laya

Laya answers typed questions about text without generating any: pick one of these labels, give this a score, yes or no. Hand it a support ticket or an email and it returns probabilities in a single pass. It's an open-weight rival to TypeSafe's hosted Jev model, and it copies Jev's API, so an existing client switches by changing one URL. Apache 2.0, code and weights.

It runs on CPU. The README puts one question at roughly 200 to 460 milliseconds on CPU and about 33 on a T4 GPU. There are three checkpoints of 322M to 421M parameters, one covering 100+ languages, plus a built-in HTTP server and MCP server. Jev charges $42 per billion input tokens; this costs whatever hardware you already have. mizorewww/laya-mlx ports it to Apple Silicon.

Teams routing tickets, triaging email or gating agent actions at high volume: self-host it and fine-tune it. The README is blunt that out of the box it's near chance on real workflows, and says to treat it as a fast base to specialise, not a zero-shot engine. A fine-tune takes about 4-5 hours on Kaggle's free GPUs.

The catch: its Jev comparisons use Jev's published numbers, not side-by-side runs, and with many options Jev wins clearly. Confidence scores behave differently too, so thresholds tuned on Jev need re-tuning.