Yupp shuts down after raising $33M from a16z crypto's Chris Dixon | TechCrunch
About this article
Less than a year after launching, with checks from some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, crowdsourced AI model feedback startup Yupp is closing its business, the company said Tuesday.
Sometimes an apparently good idea, a big raise from a big-name VC, and a sea of well-connected angel investors is not enough. Less than a year after launching, Yupp is closing its business, co-founders Pankaj Gupta and Gilad Mishne announced on Tuesday. Yupp offered a crowdsourced AI model-picking service. It allowed consumers to test and compare results from a supply of 800 AI models for free, including the state-of-the-art ones from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Yupp would return multiple replies from the prompt request, including information or images, and users would offer feedback on which models worked best for them and why. The idea was to generate anonymized data on what people actually need from AI that the model makers would then pay for. Yupp said it signed up 1.3 million users and collected millions of preferences every month. It even had a leaderboard. The company said it also had a few AI labs as customers. But alas, it “didn’t reach a strong enough product-market fit” to survive, in part because AI models improved by such leaps and bounds these past few months, the founders said. While labs are paying big bucks for feedback, the current model — pioneered by companies like Scale AI and Mercor — is to hire specialty experts, like PhDs, and tuck them into the reinforcement learning loop. On top of that, Silicon Valley is already looking 10 miles down the road, when AI is built for, and being used by, other AIs. Model makers might want some consumer feedback no...
