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Phind.com Is Shutting Down

phind.com

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Re: Phind.com Is Shutting Down

#11

Post by hobofan »

minimaxir wrote: post #3

That's a surprise given they did a Launch HN 40 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137548

They also raised $10M at that time. I assume there were conditions to that deal and/or the launch didn't really turn the trajectory around and they saw the writing on the wall.

While I admittedly also haven't been using them for quite some time, it's sad to see them shutdown. For me they were the first ones that did web search in AI chat well enough to make AI actually into a useful daily tool.

Re: Phind.com Is Shutting Down

#12

Post by etyhhgfff »

For me the point when things started to went south is when they swiched from gpt4 to phind-70b as driver behind their answers.

I would rather have exected they make a deal with OpenAI or Anthropic, ... and use one of their models at discount while improving the search functionality.

Re: Phind.com Is Shutting Down

#13

Post by pu_pe »

etyhhgfff wrote: post #12

For me the point when things started to went south is when they swiched from gpt4 to phind-70b as driver behind their answers. I would rather have exected they make a deal with OpenAI or Anthropic, ... and use one of their models at discount while improving the search functionality.

I used Phind quite a bit about a year ago and thought they were actually very good. In comparison to Perplexity, for example, I thought results were simply much better. I guess at some point the approach of finetuning their own models could not scale, and using third-party APIs would just be prohibitive as well.

Congratulations to the team though, for what it's worth I really liked the product.

Re: Phind.com Is Shutting Down

#16

Post by ashleyn »

hobofan wrote: post #11
minimaxir wrote: post #3

That's a surprise given they did a Launch HN 40 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137548

They also raised $10M at that time. I assume there were conditions to that deal and/or the launch didn't really turn the trajectory around and they saw the writing on the wall. While I admittedly also haven't been using them for quite some time, it's sad to see them shutdown. For me they were the first ones that did web search in AI chat well enough to make AI actually into a useful daily tool.

Phind was the first AI search I used as well. But they seemed to be quickly outfoxed by Perplexity. I started using Perplexity after it was recommended to me as having fewer hallucinations - now it can integrate its tools with SOTA models like Opus.

Re: Phind.com Is Shutting Down

#17

Post by not_anthropic »

Phind shut down because its small team failed to listen to the community, with minimal engagement from Michael on Discord. Michael is known for a "vibe-heavy" work style, making grand promises but missing every deadline. He proved to be smooth-talking, using sweet words to placate users, a pattern that was glaringly obvious to anyone in the community. Furthermore, the product was largely an API wrapper with a lagging model. Their strategy was highly inconsistent, switching from Qwen to GLM in a short time, showing a complete lack of direction.

Re: Phind.com Is Shutting Down

#19

Post by BinStorm »

Man this one hurt, I try to avoid AI, but felt this project was really helpful. Someone else commented about how this maybe unsustainable without Mega Corp funding and they maybe right. It's scary that we are losing more and more alternatives to the Google's of the world...

Ouch.

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