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Why would you use max? It's usually unnecessary and even prone to overthinking. In my experience, since Opus 5 the medium/high is usually enough (until 4.8 I used xhigh, but never max). Even low is quite usable these days..

actually I meant to say xhigh.

even at xhigh I get context compaction quite a bit.


yeah, i didn't notice this on 5

Well there is at least the degradation tracker from Margin labs for Sol and Opus: https://marginlab.ai/trackers/codex/

It looks pretty consistent? At least within reason for a stochastic model. Or am I missing something?

What you may be missing is that they probably track the API performance.

Subscription plans may be subject to other regime, e.g. lowering the thinking budget when the API is under heavy load, etc.


AFAIK Jev is nothing special technically so it's easy to embed it as an another tool for the LLM? For many batch tasks it can still be quite a token saver I think.

Or they can even offer it as a standalone API if deemed worth it.


Jev seems to have three benefits:

1) It's very cheap and fast - you provide one input and many potential classifications, and the compute to ingest the input is shared.

2) It generates structured output natively - guaranteed to be correct

3) It's output probabilities are calibrated to actually mean something

OpenAI, or anyone else, could certainly replicate it - there are already articles guessing how Jev achieves its "parallel" classifications, but it seems the AI companies need to decide are they in the business of providing intelligence/tokens, or are they in the application business trying to compete with all their customers (not that Jev uses OpenAI).


> It's output probabilities are calibrated to actually mean something

Don't fall for marketing BS so easily.

Jev can output drastically different probabilities if you simply reorder the list of choices. And Jev's "confidence" output is fake/redundant - it's just a formula applied to probabilities, it conveys no additional information.

I bet they will eventually "fix" (read hide under the rug) the ordering problem by ordering the list on the backend before feeding to the model.


It seems that anyway most of the value is in the speed and cost.

If it really matters to you whether whether some business-specific classification confidence is above/below some specific threshold (vs just relative order), then you'd be better off training or fine tuning a custom model for that. Maybe that is something that TypeSafe are planning to also provide?


Just to clarify:

> 2) It generates structured output natively - guaranteed to be correct

It's not guaranteed to be correct: it's guaranteed to be _formatted in a particular way_. You can get the same thing with grammars on any LLM.

Jev and Jev-like models have other advantages, but I feel like people forget grammars exist for LLMs.


Not an expert at all here, but I saw a comment on the jev post saying that it you constrain an LLM suck that it outputs a valid structure, if the token with the highest probability is not the one that you expected because of the structure (and so you pick the valid lower one) this means the LLM was already confused and your answer is less likely to be correct anyways.

Is this actually true ?


Grammars do risk pushing models off distribution in a way that impacts their output quality in a way Jev allegedly does not suffer from. Additionally, Jev's ability to answer questions independently is also exciting. Using an LLM to answer multiple questions in one generation has the property of earlier answers influencing later ones. TBD how many of TypeSafe's claims stand up, but my testing so far is promising. I hope they author some papers on their methods as well, but that might destroy their moat.

If you really know what grammers did, grammer is a filter to mask out option llm provided but you don't like.

It does not change potential distribution in any means. It DROPS part of answer model returned directly.

The text generation model go wild because model relies on previous section it answered to continue later section. And because now it contain item model have no idea, it is completely screwed.

In the case you only require model to answer one of a,b,c,d and don't care about later segment at all. It don't really matter.


What I mean is that, in general, constrained decoding can push model output off into less probable regimes. This is well studied; see for example https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.21619. The mask may only retain very improbable logits. In pathological cases, the constrained output may be little better than noise filtered through the constraint. When using existing structured output APIs, it may not be possible to even know.

You don't even bother text after the [a] at first place in this case

Your question is something like

anwser only a,b,c,d for following question a. b. c. d....

the model output possibility of next character a: 0.8 b: 0.7 c: 0.3 f: 0.2 d: 0.1

If the list contains option you did not provide. The model is confused anyway, it don't matter if you use grammer to filter out the bad option or not, the answer is screwed already.


Yes, agreed. I was speaking in general, of course. This particular topic is of interest to me, so thinking of the edge cases and confounds vs Jev.

In your example, I would expect an LLM to do fine and if you have access to the raw logits you can measure whether or not it was confused and assign a confidence to the answer it gave.

I do think that Jev handles more than this though and, in my early testing, does things that are not easily accomplished with guided decoding techniques.


The way jev actually internally work could be interesting though. I believe most llm are only tuned to return the first or second logits(or a few more) correctly as that is what the sampler would choose anyway. Do they alter existing model for better behavior across all options? Or they distilled one to have the proper behavior? We can only guess without the actual implementation.

Yes! I really hope they release some papers on their techniques. I am very curious.

I ran it through MMLU a few days ago and it scored ~90% so seems to have a lot of general world knowledge trained in. Makes me think your speculation is right. I have some credits left, might try and think of an experiment. I saw a gist where someone was asking it which model it was and it was picking qwen a lot, but who knows...

Anyway, thank you for the interesting discussion!


Although the underlying model is unknown. If it expose input token count, the tokenizer may be probable though. Most tokenizer segemnts wildly different in CJK inputs. It can probably be used to fingerprint the tokenizer based on token count if it is using existing tokenizer.

(3) seems to be the hard one, you have to have training data with accurate probabilities, maybe, but perhaps not since people are primed to trust

No, you don't. You do RLCR, similar to that proposed here:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.16806


yes, and... pretty much everything in the Ai field comes back to "data makes more difference"

Sure, and most days it doesn't rain.

depends on where you live, an important feature for data points about weather pattern probabilities

the underlying data set needs to be representative


RLVR and RLCR really don't need a whole bunch of special data.

the algorithms technically, sure, however the outcomes definitely depend on data quality and coverage like any other training method, this is well known

I don't think you've ever done either of these training steps. You are just handwaving.

you know what they say about making assumptions, yea?

and then you are going to ignore all the research and results that clearly show otherwise? why?

what might we infer about the importance of data from a learning algorithm like decision trees?


Read the paper. They train RLCR on existing big math problems. They subtract a brier score penalty from the correctness reward. No new confidence labels are needed.

Existing datasets, different reward function.


> Read the paper.

I did, in the first days Jev came out, when people were bringing it up. Another assumption. Please review the HN commenting guidelines, the one which starts with "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article." is relevant here.

Nothing in that paper changes that ML algorithms are dependent on the training data. We can step back from Jev and algos to consider Bayes Theorem. If your sample is not representative of the population, your resulting statistics will be off. The same is true here. If the data you train a model like Jev with is not representative, the probabilities and confidences it outputs will not be representative.

What makes Jev interesting is that it works well out of the box across domains. What people who are well known in the field believe is that this is the result of Typesafe having a really good training data set. People are saying similar of MiMo-2.6 today.


"Did you read the article" doesn't apply to a link someone put in a comment. If you are going to be a hall monitor, at least do it properly. You are just acting in bad faith at this point.

You are not engaging with actual points, instead attacking a person based on your bad assumptions and projections.

We both know who is

> just acting in bad faith at this point.


The relevant data is the reasoning trace. Doesn't need user data. You can learn from people's detailed reasoning steps how confident they are, even outside your domain.

Take RL 101. This is a common pattern.


We were talking about Jev and probability, now you're changing the problem, a rhetorical trick some people try to employ.

Another that uses dice rolling, coin flips, and an inventory level example to drive home the point that Jev's output are not real probabilities for outcomes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830385

> Take RL 101

I taught it (ML course; a day on RL, at a university), you should really stop making assumptions friend. Data quality and coverage matters in learning algorithms.

Here's one of the books used in that course https://amlbook.com/

Thinking blocks are not a place you can derive real confidence scores in LLMs


My initial comment and every one following is about RLCR and that paper. You don't appear to grasp the basics of that paper, it's reward function or how the optimizer is updating weights.

You are out of your depth and grasping at straws.



Well, definitely some LLM use :) At least in the second half... Confirmed with Pangram detector as well, which has pretty good precision.


Hey, author here!

No LLM use while writing, except for my grammar/phrasing plugin which I think (?) uses AI. I detailed my explicit usage cases for gpt in an earlier comment above.

Is there anything you, as a skeptical reader, would like to disclaimed/posted/footnoted when it comes to disclosing gpt usage during research questions, etc?

Wasn’t planning to have to address this early on but I would love to moving forward, especially time listener, first time caller to the online writing publication world, especially in the era of rampant AI usage.

(Keeping in mind that this is my personal substack meant to be an anthology series of my thoughts and rabbit-holed interest write ups, not exactly intended for such wide scrutiny but, I guess, could be potentially disseminated widely in a rare instance such as this first post, lol)


>Confirmed with Pangram detector as well, which has pretty good precision.

Please don't say confirmed. AI detectors are not reliable in any way.


Also, in a few years, LLMs will be building the next generation of LLMs anyway, probably autonomously to a high degree.




Output styles do that. They modify system prompt and even are periodically reminded in longer conversations I think...


Well they say Opus was trained for the subordinate role, so it doesn't excel in global view of things.

It may be a good subagent but probably not a great decision maker.


It’s more that they have a different business case than competing for the top spots on public benchmarks.

They seem to be oriented more toward customizing models for the concrete needs of a company, on-prem deployment, proprietary knowledge-bases, etc.


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