Sometimes a seemingly good idea, big funding from a big-name venture capital firm, and a well-connected angel investor aren’t enough.
Co-founders Pankaj Gupta and Gilad Mishne announced on Tuesday that Yap would be winding down, less than a year after launching.
Yupp provided a crowdsourced AI model selection service. This allowed consumers to test and compare results from a supply of 800 AI models for free, including state-of-the-art models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Yupp returns multiple responses to prompt requests, including information and images, and users provide feedback on which model is best for them and why.
The idea was that AI would generate anonymized data about what people actually need, and model makers would pay for it. Yupp said 1.3 million users have registered and it collects millions of preferences each month. There was also a leaderboard. The company said it also has several AI labs as customers.
But sadly, the company’s founders said the “product-market fit was not strong enough” to survive, in part because its AI models have improved dramatically in recent months.
Labs pay big bucks for feedback, but the current model, pioneered by companies like Scale AI and Mercor, is to hire experts, such as Ph.D.s, and incorporate them into the reinforcement learning loop.
What’s more, Silicon Valley is already looking 10 miles ahead, where AI will be built for and used by other AIs. Model makers may be seeking consumer feedback now, but they’re primarily building for the day when agents, not humans, rule the online world.
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“The state of AI model functionality has changed dramatically in the last year alone, and will continue to change rapidly in the future,” Yupp CEO Gupta wrote about the plan’s demise in a post on X. “The future is not just a model, it’s an agent system.”
In 2024, Yap raised a $33 million seed round led by Chris Dixon of a16z cryptocurrency, which was a huge seed round at the time. In addition, Yap said he collected checks from more than 45 angels and small investors. This included celebrities like Jeff Dean, chief scientist at Google DeepMind. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest. and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.
Mr. Gupta said that some Yap employees are joining “well-known” AI companies, while others are looking for their next job. Yupp did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
