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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

#81

Post by nl »

BillFranklin wrote: post #63
yuhongsun wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I understand your concern but if I miss the point, please follow up! So regarding getting access to read knowledge from the different tools, it depends tool by tool but a lot of them have API keys or options for app integrations available in the free tier (GitHub, Google Drive, Confluence come to mind). Other tools don't have a free tier and you just get access to the API keys as a part of paying for the serv…

> It is what it is sadly. This is what I mean -- previously I built a similar search engine on top of slack, notion, etc., but didn't launch the product because I thought that requiring users to constantly add bots to private channels would be a subpar experience. I thought this would be a blocker for good UX, so didn't go further, but maybe you'll find a nice solution! Searching over public internal data is addresse…

> ~maybe it's OK when run as a SaaS for db admins to have access to ingested data, but if it's OSS then the people that run it probably shouldn't be able to read the private data that's ingested

I don't understand the distinction here. If Danswer runs a SaaS version then yes I agree they can have a license agreement that lets their DB Admins see data in some cases which is fine. That seems an orthogonal issue to if a company is running the OSS version internally, in which case presumably their administrator can see all docs (but software administrators usually can do this anyway).

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

#83

Post by Weves »

jhoechtl wrote: post #78

Can I connect it to any OpenAI Rest compatible LLM? So having my own LLM on premises based eg on ollama OpenAI Rest endpoint?

Yes absolutely! We actually have a doc specifically for Ollama: https://docs.danswer.dev/gen_ai_configs/ollama

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

#85

Post by Weves »

ck_one wrote: post #80

Congrats on the launch! In what way is "prefix-aware embedding models trained with contrastive loss" better than the standard embedding model provided by OpenAI? "added in learning from feedback and time based decay" => Sounds interesting! Have you seen significant gains in precision and recall here? It looks like you are using NextJS app dir + external backend. Why did you decide against NextJs for frontend and back…

OpenAI's models may fit that description as well under the hood. Specifically, for `prefix-aware`, this is useful when you have short passages (e.g. Slack messages) that you are trying to match against short queries (e.g. user questions). Without being prefix-aware, the model can get confused, think both are queries, and cause any short passages to match very strongly with short queries.

For learning from feedback for sure! No exact benchmarks, but we've heard from quite a few users about how useful this is to push high quality docs up and reduce the prevalence of poor docs. This is all very hard to evaluate since there aren't readily available, real-world "corporate tool / knowledge base" datasets out there. We're actually building our own in house right now, so we should have more concrete numbers around these things soon.

For the backend, we do a lot of stuff with local embedding models / cross encoders / tokenization / stemming / stop word removal etc. Python has the most mature ecosystem for this kinda stuff (and the retrieval pipeline is the core of our product), so we don't regret it at all!

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

#86

Post by Weves »

nl wrote: post #81
BillFranklin wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is what it is sadly. This is what I mean -- previously I built a similar search engine on top of slack, notion, etc., but didn't launch the product because I thought that requiring users to constantly add bots to private channels would be a subpar experience. I thought this would be a blocker for good UX, so didn't go further, but maybe you'll find a nice solution! Searching over public internal data is addresse…

> ~maybe it's OK when run as a SaaS for db admins to have access to ingested data, but if it's OSS then the people that run it probably shouldn't be able to read the private data that's ingested I don't understand the distinction here. If Danswer runs a SaaS version then yes I agree they can have a license agreement that lets their DB Admins see data in some cases which is fine. That seems an orthogonal issue to if a…

Yep, this is exactly correct! For our SaaS version, we do have an agreement which allows us to look at data if needed to debug issues and/or improve search performance.

For self-hosted deployments, usually a select few admins who have setup the plumbing on AWS do have access (but as nl has mentioned, these people usually have access to superuser access on the tools we connect to anyways so this is a noop).

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

#87

Post by timby »

Great stuff!

I've spent the last 6 months doing fullstack development for a very similar app at my work. Me and the ML engineer on my team are always joking that something like Danswer is going to come around sooner or later to replace what we're building. sad lols

The concept of team-specific knowledge assistants is very hot in our org (which is a gov org). We have HEAPS of legacy and current data that employees and consultants need to comb through to write up documents.

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

#88

Post by Weves »

timby wrote: post #87

Great stuff! I've spent the last 6 months doing fullstack development for a very similar app at my work. Me and the ML engineer on my team are always joking that something like Danswer is going to come around sooner or later to replace what we're building. sad lols The concept of team-specific knowledge assistants is very hot in our org (which is a gov org). We have HEAPS of legacy and current data that employees and…

"We were building something similar in house, but then we found Danswer". That's something we keep hearing all the time :D

(1) We handle chunking, embedding, building the keyword search index, etc. all on our end! We use Vespa as both our Vector DB / Search Engine (it allows a custom hybrid search, which we've found to perform really well). So no, you would not need to bring your own Vector DB - everything needed to run the system is managed dockerized and managed by Docker compose / kubernetes (whichever you choose).

(2) It would be straightforward! We both offer an API to ingest documents into the system as well as a pretty simple connector interface that you can implement to add your own custom connector (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

#89

Post by bbor »

You’re amazing for doing such a details, OSS-first announcement — you do an honor to ycombinator and HN by living up to the old school ideals IMO. My only complaint: more whimsy and tell us what danswer means! Literally this whole time I was thinking “huh maybe it’s Docker… or just some dude named Dan…”. For the slow like me, it’s dance + answer

Will definitely be checking it out, Dan or no :)

  Optionally the system can be configured to go over each doc with multiple passes of different granularity to capture wide context vs fine details.
Just curious, is the granularity able to itself be controlled by LLMs, or does that refer to traditional content-blind sliding windows? I’m big on Minsky’s idea of Frames[1] which emphasize understanding the same input in multiple instrumental contexts/frameworks/backgrounds. Something you’ve thought of?

[1] https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Frames/frames.html

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

#90

Post by timby »

Weves wrote: post #88
timby wrote: post #87

Great stuff! I've spent the last 6 months doing fullstack development for a very similar app at my work. Me and the ML engineer on my team are always joking that something like Danswer is going to come around sooner or later to replace what we're building. sad lols The concept of team-specific knowledge assistants is very hot in our org (which is a gov org). We have HEAPS of legacy and current data that employees and…

"We were building something similar in house, but then we found Danswer". That's something we keep hearing all the time :D (1) We handle chunking, embedding, building the keyword search index, etc. all on our end! We use Vespa as both our Vector DB / Search Engine (it allows a custom hybrid search, which we've found to perform really well). So no, you would not need to bring your own Vector DB - everything needed to…

Wow! you jumped onto those questions before I read more and deleted them. Thanks :)
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