A faster, 100% open-source alternative to Jev. It’s called Laya. Both models solve the same problem. You give them unstructured state plus typed questions. Instead of generating a paragraph, they choose from answers you define and return probabilities your code can act on. But they make those decisions differently. Jev is a closed, hosted API. Its architecture and training are not public, but it works zero-shot and supports up to 255 options. Laya is Apache 2.0 licensed, runs locally, and uses open-weight encoder models. Here is how its pipeline works. → It routes by language first. Plain Python selects the English or multilingual checkpoint before inference. → It creates one sequence for each question. Every possible answer gets a `[MASK]` marker. The question and state provide the context needed to compare those options. → It scores instead of generating. A bidirectional encoder and small decision head assign one score to each option. Softmax turns those scores into a probability distribution. → It batches the questions. They run together in one model call, although every question still carries its own copy of the state. This removes network latency and token-by-token generation. In one independent test, Laya took about 35 milliseconds on a local GPU. Jev took roughly 380 milliseconds over the network. Laya also has no per-call API fee, keeps data on your infrastructure, and can run on older GPUs. But it is not a drop-in replacement for every workload. Jev is a hosted generalist that works well out of the box. Laya is a fast base you need to specialize. Laya makes the most sense when you have a stable answer set and representative training data. Fine-tune it for the task, calibrate its probabilities on held-out examples, and send uncertain decisions to a stronger model or human reviewer. Jev gives you stronger zero-shot decisions. Laya gives you speed, privacy, control, and no per-call fee after you teach it your task. The open-source repository is here: github.com/NandhaKishorM/lay… If you want to self-host Laya, InstaCloud provides a really nice and easy way to do so. Check this out: instacloud.com/templates/lay… If you're new to decision models, I wrote the full breakdown of how Jev. The article is quoted below.