Yandex has closed almost all international startups in the field of AI

According to online sources, Yandex has closed almost all international projects in the field of machine learning that were launched in 2022. At that time, the company registered the Beyond ML holding in the USA and Armenia, which was promoting 10 projects in the field of artificial intelligence, but not so long ago information about them disappeared from the official website of the holding.

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According to the source, 8 out of 10 projects ceased to exist. Thus, the startup Lawrify, which was working on a neural network for checking legal documents, closed at the beginning of this year. It is noted that organic traffic on the Lawrify website did not even reach triple-digit values. The startup Smelter, which developed an AI media analysis service focused on Latin America, ceased operations in August. For the last few months, the sites Sellesta (an AI platform for sellers on Amazon), Membrace (an AI platform for content moderation), Recommendix (a platform for managing prices and assortment on marketplaces), askthecrowd (a tool for testing a service/product/service on real people) have been unavailable before its launch), Tune The Model (provided GPT-like language models as a service) and Tune The Ads (an AI service for generating ad texts in Google Ads).

Despite this, two international Yandex startups continue to operate. The Meteum service application, which uses AI algorithms for weather forecasting, has been downloaded more than 2 million times on Google Play and about 100 thousand times on the Apple App Store. The product is most popular in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. In addition, an AI service for translating videos into more than 70 languages ​​called Neurodub continues to operate, but is now called Dubformer and has a different legal address (Amsterdam and Belgrade). It is assumed that the service no longer belongs to Yandex and cooperates with Arkady Volozh’s Nebius company.

A representative from the Yandex press service said that the company is constantly investing in new ideas, some of which eventually turn into services used by millions of people, while others “remain at the experimental level.” According to the developer, company employees can implement different projects in different teams, often moving from one direction to another. In the future, Yandex intends to continue “experimenting and testing hypotheses, creating new useful tools and services.”