ExpertCrowd and HUD Collaborate to Advance AI Training and Evaluation, Release SWE Benchmark. SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - ExpertCrowd, Toptal's platform for training and improving AI models and systems, today announced a collaboration with HUD, a Y Combinator-backed startup that provides tools for building AI training data through its DataVendor(TM) marketplace. Together, the teams released ExpertCrowd-SWE, a software engineering benchmark that evaluates the performance of frontier-grade LLMs and coding agents. As AI systems take on increasingly complex work, measuring their capabilities requires tasks that reflect professional practice and grading criteria that capture what successful execution actually means. This collaboration brings together ExpertCrowd's expert-led task development and HUD's infrastructure for running complex RL environments. ExpertCrowd and HUD co-developed ExpertCrowd-SWE, bringing together engineers from Toptal's global network of highly skilled domain experts with HUD's experience collaborating with frontier research teams. After Toptal's experts authored tasks and grading rubrics, HUD's infrastructure hosted task-run environments and verified the benchmarks against internal quality assurance pipelines. HUD and Toptal's AI research teams, composed of more than a dozen PhDs and researchers with educational or professional experience at Harvard, EPFL, the University of Liège, DeepMind, Qwen, and ByteDance, reviewed and assessed the methodology and results to build one of the most robust software engineering benchmarks in the industry. "ExpertCrowd puts practitioners at the center of defining the work AI systems should perform and judging how well they perform it. By combining that specialized expertise with HUD's testing infrastructure, we're advancing what AI systems can achieve and setting a higher standard for real-world performance," said Taso Du Val, founder and CEO of Toptal. ExpertCrowd-SWE is the first release of an ongoing Toptal-HUD collaboration, with additional initiatives in development and further announcements coming soon. Building on this foundation, ExpertCrowd and HUD will bring more specialized human expertise into the tasks, environments, and evaluations that support the next generation of AI. "We built HUD's infrastructure to give research teams the tools to create realistic RL training environments, run evaluations across AI models, and inspect model performance. ExpertCrowd put that infrastructure to work, bringing the professional expertise to translate complex, real-world workflows into rigorous tasks, reference outputs, and evaluation frameworks that test the limits of today's leading AI models," said Jay Ram, founder and CEO of HUD. About ExpertCrowd ExpertCrowd is Toptal's platform for training and improving AI models and systems through RLHF, RL data generation, data labeling, and model evaluation. It is powered by Toptal's global talent network, with more than 30,000 specialized domain experts across 140+ countries, including more than 2,000 AI and big data specialists, 12,000 professionals with advanced degrees, and 1,000 PhD-level AI specialists, available on demand. For more information, please visit ExpertCrowd.com. HUD is a platform for building reinforcement learning environments, used by startups, Fortune 500 companies, and frontier labs. It provides infrastructure for training models, evaluating AI agents, and creating the post-training data that aligns AI to organizations' work. HUD's mission is to build reliable, fair, and open infrastructure for AI data with the goal of making data valuable for the people who create it and trustworthy for the labs that train on it. DataVendor(TM) is HUD's marketplace, which allows AI labs to license training and evaluation data directly from the companies that created it. For more information, please visit HUD.ai. FONTE Toptal

Toptal launches ExpertCrowd to train AI with vetted domain experts, releases frontier SWE benchmark. Oct 13, 2026, 12:00 ET SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 13, 2026 /CNW/ - Toptal, the world's largest talent network of highly skilled domain experts, today announced the launch of ExpertCrowd, a platform for training and improving AI models and systems through RLHF, RL data generation, data labeling, and model evaluation. ExpertCrowd combines its advanced platform for AI model development and testing with Toptal's global network of specialized talent to help frontier AI labs, innovative enterprises, and fast-growing startups build more accurate and capable AI models and systems. The platform enables organizations to move beyond generalized crowdsourcing and data annotation and apply highly specialized human judgment to develop and improve AI applications and models across industries including financial services, healthcare, legal, biotechnology, cybersecurity, and more. ExpertCrowd is powered by Toptal's global talent network, with more than 30,000 specialized domain experts across 140+ countries, including more than 2,000 AI and big data specialists, 12,000 professionals with advanced degrees, and 1,000 PhD-level AI specialists, available on demand. ExpertCrowd matches thousands of specialized experts to AI alignment and training projects instantaneously, enabling organizations to rapidly scale such projects with confidence. Its AI-driven sourcing engine was developed in-house by Toptal's AI research team, composed of more than a dozen PhDs and researchers from leading institutions such as Harvard, EPFL, and the University of Liège, using 15 years of Toptal's proprietary data in sourcing, screening, and matching highly skilled domain experts. Offering multimodal annotation with customizable workflows and live project tracking, ExpertCrowd provides real-time progress updates as domain experts do the actual work. AI researchers applying GRPO, PPO, and other RL techniques have leveraged ExpertCrowd's platform to further the development of their AI models and systems. Prior to today's official launch, ExpertCrowd generated over $5 million in recurring revenue from work with frontier and neo labs, as well as companies including Scale AI, Sterling Labs, Vetto, and other innovative startups that service frontier labs. As part of the launch, ExpertCrowd has developed and published the ExpertCrowd-SWE benchmark, which evaluates SOTA AI coding agents on previously unseen issues. The ExpertCrowd-SWE benchmark exposes the most significant deficiencies in model capability relative to any other currently published SWE benchmark. ExpertCrowd-SWE spans 87 codebases in 11 programming languages. Engineers from Toptal's talent network led the development of this benchmark and authored every task as well as each grading rubric. Researchers, including several PhDs in various areas of artificial intelligence from Toptal's AI team, reviewed and assessed the benchmark's methodology and results. "The fact that our SWE benchmark results expose the most deficiencies relative to any other published benchmark on leading models such as Opus 5.5 and Fable 5.1 demonstrates our ability to push frontier AI forward," said Taso Du Val, founder and CEO of Toptal. "Developing frontier AI models requires more than just powerful compute. It requires specialized human expertise to train, evaluate, and continuously improve these models. ExpertCrowd brings together the technology and domain expertise required to build and train AI models and systems for executing complex, real-world tasks with precision." About Toptal Toptal is the world's largest talent network of highly skilled domain experts, connecting businesses with the top 3% of freelance talent on demand. Toptal was ranked the #1 Most Reliable Professional Services Company in America by Newsweek and Statista, based on an independent survey of more than 2,400 decision-makers at Fortune 500s. Founded in 2010, Toptal has served more than 35,000 clients across more than 140 countries. For more information, please visit Toptal.com. SOURCE Toptal

Toptal, a network of freelance domain experts, has launched ExpertCrowd, a platform that trains and improves AI models using vetted specialists. It supports reinforcement learning from human feedback, data labelling, and model evaluation for AI labs, enterprises, and startups. ExpertCrowd draws on more than 30,000 experts in over 140 countries, including 1,000 PhD-level AI specialists. Before launch, it generated over $5 million in recurring revenue from clients including Scale AI, Sterling Labs, and Vetto. The company also published the ExpertCrowd-SWE benchmark, which tests AI coding agents on unseen issues across 87 codebases and 11 programming languages. Toptal says it exposes more model deficiencies than any other published software engineering benchmark. "Developing frontier AI models requires more than just powerful compute," said chief executive officer Taso Du Val.