Cool product. Few Qs: - What would you say is the agentic approach's special sauce over a typical RAG pipeline, ie query->multi-query generation->HyDE->vector search->bm25 search->RRF->rerank->evaluate->(retry|refuse|respond) that differentiates the approach? - If a user has 20 services connected, how does the agent know how to call/search/traverse the information in the right order? - Do you have any internal evals…
If I understand correctly, they are indexing all of the docs together rather than relying on the agent to retrieve them.
Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications
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Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications
#12Very cool! One question: how do you handle permissions? Different apps have different permissions models, not everyone is allowed to see everything. Do you attempt to model this complexity at all or normalize it to some general permissions model?
edit: added clarification
Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications
#13Onyx is as close as to magic you can get in this space. It just. Works. I can talk for literally hours about how good it is when you connect it to your company's Confluence or Jira or Slack or Google Drive or a ton of other things. At a scale of many tens of thousands of documents too. Their team is awesome too and completely tuned into exactly what their users need. And that it's open source is the cherry on top. No…
Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications
#14The demo looked sharp but I am curious if you have done any formal evaluation of the quality of the results? For example, MRR and recall@k, even on a toy dataset? Seems like the quality of the generated responses will be highly dependent on the docs which are retrieved.
I am also interested in how to do eval on an open source corporate search system. Privacy and information security make this challenging, right?
So basically you can have it completely airgapped from the outside world, the only tough part is the local LLM but there are lots of options for that these days.
Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications
#15Cool product. Few Qs: - What would you say is the agentic approach's special sauce over a typical RAG pipeline, ie query->multi-query generation->HyDE->vector search->bm25 search->RRF->rerank->evaluate->(retry|refuse|respond) that differentiates the approach? - If a user has 20 services connected, how does the agent know how to call/search/traverse the information in the right order? - Do you have any internal evals…
The agent part is the loop of running the LLM over RAG system and letting it decide which questions it wants to explore more (some similarities to retry|refuse|respond I guess?). We also have the model do CoT over its own results including over the subquestions it generates.
Essentially it is the deep research paradigm with some more parallelism and a document index backing it.
How does the agent traverse the information: there are index-free approaches where the LLM has to use the searches of the tools. This gives worse results than approaches that build a coherent index across sources. We use the latter approach. So the search occurs over our index which is a central place for all the knowledge across all connected tools.
Do you have any internal evals on how well the different model affect the overall quality of output, esp for a "deep search" type of task? I have model-picker fatigue: Yes, we have datasets that we use internally. It comprises of "company type data" rather than "web type" data (like short Slack messages, very technical design documents, etc.) comprising about 10K documents and 500 questions.
For which model to use: it was developed primarily against gpt-4o but we retuned the prompts to work with all the recent models like Claude 3.5, Gemini, Deepseek, etc.
Do you plan to implement knowledge graphs in the future? Yes! We're looking into customizing LLM based knowledge graphs like LightGraphRAG (inspired by, but not the same).
Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications
#16Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I understand correctly, they are indexing all of the docs together rather than relying on the agent to retrieve them.
That sounds like RAG though, right?
Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications
#18Very cool! One question: how do you handle permissions? Different apps have different permissions models, not everyone is allowed to see everything. Do you attempt to model this complexity at all or normalize it to some general permissions model?
For example, Google Drive docs have permissions like "global public", "domain public", "private" where "private" is shared with users and groups and there's also the document owner.
Slack has public channels, private channels, DMs, group DMs.
So we need to map these external objects and their external users/groups into a unified representation within Onyx.
Then there are additional challenges like rate limiting so we cannot poll at subsecond intervals.
The way that we do it is we have async jobs that check for object permission updates and group/user updates against the external sources at a configurable frequency (with defaults that depend on the external source type).
Of course, always failing-closed instead of failing-open and defaulting to least permissive.
Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications
#19How is the data stored? E.g. for concerns about internal data leaking out?
At rest, the data is stored in Postgres and Vespa (the hybrid index), both of which are part of the deployment so it's all local.
The part that typically goes external is the LLM but many teams also host local LLMs to use with Onyx. In either case, the LLM is not being finetuned, the knowledge relevant to the question is passed in as part of the user message.
We built Onyx with data security in mind so we're very proud of the way the data flows within the system. We made the system work well with models that can run without GPUs as well so our users can get good quality results even if deploying on a laptop.
Re: Show HN: Open-source Deep Research across workplace applications
#20The demo looked sharp but I am curious if you have done any formal evaluation of the quality of the results? For example, MRR and recall@k, even on a toy dataset? Seems like the quality of the generated responses will be highly dependent on the docs which are retrieved.
We checked the recall at 4K tokens (which was a pretty typical token limit of the previous generation of LLMs) and we were at over 94% recall for our 10K document set. We also added a lot of noise to it (Slack messages from public Slack workspaces) to get hundreds of thousands of documents but recall remained at over 90%.