Yupp.ai Shuts Down After Raising $33m From A16z Crypto’s Chris Dixon

Sometimes an apparently bully idea, a large raise 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 nan state-of-the-art ones from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic. Yupp would return aggregate replies from nan punctual request, including accusation aliases images, and users would connection feedback connected which models worked champion for them and why.

The thought was to make anonymized information connected what group really request from AI that nan exemplary makers would past salary for. Yupp said it signed up 1.3 cardinal users and collected millions of preferences each month. It moreover 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 because AI models improved by specified leaps and bounds these past fewer months, nan founders said.

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

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

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

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

Gupta said immoderate of Yupp’s labor 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.