RIP Jev (September 2026–October 2026)!
RIP Jev (September 2026-October 2026)! The joke just writes itself - Jev created a new product category and three weeks later OpenAI comes with a distribution model!
Achieving product market fit is a dream for almost every company! You have been told that it was essential for survival. But that same Product Market fit is now the reason your startup is near death! That's what I feel happened to Jev! In 2026, product-market fit isn't a milestone. It's a notification sent to OpenAI / Anthropic's product team.
Creating a new category is no longer sufficient either. Jev showed that was a demand for a new kind of model - that doesn't just generate text, but helps with decisions, is super fast and cheap! Any other time, any other industry, this would have been a very different Harvard case study. The case study would have been titled "Creating a New Market." Now it's probably titled "Well, That Escalated Quickly."! The old rules don't seem to work anymore. Yesterday (that is three weeks after Jev launched) , OpenAI released Decisions API! Powered by GPT 6 Luna, this model is multimodal - capable of taking images as inputs as well! That demo with the hugging face robot is just 🤯!
Three weeks! I am sure how I am going to see Linkedin posts saying how distribution is now the ultimate moat, but to enter a brand new category AND one up the category creator, and throwing in a cool robotics demo on the side in just three weeks - this speed is not something you can compete with!
I still want to root for Jev (obvious isn't it? underdog, David in David-Goliath etc). But I highly doubt if this story is going to have a happy ending. I'd ask Jev to predict its own survival probability. But I'm not sure I want to see the answer. I really hope Jev proves me wrong. Because if creating an entirely new category buys you three weeks of differentiation, we may need to rethink what innovation is actually worth.