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Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

#51

Post by AznHisoka »

sand1929 wrote: post #45
KaiserPro wrote: post #39

Perhaps I am not using it right, I wanted to see if I could get a list of sources for "policy roadblocks to timely court justice" for the last 7 days in the UK. I get some interesting articles, but only really one was relevant even then it was only tangential. Its kinda useful as a news cutting service, but its really not precise enough to replace a decent PR summary report. for housing policy It either over indexes…

So we actually have 2 search tools. One is the one you see here, which is made to be less precise, but returns more results and returns them faster. The other sounds more like what you are looking for. It returns a more focused set of results and actually generates PR summary reports as PDFs for our customers. However, we can't really give a public demo to HN of this second one, because it takes 1-3 minutes per run a…

Asking ChatGPT yields this: https://chatgpt.com/share/675181dd-4640-8006-b8d7-e558fb4907...

Not sure if grandfather can comment on whether those satisfies their request.

Re: Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

#52

Post by AznHisoka »

1) You say that small startups had no budget for your previous tool, but isnt that an even bigger problem since you seem to be targeting non-profits? Whose biggest pain is getting donors, instead of policy monitoring?

2) why would your previous data pipeline tool or expertise give you an advantage with monitoring thousands of government sites? Did your previous AI tool have some sort of smart automated scraping or something? Otherwise, being able to process large amounts of data is a commodity these days. Its getting the data in an efficient manner thats the hard part, not analyzing it (anyone can do RAG and OpenAI calls)

Re: Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

#53

Post by vouaobrasil »

The upside to this tool is that it can bring greater informational efficiency to governments. But I think we should be careful, because this tool could also be used to make government overreach more effective. In the future, I'd imagine someone using this tool to incorporate greater analysis so that governments could type "show me any evidence of insurrection against our new draconian policy".

To be honest, maximal informational efficiency for governments is not a one-sided coin, and I think we ought to be a little more careful because this one-sided view of this as a tool to help with the good stuff ignores the danger of using it to silence potential movements against the government should it become primarily the bodyguard of the big corporation -- which frankly, is not far from the truth today.

Re: Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

#54

Post by fl0id »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #53

The upside to this tool is that it can bring greater informational efficiency to governments. But I think we should be careful, because this tool could also be used to make government overreach more effective. In the future, I'd imagine someone using this tool to incorporate greater analysis so that governments could type "show me any evidence of insurrection against our new draconian policy". To be honest, maximal i…

it's not targeting govts though, but downstream users of policy

Re: Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

#55

Post by fl0id »

enisberk wrote: post #14

Congrats on the launch! While search with LLMs is quite popular nowadays, it is still hard to get it right. As a smoke test, I tried the following queries, and they returned the same result. Good job! international relations Turkey international relations about the country with the capital city of Ankara Both return info from this link: https://www.state.gov/secretary-blinkens-call-with-foreign-m...

which category did you select? if you select custom, it just says to contact them. If I want to search for another region, why should I select UK or US?

Re: Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

#56

Post by sand1929 »

AznHisoka wrote: post #52

1) You say that small startups had no budget for your previous tool, but isnt that an even bigger problem since you seem to be targeting non-profits? Whose biggest pain is getting donors, instead of policy monitoring? 2) why would your previous data pipeline tool or expertise give you an advantage with monitoring thousands of government sites? Did your previous AI tool have some sort of smart automated scraping or so…

1) I don't think we'll ever primarily target non-profits (our first customer happened to be a non-profit, but there's just inherently more business in for-profit spaces), but it has been incredibly fun and rewarding to work with non-profits, and if there's a need for policy monitoring there, we're happy to help (even if it's not our main target).

2) Yes, it's our proprietary AI that lets us generate thousands of custom web scrapers, find and clean the right RSS feeds, etc etc

Re: Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

#57

Post by KaiserPro »

sand1929 wrote: post #45
KaiserPro wrote: post #39

Perhaps I am not using it right, I wanted to see if I could get a list of sources for "policy roadblocks to timely court justice" for the last 7 days in the UK. I get some interesting articles, but only really one was relevant even then it was only tangential. Its kinda useful as a news cutting service, but its really not precise enough to replace a decent PR summary report. for housing policy It either over indexes…

So we actually have 2 search tools. One is the one you see here, which is made to be less precise, but returns more results and returns them faster. The other sounds more like what you are looking for. It returns a more focused set of results and actually generates PR summary reports as PDFs for our customers. However, we can't really give a public demo to HN of this second one, because it takes 1-3 minutes per run a…

thank you for your reply, it is most appreciated.

Re: Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

#58

Post by KaiserPro »

AznHisoka wrote: post #51
sand1929 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we actually have 2 search tools. One is the one you see here, which is made to be less precise, but returns more results and returns them faster. The other sounds more like what you are looking for. It returns a more focused set of results and actually generates PR summary reports as PDFs for our customers. However, we can't really give a public demo to HN of this second one, because it takes 1-3 minutes per run a…

Asking ChatGPT yields this: https://chatgpt.com/share/675181dd-4640-8006-b8d7-e558fb4907... Not sure if grandfather can comment on whether those satisfies their request.

That is more relevant, but is limited by its data sources. Thank you for this.

Re: Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

#59

Post by hiharryhere »

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #2

Congrats on the launch! I know it is truly the peak of the spirit of Hacker News to make the first comment a nitpick, but the fact that your name is a play on Pentagon but your logo is a hexagon causes me irrational levels of emotional distress.

Their logo is also almost identical to a huge competitor in the monitoring space. Meltwater -> https://www.meltwater.com/

Re: Launch HN: Parsagon (YC W21) – AI for public affairs and government relations

#60

Post by sand1929 »

hiharryhere wrote: post #59
stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #2

Congrats on the launch! I know it is truly the peak of the spirit of Hacker News to make the first comment a nitpick, but the fact that your name is a play on Pentagon but your logo is a hexagon causes me irrational levels of emotional distress.

Their logo is also almost identical to a huge competitor in the monitoring space. Meltwater -> https://www.meltwater.com/

Oh interesting, we never actually thought of it that way—we just had a friend design this logo for us and this is what he came up with. And USPTO never complained, so we didn’t think about it too hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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