Every major AI shop has a ton of in-house classifiers already, big, small, generalist, specialized. Some are used in inference pipelines (e.g. safeguards), some are used in data preparation, training, analysis and investigation, research, various one-off and intermediate tasks etc. Offering them on a public API doesn't always make business sense. I don't see much substance to this buzz, looks like people that are new to all this are discovering that classifiers exist, they are more efficient at classification, and many tasks commonly done with generative models are classification in disguise. Which is not bad at all, a fresh look at their use is great to have.
I fed into the hype at first. Testing Jev and Laya, they both suffer from the same issues as LLMs that stop them being useful beyond limited classifications.
I can't see any benefits that a typical ML classifier would not be better at.
Using Jev as a plain classifier is the least interesting case. See robotic control, navigation, computer use examples, none of it possible with a classifier.
That's the point, they're classification in disguise. Agentic game engines/mods started doing this long ago due to the latency requirements (although they're typically using small BERT-like models that need to be finetuned, or low TTFT generative models and structured outputs). New or newly discovered use cases are great, sure.
orbital-decay · · focus · HN ↗
EagnaIonat · · focus · HN ↗
I can't see any benefits that a typical ML classifier would not be better at.
ricardobeat · · focus · HN ↗
orbital-decay · · focus · HN ↗