Amazon unveils Strands Decider 2B as an open-source rival to Jev

Amazon Web Services has released Strands Decider 2B, an open-source model built to make quick choices on behalf of AI agents. It launched on October 1, 2026. Strands Decider 2B carries 2 billion total parameters. That makes it small by modern AI standards and modest enough to run on local hardware. The headline feature is what AWS calls a “pointer head.” It’s a lightweight add-on with approximately 1 million parameters. The pointer head looks at a set of predefined options and scores them directly, picking the best fit without generating text word by word to reach a conclusion. That design choice matters for two reasons. Fewer generated words means lower token usage, and tokens are how AI providers typically measure, and bill, model work. The second payoff is speed. AWS reports the model can make decisions in under 100 milliseconds on common hardware, including the NVIDIA RTX 3090. How it stacks up on JevBench AWS tested the model on JevBench, a benchmark for decision models. Strands Decider 2B posted a perfect score on the benchmark’s easy tier. Across the full benchmark, the model ranks second among public models of roughly 2 billion parameters. Among models that ship with a comp...