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.
That "launch" was when they introduced a feature that made their service unusable.
I wonder if they had stuck with the unintrusive UI if they would have made it.
From the outside it looks like they would have benefitted from having Bill Hicks on their staff to answer whatever project manager was riding the designers to keep justifying their paychecks by adding more and more noisy features.
Maybe they have come to hard conclusion that it is unsustainable without Google/Meta/Microsoft level funding. Model prices just keep increasing while old models are removed. Subscription is not enough?
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.
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.
That "launch" was when they introduced a feature that made their service unusable.
I wonder if they had stuck with the unintrusive UI if they would have made it.
From the outside it looks like they would have benefitted from having Bill Hicks on their staff to answer whatever project manager was riding the designers to keep justifying their paychecks by adding more and more noisy features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO-fq8Feqfo
>With Phind 3, we create a "personal internet" for you
>We think that this current "chat" era of AI is akin to the era of text-only interfaces in computers.
>The new Phind Fast model is based on GLM-4.5-Air while the new Phind Large model is based on GLM 4.6.
So... vaporware that could no longer compete with the big three frontier LLM firms?
Maybe they have come to hard conclusion that it is unsustainable without Google/Meta/Microsoft level funding. Model prices just keep increasing while old models are removed. Subscription is not enough?
Whenever search engines shut down like this with no explanation, it reminds me of this article in 2600 magazine: https://archive.org/details/search-timeline
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/phind
Better hurry up and apply for one of those jobs!
That's one way to get severance.
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.
Got a "please come back we'll give you a discount" email a week or so back. I guess that was last attempt to stabilize things.
What happened? 40 Days ago they did a Launch HN. [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137548