Introducing Clef: our open-source decision models, and new RL fine-tuning platform

Cloudflare has released Clef and Clef-Flash, vision-language decision models that return typed classifications with probabilities, alongside a reinforcement-learning fine-tuning service. The models target routing and other bounded decisions where an application needs structured output rather than open-ended text. Cloudflare reports that Clef leads its Jev Decision Index and shares an internal domain-classification latency comparison; those are vendor-reported results, not independent evaluations.

A terminology caveat: the models’ weights are Apache-licensed and downloadable, but that does not make the training data and process fully reproducible. HN commenters debated how novel the approach is relative to existing classifiers and structured-output LLMs. Early comparisons in the thread also raised questions about price and latency, while others welcomed locally runnable, image-capable alternatives.

• Hacker News discussion
• Cloudflare’s benchmark