“95% Einstein, 5% Mr. Bean”: Jev’s Creator on Why AI Can’t Automate Anything Reliably (Diogo Almeida)

Diogo Almeida (0:00)

95% Einstein, 5% Mr. Bean, and if it doesn't tell you when it's the Mr. Bean, then how are you gonna automate anything? I wrote a document at OpenAI. We could have had AGI last year, and I still believe that to be true. Free training is a giant dumpster fire of wasting resources. When I first started this project, I literally thought it would take a week. You can now express things that you couldn't express in software before. I think that the future will be unbelievably sci-fi. We're building fraud, not God, absolutely.

Matt Turck (0:31)

That is Diogo Almeida, CEO of TypeSafe, the company behind Jev. A month ago, nobody had heard of Jev. Then it launched, hit a nerve in the AI world, and quickly became the most copied model in AI. Jev is both fascinating and perplexing. It's a new kind of model, and it's clearly a big deal. Yet even some AI insiders struggle to explain what it is, while others dismiss it as just a classifier. So we went to the source and asked Diogo to walk us through Jev in plain English. What it is, where it's going, and why copycats are missing the point. I'm Matt Turck, and this is the MAD Podcast.

Diogo, welcome.

Diogo Almeida (1:07)

Thank you, thank you. Hey.

Matt Turck (1:09)

All right. This is a super fun time to be doing this conversation, in part because just yesterday, I believe, as we were recording this, you guys announced your gigantic Series A, 870 million Series A at a 7.5 billion valuation. So it's been a wild three weeks just looking at some stats. You launched a video at 40 million views. You talked to somebody, talked about a million users a day, a trillion tokens a day, a third of the Fortune 500, all of this in just a few weeks. So it sounds like you're indeed building what you called a jevolution.

I love the term. I'm just curious what it feels like from the inside.

Diogo Almeida (1:50)

Where do I start? I will say that a lot of those stats don't really matter for what I feel like is the jevolution. To me, I knew it would be happening when builders started playing with it and doing the weird stuff and especially when people were starting to make apps that they maybe could have done before but didn't bother with because AI was so expensive.

We push the boundaries of intelligence per second, but I think the future is going to be intelligence per dollar primarily. I think really getting people to play with the idea that intelligence per dollar has dropped to orders of magnitude is what will make the devolution unstoppable independent of enterprise adoption, users, stats, whatever. To me, it's about people slaying around with things and starting to, I can't think of a non-corny way to say it, but like build the future, you know, like that to be used, the unstoppable energy. And no matter how big that initial snowball is, it will become gigantic. So I've been celebrating this for something like two and a half weeks now. I've actually had to do soul searching because I think one of my big life goals has been achieved.

And yeah, the stats are obviously great. Growing fast is obviously great. I love that we are also getting a lot of the distribution that we knew we would get in two years, but much faster than we thought. These are all obviously phenomenal things, but the leading indicator of it all is builders being inspired to do new things.

Matt Turck (3:25)

And just to ask a couple of like the startup related questions. So you guys were in stealth for two years.

I'm curious how you thought about it in a world where like everybody's on X every two minutes to talk about something. Why did you decide to be in stealth?

Diogo Almeida (3:40)

No one's asked me that, so that's fun.

I would say I think quite contrarianly, and I think that this whole... AI has a gigantic over promise under deliver issue. And, you know, I think people really saw that with our launch. Like when we first launched the video, people were like, Oh, that's fake. It's kind of interesting. But like there's no way it's true. The launch really picked up when people started playing with it and showing their results. And I think that under promise over deliver of our launch is what really made it take off. And it's been, I can't think of a launch in AI that has been under promise over deliver since ChatGPT. So that might be why it took off. I'm not an expert in like social dynamics. So I really, really, you know, for better or for worse, I ignore the noise in the field and really focus on what I think is most important. And I just did not buy the story at all that AI was solving all sorts of problems. Because if you actually look at all the evidence, it's...