From the lab to the marketplace
Is it possible for Waterloo professor to successfully bridge academic research and industry innovation, especially in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence?
The answer, it turns out, is Yupp.
Jimmy Lin is a professor of computer science and David R. Cheriton Chair in Software Systems, as well as co-director of the Waterloo Data & Artificial Intelligence Institute. He is also the chief scientist at Yupp, an AI startup that launched last month with more than $33 million in seed funding, led by the veteran investor Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).
Yupp allows users to check out and compare more than 600 different AIs such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek for free, and in turn helps their creators improve the quality of their products. The company came out of “stealth” about a month ago with the ambition of tackling the challenges of robust and trustworthy AI evaluation. Although Yupp is still quite early, Professor Lin and his team have already evaluated several recent AI models, including Grok-4 (from xAI) and Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite (Google’s latest offering), revealing strong user preferences for speed.
While Yupp is based in Mountain View, California, Professor Lin is running a Waterloo office focused on research out of the Communitech hub with the help of a few intrepid co-op students.
For Professor Lin, the relationship between industry and academia is a mutually enriching one. His goal is to align the research of his group at Waterloo with his work at Yupp, putting into practice this mutual exchange of knowledge to the benefit of both.
“I find great satisfaction in translating innovations from the lab into the real world and achieving broad impact,” he says. “Real-world use cases are almost always different from what you imagine in the lab. And that knowledge can be distilled to further inform your research.”
- Read the full article on Waterloo News