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.
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.