Phind.com Is Shutting Down

[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.

[minimaxir]

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

[hobofan]

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.

[foundarium]

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

[usefulposter]

>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?

[nicce]

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?

[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.

[BojanTomic]

A great tool will be missed. I wrote an eulogy if someone wants to pay their last respects. https://intelligenttools.co/blog/improved-phind-shutdown-pos...

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/phind

[foundarium]

Better hurry up and apply for one of those jobs!

[n1xis10t]

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

[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.

[pu_pe]

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.

[rvz]

What happened? 40 Days ago they did a Launch HN. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137548

[Havoc]

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.