It's not a new concept, it just took someone adding on to the approach and refining it. I never deep dove it, but I assume JEV is sort of like how Sora works? They had a blog post about how it has a sort of tiny LLM, which OpenAI's small LLMs are insanely good and well defined. I think any lab tackling this with a from-scratch model could yield affordable alternatives that are highly competitive.

It seems insanely obvious at least to me, that JEV is the new hot thing for the AI field since they give you stronger output that isn't... flat out wrong, that alone is impressive.