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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

But Jev established the branding and investors are betting that Jev will be acquired by one of the big labs soon - and if they aren't, the money itself can create a positive outcome by allowing Jev to hire incredible talent and scale the company rapidly.

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Rapidly? Their 2 years of stealth was replicated in 2 weeks.

I give it to them for creating the hype (good marketing), and for making a useful classifier. Not sure what they would scale rapidly though.

Either the investors know something we don't, or the market is irrational.

I feel like half the game now is marketing though, so I can see why they'd be attractive to an investor. Maybe if they scale they can come up with something.

Always has been imo.

Always has been indeed. Marketing is the closest thing to a real superpower if done right, no matter how successful your product in practice is, or if it even does anything at all (see any and all youtube sponsorships kind of...)

It’s the classic SV flip. You scale your investors, your executive team, your sales people, hire a bunch of engineering you don’t need, then sell the company. The company’s product doesn’t matter, the company is the product.

> Their 2 years of stealth was replicated in 2 weeks.

Actually they stolen the idea from a paper.

So did Oracle with relational databases by that logic

You can replicate any fitness app in no time and you will make close to $0. Brand recognition matters a lot.

100%. Product finesse + Marketing is now the "moat".

"now"? It always was. Pre-AI we still had ton of great apps "losing" just because the couldn't be brought before the eyes of people that would like them

Marketing always was a forcing function. The barrier to product building has dropped immensely now, so it is more about "finesse" part of the product in that area.

Yeah but there are also network effects of using fitness apps. Every engineer I know switches easily between Codex and Claude Code when one gets better than the other.

Jev has been around for a couple weeks. Cost and performance matter more than anything. Staying with an existing provider (the # of people choosing Jev without already having a frontier API key is probably zero?) is way easier than this.

What the hell are we even talking about.

Enterprises are very sticky and they arent even chosing between claude and codex, many are looking at something like Kiro.

Kiro came out after both Claude and codex, so not sure that any enterprise stuck to kiro unless you mean that they stick to aws in general. I'd love to hear about usage of kiro even in vague terms compared to the competitors. Naively thinking, I'd guess it's 1% or less of Claude code.

I think it's a ridiculous amount of money they got, but we don't know what's in the pitch deck. Investors are also blind to most of these things and take the pedigree of the founders above else.

It’s like openclaw. There was a bunch of technically better ones that came along afterwards, but nobody remembers what any of them were called.

You say this, while Hermes Agent has been at top of the openrouter.ai leaderboard for several months and currently has 3X the token usage of OpenClaw.

What? OpenClaw has been completely replaced by Hermes and others in the discourse

And Muse is what normal people use instead

Their 2 years of stealth involved a lot more than building their model.

People who can find things of value, and execute on those things, are worth investing in - even if that thing of value is replicated in short order.

Nobody was looking at decision models, but now that Jev has surfaced, everybody is.

> People who can find things of value, and execute on those things, are worth investing in

Investing isn't binary. You can be investible but not at a 7.5b valuation.

Jev and decision models are *a derivative* of a pretrained LLM trunk, and one that's super easy to build once you have an LLM. Put a single step fully connected NN on the transformer, create a training dataset for it, add fancy but bread and butter multi step decision RL, nothing crazy.

*They have zero moat* against established AI companies, as the recent copies show, and will do worse than frontier labs.*

Is anybody really looking to scale a company’s people rapidly these days? It’s just not necessary.

Most of the money will be burned in data centers as they struggle to sell tokens at a loss.

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