Yupp.ai shuts down after raising $33M from a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon

Sometimes an seemingly bully idea, a large rise from a big-name VC, and a oversea of well-connected angel investors is not enough.

Less than a twelvemonth aft launching, Yupp.ai is closing its business, co-founders Pankaj Gupta and Gilad Mishne announced connected Tuesday.

Yupp offered a crowdsourced AI model-picking service. It allowed consumers to trial and comparison results from a proviso of 800 AI models for free, including the state-of-the-art ones from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic. Yupp would instrumentality aggregate replies from the punctual request, including accusation oregon images, and users would connection feedback connected which models worked champion for them and why.

The thought was to make anonymized information connected what radical really request from AI that the exemplary makers would past wage for. Yupp said it signed up 1.3 cardinal users and collected millions of preferences each month. It adjacent had a leaderboard. The institution said it besides had a fewer AI labs arsenic customers.

But alas, “we didn’t scope a beardown capable product-market fit” to survive, successful portion due to the fact that AI models improved by specified leaps and bounds these past fewer months, the founders said.

While labs are paying large bucks for feedback, the existent exemplary — pioneered by companies similar Scale AI and Mercor — is to prosecute specialty experts, similar PhDs, and tuck them into the reinforcement learning loop.

On apical of that, Silicon Valley is already looking 10 miles down the road, erstwhile AI is built for, and being utilized by, different AIs. Model makers mightiness privation immoderate user feedback now, but they are mostly gathering for the time erstwhile agents, not humans, rule the online world.

“The AI exemplary capableness scenery has changed dramatically successful the past twelvemonth unsocial and volition proceed to alteration quickly,” Gupta, Yupp.ai’s CEO, wrote successful a station connected X astir the plans to shutter. “The aboriginal is not conscionable models but agentic systems.”

Yupp.ai raised a $33 cardinal effect circular successful 2024 led by a16z crypto’s Chris Dixon, a elephantine effect circular for its day. In addition, Yupp.ai raised checks from much than 45 angels and tiny investors, it said. This included luminaries similar Google DeepMind main idiosyncratic Jeff Dean; Twitter co-founder Biz Stone; Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp; and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas.

Gupta said immoderate of Yupp’s employees are joining a “well known” AI company, and others are looking for their adjacent gig. Yupp.ai did not instantly respond to TechCrunch’s petition for comment.