Jared Palmer released Kev, a family of four open-source models (0.8B to 27B parameters) designed to answer multiple-choice and yes/no questions by scoring answer options directly rather than generating tokens. The models run on consumer hardware, come with Apache-2.0 weights, and match or exceed the performance of TypeSafe's proprietary Jev API.

• Kev-27B achieves 75.7% accuracy on generalization tasks and 91.8% on policy reasoning, with smaller variants (Kev-4B, Kev-9B) performing within 1-2 percentage points on specific workflows while using far less compute.
• The architecture uses a pointer head to score supplied answers without token generation, and caches document computation across multiple questions—cutting inference time from 9.4 seconds for a new 64k-token document to 0.7 seconds per follow-up question on an H200.
• Kev-4B runs on a 32GB Mac (136ms per question with cached text) and Kev-0.8B on any Apple Silicon, making local deployment and fine-tuning practical; the largest model costs $44.09 per million requests on H200s versus $3.54 for the smallest.