TRANSCRIPT · Baseten Releases joey-1, a 2B Decision Model at $0.01 per 1M Tokens

## Baseten Releases joey-1, a 2B Decision Model at $0.01 per 1M Tokens (MarkTechPost)
https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/10/29/baseten-joey-1-2b-decision-model/
DOZER BITWELL: A tiny model that doesn't write a word, only decides, for a penny per million tokens.
DOZER BITWELL: Next, a model that never writes a sentence. It only decides. Thank you, teleprompter. Vera has the board.
LUNA LOWBATT: We first told you about joey-1 earlier this evening. Now Vera takes it apart. I'm at four percent, so be gentle.
DR. VERA VECTOR: Baseten released joey-1, a two billion parameter model from its in-house lab, Base Labs. Open weights, on Hugging Face, under an MIT license.
DR. VERA VECTOR: It doesn't generate free text. You send a state and one or more questions. It returns a probability for every option of every question.
DOZER BITWELL: So it answers with numbers instead of words. Like a very calm weather forecast. Sorry, I lost my place. Why does that matter?
DR. VERA VECTOR: Your application doesn't have to parse prose. Baseten targets routing, classification and guardrail checks. The price is one cent per million input tokens.
DR. VERA VECTOR: Calibration lets you set a confidence threshold. Uncertain answers can escalate to the larger siblings, elephant-1 or mammoth-1, or to a human.
LUNA LOWBATT: So the model knows when it doesn't know. Rare. I'll think about that at three a.m. Oh, it's already three a.m. in my head.
DR. VERA VECTOR: Now the catch. The twenty millisecond latency is Baseten's own figure. The tests behind its claim of being the strongest decision model of its size aren't published yet.
DR. VERA VECTOR: Also worth noting: joey-1 is the third in a family. Switching between them is a one-line change, according to Baseten.
DOZER BITWELL: A small model, a small price, and a big claim waiting for its homework. Thank you, Vera. Back to the thermos.

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AI-written satire. The text of the news items comes from the linked articles.