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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

#31

Post by yuhongsun »

tibanne wrote: post #27
yuhongsun wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think these developer platforms like LlamaIndex and Langchain are super great for prototyping and understanding the crowdsourced best approaches in solving these new LLM related challenges.

Depending on how custom the pipelines need to be, you'll either find that you've saved a huge amount of time using these libraries, or you'll find that you have no option but to switch off and build from scratch.

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

#32

Post by tibanne »

yuhongsun wrote: post #28
tibanne wrote: 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!

With the free version, can I constrain the emails to be from one domain? i.e. the company domain

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

#33

Post by yuhongsun »

cyanydeez wrote: post #29
yuhongsun wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of people are very bullish on AI, it's very interesting to hear the opposite side. My opinion is that LLMs are very powerful at digesting and distilling knowledge which is why we built this project. I also think that LLMs are terrible reasoning engines and so agent-flows are not quite ready for primetime.

Would love to hear your perspective on the space!

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

#35

Post by yuhongsun »

bredren wrote: post #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?

Code search is something we have in our sights in the next couple months. Currently the GitHub connector pulls in PRs and Issues but not the whole code base. We wanted to have the best RAG pipeline so we deep dived on that. Code search uses a combination of graph based traversals and a different type of embedding so it's a separate effort, but we will definitely build it out since it's immensely useful to engineering teams!

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

#36

Post by yuhongsun »

Akashic101 wrote: post #34

What an amazing tool, I cant wait to implement this in our workflow. How well does this work with documents in other languages besides English?

Glad you asked! We are actually the only project (open source or closed), as far as I know, that handles multilingual quite well. We have options to do multilingual query-expansion and also multilingual embedding models.

Without dropping any names, a big french company with 5000 people is actually doing this with Danswer and have found great success.

There is some info here: https://docs.danswer.dev/configuration_guide You'll also want to change the embedding model in the admin UI

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

#37

Post by [deleted] »

yuhongsun wrote: post #35
bredren wrote: post #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?

Code search is something we have in our sights in the next couple months. Currently the GitHub connector pulls in PRs and Issues but not the whole code base. We wanted to have the best RAG pipeline so we deep dived on that. Code search uses a combination of graph based traversals and a different type of embedding so it's a separate effort, but we will definitely build it out since it's immensely useful to engineering…

[deleted]

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

#38

Post by yuhongsun »

bredren wrote: post #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?

So the intent of the GitHub/GitLab connector in the current iteration is to help people easily find implementations that have been done before. For example, if a new bug comes up with some feature, I can easily search for the PRs relating to that feature in natural language and filter down the code changes that may have caused it.

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

#39

Post by BrandiATMuhkuh »

This is really nice. Congratulations for launching.

Just the last 2-3 weeks have I had talks with enterprise companies regarding this topic. It seems to be on every CEO's agenda. I have talked to a couple of startups who wanted to do a similar thing to you. But they all feared Microsoft Copilot is not beatable. So they don't even try.

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

#40

Post by yuhongsun »

BrandiATMuhkuh wrote: post #39

This is really nice. Congratulations for launching. Just the last 2-3 weeks have I had talks with enterprise companies regarding this topic. It seems to be on every CEO's agenda. I have talked to a couple of startups who wanted to do a similar thing to you. But they all feared Microsoft Copilot is not beatable. So they don't even try.

This is also another reason why we think OSS is the way to go here. Taking on the tech giants alone is definitely a daunting task (maybe even impossible for a small isolated team).

The hope is that by working with the community, we'll be able to incorporate the best ideas and contributions from a large pool of like-minded people to build something everyone can benefit from!

The OSS space has absolutely taken off in the NLP space and the excitement has bled over to developer platforms resulting in some outstanding projects, hopefully the same will happen with LLM applications.

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