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

Post by timby » Fri, Feb 23, 2024, 12:17 AM UTC

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…

Post by bbor » Fri, Feb 23, 2024, 1:36 AM UTC

Weves wrote: post #91

bbor wrote: post #89

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 c…

The name was intended to be (1) Danswer -> Deep (learning) Answer and (2) Danswer -> Dancer (thus the logo). Although we've heard quite a ton of different interpretations (the "dude named Dan" is quite popular, as is "Danswer -> The Answer". The granularity is currently hard-coded (e.g. 512 tokens default chunk size, augmented with passes of 128 tokens). I have not heard of the idea of Frames, but it's interesting. T…

Post by yuhongsun » Fri, Feb 23, 2024, 1:50 AM UTC

bbor wrote: post #94

Weves wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name was intended to be (1) Danswer -> Deep (learning) Answer and (2) Danswer -> Dancer (thus the logo). Although we've heard quite a ton of different interpretations (the "dude named Dan" is quite popular, as is "Danswer -> The Answer". The granularity is currently hard-coded (e.g. 512 tokens default chunk size, augmented with passes of 128 tokens). I have not heard of the idea of Frames, but it's interesting. T…

lol great answer, thanks. I think it’s a powerful, simple idea that is too little used - for example, temporarily transforming a markdown document into an outline, an amateur summary, and a detailed outline, or transforming a source file into comments, explanations, code, specific classes/functions, etc. I say this with a hint of irony, knowing that I’m just some kid and you’re launching an awesome AI product right n…

Post by beardedwizard » Fri, Feb 23, 2024, 3:15 AM UTC

yuhongsun wrote: post #40

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 t…

Post by tibanne » Fri, Feb 23, 2024, 8:09 AM UTC

yuhongsun wrote: post #31

tibanne wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.