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

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51–60 of 134 posts

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

#51
I've been planning on building some of this for an internal tool, but now it looks like I don't have to. I'm impressed by the demo, it looks really polished.

I'm particularly surprised by the speed considering all of the pre and post processing. I am doing some similar things and that is one bottlenecks. I'll dig in, but I'm curious what models you are using for each of these steps.

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

#52
post #51

I've been planning on building some of this for an internal tool, but now it looks like I don't have to. I'm impressed by the demo, it looks really polished. I'm particularly surprised by the speed considering all of the pre and post processing. I am doing some similar things and that is one bottlenecks. I'll dig in, but I'm curious what models you are using for each of these steps.

A lot of teams we talk to switched from an in-house solution to either directly using Danswer or building on top of Danswer. Glad you liked the demo!

We're using E5 base by default but there's an embedding model admin page to choose alternatives. There's also an API for it if you know what you're doing, you can even set one of the billion+ parameter LLM bi-encoders if you want (but you'd need a GPU for sure).

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

#53
Congrats on launching guys.

When I was in consulting, being able to search our internal documents was absurdly painful.

We had all this data from client teams spanning decades and continents, but I could never find what I needed. It was all locked up in these silly PowerPoint files -- not even necessarily PDFs. I'd literally spend all night sometimes clicking through pages by hand.

Corporate knowledge management is an absolutely immense problem, and I'm thrilled to see you tackling it.

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

#55
post #6

Interesting! I’m curious about the busines model. I see more and more YC companies that are FOSS, which is nice. Why did you choose a FOSS license instead of proprietary with a license fee? What are your plans for securing funding for further development? Would be very interesting to hear your thoughts on this. Congrats on the launch!

We chose FOSS because we think this type of tool will be universal in the near future. We likely won't be able to directly serve millions of teams ourselves by the time it happens but by open sourcing, if teams want it, they can just set it up. Especially with small teams that have no budget, they can get value and never need to talk to us. We hope to grow with them. In terms of funding and the economics of it, we ha…

Ok, cool. Best of luck with Danswer!

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

#56
post #53

Congrats on launching guys. When I was in consulting, being able to search our internal documents was absurdly painful. We had all this data from client teams spanning decades and continents, but I could never find what I needed. It was all locked up in these silly PowerPoint files -- not even necessarily PDFs. I'd literally spend all night sometimes clicking through pages by hand. Corporate knowledge management is a…

Ya, there's definitely a common thread there! A lot of consulting firms have given us very positive feedback from using Danswer. I think the nature of the time-framed projects and frequent scope changes mean that people have to always take in new information and a lot of documented knowledge is lost or at least difficult to find.

A great use case for sure!

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

#57
post #54

I would suggest putting real time ingestion on the roadmap; that would unlock a lot of new use cases. Did you use a library to implement the integrations?

Do you mean directly uploading files in the UI and chatting against those files? This one will be done within the next few weeks, it's a very high value item for sure.

Alternatively, if you're talking about real time indexing to make it available to everyone immediately, there's an Ingestion API, where users can send documents in the expected format directly to the system, is this what you're thinking?

The integrations are built in house, some using client libraries of the particular tool (like the Atlassian python client library for example). We considered using Airbyte, LlamaHub etc. but we found that they don't support the full flexibility that we need, including pulling incremental updates and access permissions.

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

#58
post #54

I would suggest putting real time ingestion on the roadmap; that would unlock a lot of new use cases. Did you use a library to implement the integrations?

Do you mean directly uploading files in the UI and chatting against those files? This one will be done within the next few weeks, it's a very high value item for sure. Alternatively, if you're talking about real time indexing to make it available to everyone immediately, there's an Ingestion API, where users can send documents in the expected format directly to the system, is this what you're thinking? The integratio…

I mean streaming insertions and indexing using pub/sub or something.

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

#59
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean directly uploading files in the UI and chatting against those files? This one will be done within the next few weeks, it's a very high value item for sure. Alternatively, if you're talking about real time indexing to make it available to everyone immediately, there's an Ingestion API, where users can send documents in the expected format directly to the system, is this what you're thinking? The integratio…

I mean streaming insertions and indexing using pub/sub or something.

Got it, we considered it but most connectors that we pull from don't support this. Might bring it back for the ones that do, thanks for the suggestion!

It's actually still in the code, just none of the connectors implement it atm: https://github.com/danswer-ai/danswer/blob/main/backend/dans...

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

#60
I think the biggest problem I've run into with company documentation is that the relevant docs either don't exist at all or are woefully out of date. Sure, there might be a procedure doc that spelled out how to handle a particular type of issue, but it has probably been updated three times in Slack DMs and twice on Zoom calls since the doc was actually written. And maybe at least once, the company has "declared bankruptcy" on, say, Confluence, and half-converted a few things over to Notion.

If Danswer could surface the "official" answer, such as it is, but then also note how old the authoritative doc is, and which teams have been messaging about it and/or scheduling calls with related names more recently, and then tell me who's responsible on that team for knowing the actual procedure, I'd never need another tool!

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