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Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

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Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#21
Your methodology is nice.

Is there any work or planned work around enterprise authentication and access? For instance, indexing Sharepoint in such a way where a user of Danswer isn't exposed to sharepoint information they wouldn't otherwise have access to?

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#23
post #19

Are you using anything like Llamaindex internally or did you write it from scratch without the assistance form a helping wrapper like this?

We use LlamaIndex very sparingly. Specifically the context aware document chunking functionality is via LlamaIndex.

We couldn't use the more involved pipelines because we needed significant custom logic to enforce permissions, filters (like time filter, source filter, document-set filters), and other complexities. At that point, it's easier to write from scratch rather than conform to expectations of these third party libraries.

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#25
Does the GitHub connector imply ability to ask questions of an entire code base, such as: “help me write an endpoint to style of our codebase.”

I believe there are a variety of projects focused on that problem but would be good to latch onto one that handles and integrates externalities.

Speaking of which I did not see sentry in the list of connections or mentioned in an issue. Any plans there?

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#26

Congrats on the launch! Does it search within pdf files?

Thanks! Yes, it does do PDFs. We don't do anything fancy with it though like Optical Character Recognition (OCR). So pictures of text, as well as images and graphs will be lost. This is something we will work on though.

Is this something that you would find a lot of value in or is simple text processing of PDFs sufficient?

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#27
post #19

Are you using anything like Llamaindex internally or did you write it from scratch without the assistance form a helping wrapper like this?

We use LlamaIndex very sparingly. Specifically the context aware document chunking functionality is via LlamaIndex. We couldn't use the more involved pipelines because we needed significant custom logic to enforce permissions, filters (like time filter, source filter, document-set filters), and other complexities. At that point, it's easier to write from scratch rather than conform to expectations of these third part…

I was considering starting a project just like this using Llamaindex but I think I'll give yours a try first before going that route. Looks good. Thank you.

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#28
post #24

Another question. If I host this publicly for people that I work with on their data, how can I make sure that it's only them that can access the service? Do you have any form of auth?

Yes! There is Basic Auth (email + password with email verification) and Google OAuth available in the free version.

We also do OIDC and SAML to integration with Identity Providers (IdPs) like Okta but that's part of the paid features. Ahhh please don't hate us!

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most of the files I have, I'm most interested in finding graphs and then updating relevant data. it looks like the best way to do that is understand the ooxml format in xlsx. it's all fairly easy to understand.

Ya, parsing the file is generally not bad at all. The problem comes with the fact that LLMs are notoriously bad with numbers and formatted data. So the current approach of passing relevant information to the LLM and asking it to generate answers will produce misleading information when larger tables are passed in. By asking the LLM to generate a formula though, it doesn't actually need to do any number crunching of i…

I've limited my expectations for LLM support to file management. locating relevant datasets or filing away things. the interactive QA just don't seem salient beyond some high level.

Re: Launch HN: Danswer (YC W24) – Open-source AI search and chat over private data

#30
post #21

Your methodology is nice. Is there any work or planned work around enterprise authentication and access? For instance, indexing Sharepoint in such a way where a user of Danswer isn't exposed to sharepoint information they wouldn't otherwise have access to?

Thank you!

Yes, there are several options for user authentication (Basic Auth, Google OAuth, OIDC, SAML).

Currently the RBAC is managed via the Danswer and this controls who has access to which documents (it's done at the connector level as it would be untenable to assign access to documents individually).

We're also working on automatically sync-ing permissions from the sources. Basically seeing which emails have access to each doc and mapping it to the Danswer users.

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