They knew before JEV. They just wanted more money.

A couple of weeks ago, a former OpenAI employee introduced JEV, their System One model, calling it the fastest and cheapest model for making decisions. Within 14 days, OpenAI introduced its Decision API at Dev Day 2026. Then I saw someone else tweet that they had been working on something similar a year earlier, called Laya.

All of this made me wonder: if these ideas were already around, why are we only seeing them now?

My guess is that the big AI companies knew about these approaches too. I find it hard to believe they all suddenly figured this out at the same time. So why wait?

I think a lot of it comes down to money. More tokens means more revenue. If people are already paying, there isn’t much reason to offer them a cheaper way to do the same thing. But once someone leaves, builds it, and puts it out there, everyone else has a reason to respond. Suddenly, cheaper options start showing up.

I don’t know what happened inside these companies. But watching this play out makes it hard for me to buy the whole “we’re doing this to make the world better” story. To me, making money still seems to come first.

This is why I keep coming back to open source and community-driven development. I want people to be able to understand the tools they use, change them, and run them on their own terms. We shouldn’t have to wait for a handful of companies to decide what we can afford or what we’re allowed to build.

For me, that’s what sovereignty means: having control over the technology we depend on. And I believe open source is the only way we get there.