LLMs have higher accuracy and are more versatile, but that comes with a cost (slower and more expensive to run). On the other end you can have your own mini classifier something built on top of ModernBert or DIET or even a hash classifier (these are narrow).
Models like JEV fall in the golden middle. Somewhat cheap, somewhat fast, somewhat general.
Many people have replied saying that narrow classifiers (eg bert) are better, and they are better in many ways (essentially free and faster). But... the real world is messy, in my experience it's actually very hard to make a really good classifier that will work across a specific niche domain especially when there is very fuzzy input. And the most interesting real world scenarios are nuanced and overtime there will be edge cases discovered where it fails and that will require retraining and re-evaluation etc etc. It can becomes a full project on its own that eventually collapses into a game of whackamole (improved in some direction but regressed elsewhere).
Things like JEV (or similar models) provide ease of mind, just off load the complexity to it and move on to the next challenge type of thing.
Models like JEV fall in the golden middle. Somewhat cheap, somewhat fast, somewhat general.
Many people have replied saying that narrow classifiers (eg bert) are better, and they are better in many ways (essentially free and faster). But... the real world is messy, in my experience it's actually very hard to make a really good classifier that will work across a specific niche domain especially when there is very fuzzy input. And the most interesting real world scenarios are nuanced and overtime there will be edge cases discovered where it fails and that will require retraining and re-evaluation etc etc. It can becomes a full project on its own that eventually collapses into a game of whackamole (improved in some direction but regressed elsewhere). Things like JEV (or similar models) provide ease of mind, just off load the complexity to it and move on to the next challenge type of thing.