OpenAI hires team behind GV-backed AI eval platform Context.ai

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Context.ai, a startup building evaluations and analytics for AI models, announced Tuesday that its co-founders will join OpenAI. 

Context.ai plans to wind down its products following the acqui-hire, per a message on the company’s website. When reached for comment, OpenAI declined to reveal the terms of the deal.

“Evals are a requirement to building high-performing AI applications, but they’re hard to get right today,” reads the message. “We spent two years building evals and analytics for [models] at Context.ai — with a few pivots along the way. We couldn’t be more excited for this next chapter of our journey at OpenAI and are grateful to everyone who played a part.”

Context.ai was founded in 2023 by former Googlers Henry Scott-Green (CEO) and Alex Gamble (CTO). The startup raised $3.5 million in seed funding from GV and Theory Ventures that same year.

One of Context.ai’s flagship products was a dashboard customers could use to dig into the data generated by a model and figure out if it’s producing content that truly helps answer queries. Context.ai users could share transcripts via an API, which Context.ai would then analyze to group and tag based on subject.

“The phrase that I always hear is that ‘my model is a black box,’” Scott-Green told TechCrunch in a 2023 interview. “We’ve spoken to hundreds of developers who are building [models], and they have a really consistent set of problems. Those problems are that they don’t understand how people are using their model, and they don’t understand how their model is performing.”

Context.ai had six employees as of August 2023. It’s unclear how large the team is today, and whether every staffer will be offered a job at OpenAI.

In a post on X, Scott-Green said that he and Gamble will be creating “the tools developers need to succeed” at OpenAI, with a focus on model evaluations. According to Scott-Green’s LinkedIn profile, he’s now a product manager at OpenAI “building evals.”