Baseten’s joey-1 makes AI decisions for a penny per million tokens

Baseten released joey-1, a 2B open-weights “ decision model ” that returns an answer and a probability rather than text. It costs $0.01 per million tokens and answers in about 20ms, Baseten says. It joins the larger mammoth-1 and elephant-1 launched last week.

Baseten has released joey-1, a small open AI model that answers yes-or-no and multiple-choice questions instead of writing text, the company said on Thursday. It costs $0.01 per million tokens.

Joey-1 has 2B parameters and joins the larger mammoth-1 and elephant-1, which Baseten’s research lab, Base Labs, released last week. Rather than writing a reply, the models return an answer with a probability score.

That makes them cheaper and faster for jobs such as routing support tickets, spotting spam or blocking harmful prompts. TypeSafe AI’s Jev, launched in September, works the same way.

Baseten says joey-1 answers a typical 2,000-token request in 20 milliseconds, about 2.5 times faster than elephant-1. Sorting 10M support tickets a month would cost about $50, against $500 on mammoth-1, it says.

The company calls joey-1 the strongest decision model with 3B or fewer parameters, but has not yet published the tests behind that claim. Its model card ranks joey-1 37th of 230 models on the Jev Decision Index, the top score for models under 4B parameters.

Joey-1 is built on Alibaba’s Qwen3.5-2B and was trained on 6.21 million decision examples. Microsoft built its own decision model on Qwen this month, priced at $0.042 per million tokens. Its weights are free on Hugging Face under the MIT licence.

Baseten, which helps companies run AI models, raised $1.5B at a valuation of up to $13B in June. In September it bought sandbox startup Blaxel.

With expertise in digital marketing, product management, and branding & identity, Ana Maria Constantin develops strategies that resonate (show all) With expertise in digital marketing, product management, and branding & identity, Ana Maria Constantin develops strategies that resonate with our target audience in the software/SaaS industry. Collaboration and teamwork are paramount to her, as she loves empowering her colleagues to achieve outstanding results and unlock their full potential.

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