Cloudflare tries to outplay Jev with open-weight Clef models

Two weeks after the Jev model took the AI world by storm, Cloudflare has released its own pair of "Clef" decision models that it claims are smarter and faster than Jev, while also being open weight and runnable locally. The Clef family of decision models was announced by Cloudflare on Thursday, and consists of two models: Clef and Clef-flash, a slightly smaller and faster version of the model. For all intents and purposes, they work the same way as TypeSafe’s Jev, in that they can answer three types of bounded, structured questions: Yes/no, multiple choice, and rankings. It’s there that the bigger differences emerge, though, as Clef isn’t only built differently but, if Cloudflare’s benchmark claims hold up, also appears more capable than Jev and several other decision models in a number of tests. For starters, Clef has an LLM backbone. …