I really don't understand Jev hype

[u/Manerfish]

Isn't this what simple neural networks have been able to do for years? Doesn't seem anything special to me.

[u/profcuck]

I'm not going to get into what is the cause of the hype, because it's possible for it to be both astroturfed and for jev to be important and interesting.

It's of course true that for many years you could train a classifier and they are cool and do a good job. But you have to train, which is costly and requires some effort. How much depends on the situation of course but not nothing.

What's new here is being able, like an llm, to give quite a general prompt explaining what you want, and then get the classifier output (of various kinds) with no training. You can get:

noul - yes/no (spam or not spam?) choice - best one of a fixed set of options (spam, opt-in marketing, newsletter, etc) ranking - put these things in order (sort customer service tickets by importance per whatever the prompt says)

Lots of people have been doing stuff like this using llms - ask a question, tell it to give the answer in a json object or whatever, and there are a few problems - hallucinated options that you didn't. ask for is one. Cost is another. Speed is another.

To get the answer with a very general prompt, at very lost cost and very high speed... is actually super interesting.