it'll only be useful for scenarios where you've tightly constrained the answer space but want to use fuzzy language to describe it. Like:
- Question to human: "Would you like a support agent RIGHT NOW?"
- Their response: Yes | Yeah | Mhmm | ye sure (any possible yes signal)
Model input: "Did they ask for a support agent?"
Still... a tiny LLM could accomplish this sort of thing without problem. And that doesn't stop someone from saying: "No, not right now. But tomorrow." - and the tomorrow would get missed. I think this is why people haven't really tried this approach much already.
Also their Doom demo is on structured state, not on images. Meaning, the enemies must be being served to the model as coordinates (or the exact angle of projectiles that hit the player), otherwise it'd have to scan every pixel of the 360 degrees to know whether an enemy is in front of the crosshair or not. You can see from the map below that it's also choosing travel checkpoints/destinations through walls. So they've severely cooked this to make it look far more capable than it is in practice, and any speed advantage that is offered here is not factoring in the shortcuts it is taking, the training on the map, and the fact that it can cheat because the structured state it is using is not bound by obstructions.
Here is their docs by the way: https://docs.typesafe.ai/ - so you can understand how it works.