alt Hacker NewsI think the biggest lesson with Jev was the one of communication and understanding for the broader audience, sometimes a lot about innovating involves repeating yourself and translating your own thoughts to an intended audience.
Classical machine learning has been, for the most part, and just by the nature of science, behind academic terms and difficult to engage with as a product.
Jev did really well with coining up “System One” models and defining a standard application interface plus core primitives that landed in the current paradigm of software development.
I think it’s sort of like how Cursor reinvented autocomplete back then as a different UX and suddenly everyone was just using it because of how easy the bar was to understanding it.
Lastly, timing is everything. Just as Cursor had a first mover advantage, despite ML Ops being a thing for a while, they managed to encapsulate the concept behind a “System One” black box that fits the existing mental model for building software and shipping a data contract in the right point in time where the cost of tokens has been an important metric to watch.
Furthermore, it's not about the current innovation right now - if you sell yourself on a broader mission, your core product can evolve and change with it, and you're more selling yourself as the guy who will make that abstract vision possible no matter what.
No matter how much we pretend, that's how a lot of abstractions work. Things that touch the real world can change; there's a risk that the change could be as something as simple as a bugfix to changing the underlying implementation but preserving a higher level goal; you generally want a human in the loop to make sure the semantics work out and everybody's agreeing.