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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

#103

Post by ankit219 »

BillFranklin wrote: post #12

Good luck folks! I'm glad there are projects trying to solve enterprise search. I guess the main problem is the "private" aspect, if I've understood your goals correctly. Since most SaaS products lock down the private data unless you pay enterprise fees for compliance tooling. For instance, if you want to ingest data from private Slack channels or Notion groups, you have to get the users in those groups to add your b…

I think search is the wrong lens to look at it. Yes, finding relevant information quickly is important, but the key to enterprise search tools would be to get a holistic view around any topic. A typical enterprise has a lot of silos (12 out of top 15 enterprise apps on G2 are addressing this problem) and the flow of information doesn't exist. Any enterprise search tool helps in aggregation and triangulation of conversations/knowledge from various sources, helping any user get the sense of 1/ what is the current state of this topic? 2/ how did they get to this state? (you would have guessed it, you need a knowledge graph for the product to work well)

(Disclaimer: we started with enterprise search too, and now we think a custom model is a better way to get to those goals) Also, the output needs to be integrated into their own workflows. Eg: Seeing a conversation on slack and using a bot fetch all the supplemental information to understand the context from say mail, docs etc. is mighty useful. Search using RAG is the easy part, the hard part is contextualizing it in a way it is immediately useful. That depends on understanding the company/domain lingo, understanding users, etc.

Private aspect is a bad UX but not a bottleneck. Remember, this is targeted towards power users looking to use it on a daily basis. Connecting the bot once to get started is fine as long as it adds value. If anyone offers data governance along with it (updating access on a daily basis and answers only from access), it could be a huge hit.

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

#104

Post by erlend_sh »

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…

I would hope you just partner with the open source Bloop AI for that :)

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

#106

Post by monkeydust »

smeej wrote: post #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 bankr…

The truth will be in the code!

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

#109

Post by dkarras »

yuhongsun wrote: post #73
DrWonbor wrote: post #71

I like open source software. I like what you are doing and keeping development open. I have been closely watching AI development. There are 10k+ apps now using AI. Every major company FAANG, Tier-2,3,4,5 company now have AI as top priority. However, there got to be something coming out of wrapper software. I have not read docs entirely yet. I have a few questions for you that might give us idea whether this fits our…

Hello, thanks for the kind words! With regards to your questions: 1. Are you referring to the local NLP models or the LLM? The local models are already open source models or ones we've trained ourselves. If you're talking about the LLM, the default is OpenAI but it's easy to configure other ones without any code changes. 2. Most sources are pulled from every 10 minutes. They have incremental updates so if you have Co…

how is it "chat over private data" if you are exposing my data to more parties like openai? I thought you were using a stack of self hosted open weight LLMs etc. If I can send it elsewhere, it is not private data.
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