Sebastian Raschka's history of text classifiers

Sebastian Raschka’s history of text classifiers puts numbers on why Jev feels new. On IMDb, bag-of-words + logistic regression gets 89.9%, a fine-tuned ModernBERT about 95%, and Jev 96.5% zero-shot for $0.65 across 25k reviews. Under the hood it is likely still a pretrained transformer with a one-number head that scores each answer option. The hard part is broad training data and calibrated probabilities. What changes is the cost of starting: no labelling, training or hosting per task. Specialists still win on huge volume, the last point of accuracy, or data that can’t leave your network. Within a month OpenAI and Microsoft shipped the same yes/no, choice and score contract.