Jev and Laya Offer Rival Approaches to AI Decision Models Without Text Generation

Two new AI models designed for classification rather than text generation emerged in mid-2026: Jev, a closed hosted API from TypeSafe AI launched on September 15, and Laya, an open-source model released shortly after by Convai Innovations. Both models accept structured inputs and return typed answers with confidence scores, eliminating parsing errors and hallucinations by design. Jev, priced at $0.042 per million input tokens, excels at large-label classification, scoring 0.870 on the Banking77 benchmark compared to Laya's 0.425, due to architectural differences in how candidate options are represented. Laya, a 421-million-parameter encoder available on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license, runs on local hardware at roughly 7–33 milliseconds per query and supports fine-tuning, multilingual use, and air-gapped deployment at no API cost. The choice between them largely depends on scale of label sets, data privacy requirements, and whether teams prefer a managed service or self-hosted infrastructure.