# JEV's value comes from decision intelligence, not just speed

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/jevs-value-comes-from-decision-intelligence-not-just-speed/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Diogo Almeida](https://realalpha.app/builders/diogo-almeida/) · Diogo Almeida is co-founder and CEO of TypeSafe. · Built Jev, a decision model returning typed probabilities; co-invented RLHF and InstructGPT at OpenAI.
- Host: [Sam Charrington](https://realalpha.app/people/sam-charrington/) · Host, The TWIML AI Podcast
- Show: The TWIML AI Podcast
- Episode: [Asking JEV's Creator the Hard Questions About This Hot New AI Model](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/), Oct 6, 2026
- Moment: 23:56 to 32:08 of the episode (8 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/jevs-value-comes-from-decision-intelligence-not-just-speed/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1436

## Quote

> “people just don't get that they're **paying for intelligence** and if you use a like a logistic regression on top of embeddings or a small model”
> — [Diogo Almeida](https://realalpha.app/builders/diogo-almeida/) at [27:59](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1679) · The TWIML AI Podcast

## Takeaways

1. Classifiers are a standard way to put intelligence into software.
2. Speed and price matter less than the intelligence behind a model.
3. A model's capabilities depend on what it was optimized to do.

## About this segment

Diogo Almeida says classifiers are useful interfaces, but JEV's promise depends on intelligence optimized for decisions, not simply lower cost or faster inference. That distinction helps explain why its familiar-looking API can do more than a conventional classifier.

From “Asking JEV's Creator the Hard Questions About This Hot New AI Model”, Oct 6, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[24:01](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1441) myself so classifiers not there's nothing wrong with classifiers classifiers are an interface like creating classifiers is not an ml innovation and no one in like 2010 to 20 to 2020 was inventing new shapes of classifiers they were just making classifiers for useful stuff um and classifiers are not like meant to be cool in ml they are literally the shape of usefulness yeah you know like that sounds like an arrogant thing to say but that is how you get yeah well Yes, that is how you put intelligence into software to make the software smart.

[24:37](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1477) How is meta-powered? Classifiers. Maybe some regressors, but probably mostly classifiers. How is Google powered? Probably mostly classifiers. So there's nothing wrong with classifiers. I actually think if someone told us that we were a zero-shot general classifier for anything, that would be the greatest compliment I've ever been given for Jev. We have other things too, but for Jev, that would be an incredible description of it.

[24:59](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1499) Like, if someone could say that I can give you, you know, a random developer, the equivalent of an MLE team of a dozen people from 2019 to work on any task that you think up on the fly while coding, and it's instantly done, and not only that, it's going to be better than the quality in 2019, because the AI models have gotten a lot better. it's going to be way way way smarter that sounds insane for development so i think that the classifier thing is um like grumpy ml people who kind of don't get it and that is totally fine because the jav party is a developer party oh man i should have said developer um so yes and not i actually think that there's another class of people who is not just like we can run the same stuff with lms so much cheaper i actually think that they are the they're the second wave

[25:58](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1558) of people i think the first wave of people who got really excited were the kind of people who felt like this is how ai should have been shaped all along this is like obviously the way to make stuff useful and i'm talking about like the people who like live and breathe structured outputs like the dspy i am not sure how it's pronounced dsp um but like i always say dspy but i think dspy is the most popular cool way of saying it but like these people have been kind of um you know trying to push this vision of this is how you actually make useful systems and i believe that they're intellectually quite correct but they've been hobbled by the models being optimized for strings instead of them being optimized for the thing that they want which is programmatic use so i think those people not necessarily dspy but like there's a lot of developers who intuitively think in this

[26:51](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1611) way and part of what made us so popular is kind of on twitter them screaming like a phantom limb was returned and i you know i didn't expect this because i'm like this you know i i was designing for like where's my missing phantom limb and it turns out there's tons of other people with this And that was so... So freaking cool. That was only one crumb. Like, there are more crumbs out there. I don't even remember what the other crumbs were.

[27:15](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1635) Do you? I just got worked up. Yeah, embedding model plus classifier, small models, like... The thing is, if you put a small model or an embedding model plus a classifier, a lot of people miss this. And my team has been telling me to stop telling this to people because it makes it more likely we have competition. And right now, I think everyone is missing this. i want to educate the world even if it's not in my financial best interest and the thing i really want to emphasize is that it is not about the interface the interface is cool it is not even about the speed and the cost speed and cost are bad things ideal speed is instant ideal cost is zero no one like spins up a library and says like i feel like putting cost and latency into this like line of code thing you want right so i think people just don't get that they're paying for

[28:05](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1685) intelligence and if you use a like a logistic regression on top of embeddings or a small model you get the intelligence of logistic regression on top of embeddings or a small model right yeah but like everyone misses that you get what you optimize for of course you can get a gigantic jump in this thing if you're literally the only person doing that and we are literally the only person doing that despite me trying to shout out like hey everyone please do this this is really valuable for the world this is what's going to make ai really useful and you know there's been lots of copycats i still don't think people i was just going to say you say no one's doing this but like within the space of a week i think there are half a dozen or more open source projects uh a bunch of other like i mentioned at dev days yesterday open ai announced their decision models

[28:59](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1739) which is i think terra or a smaller model like that's about like the interface and the cost and the speed not about the intelligence right like if people really want to taking the same approach that you're taking to get there they don't even need to have the same approach they just need to care about intelligence you know like if you're taking like an open source model doing something to make it have the same interface and same characteristics and you just benchmark on nlp tasks or something like that like you don't think i thought of that this was like literally day one into this project uh it's like i i i thought this project would take a week um it's been fun you know i i only feel okay admitting it now totally honestly because it's been so successful like i it becomes feels way safer to admit my feelings at the time we started this i was

[29:47](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1787) probably at worst tied at best at post training in the world when we started and i thought it have taken a week because i've post-trained so many models for so many different things and models are they seem to be very very general at a lot of stuff but apparently not decision making which i've learned the hard way so i i i think it's very cool that people are playing around with stuff i worry that if people play with bad versions of the model they might actually get burned by the whole subgenre and say like hey like like this kind of stuff is crap i i hope that's not as big a deal as people were saying that kind of exactly because the thing they want is intelligence if the models were perfectly intelligent which our models are not and no one else's are then you could literally solve everything classification is ai complete right

[30:37](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1837) like any task could be boiled down into classification questions and you could just solve everything so truly intelligence matters in what you can and can't automate and what kind of sci-fi you can build and it's it's really important it's so important i try so hard you know like we could have released so much earlier if we didn't care about this and you know that even now it's a debate for like shipping new stuff how do we continue to ship stuff when we have such a high bar for reliability because we want to be trustworthy we want to be trustworthy to developers not ml researchers who are like you know snoot about which benchmark things are better at. We just want people to not have to worry about their intelligence because that is what developers want in order to build stuff. So I get worked up about

[31:20](https://realalpha.app/v/9Aato-NfjoU/?t=1880) this basically every day. It's such a frustration. And people on the street recognize me and they're like, oh, you're the Jeff guy. I love how smart and cheap it is. And I'm like, no, what has my reputation become you know like i want to be a paragon of making ai so reliable that it's boring like sequel you know like i want ai to be so predictable that you can like write queries without having to even run them against like eval sets because you know this is what common sense intelligence would do there and to just do it every single time and that is when software engineers get super duper powers and yeah i i obviously love jev i love that we're fast and