Phind.com Is Shutting Down

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.

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.

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?

Better hurry up and apply for one of those jobs!