Look neat. FYI clicking "See All Connectors" is a 404.
Thanks! And 404 should be fixed
Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
101–110 of 163 posts
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#102[flagged]
Totally get this concern.
How we think about it: the chat product should be completely open-source and free (forever). To that end we've moved features like SSO (that used to be "enterprise") to be MIT licensed. The chat interface is something pretty much every team needs (be it a proprietary or open-source solution). You can think of this like Apache Spark for Databricks or Ray for Anyscale.
Also, as other folks have pointed out in the thread, there are quite a few other open source options out there. So there's a a ton of outside pressure for our open-source only offering to be very competitive. We hope this reduces the "enshitification" risk that you speak of.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the kind words! The key point there is that many would do it through Azure / Bedrock + locally host the open-source models. Also, all chats / indexed data lives on-prem, and there are better guarantees around retention when using the APIs directly.
Is running your llm through azure insecure? I mean more so than running anything on cloud? My understanding was that azure gpt instances were completely independent with the same security protocols as databases, vms, etc.
Azure wouldn't be if you have your company AD/Oauth, I'm GUESSING running local models with data transfer might expose that communication if your local machine is compromised, or someone else's, potentially is multiple points of leakage, companies generally like to limit that risk. This is all an assumption btw.
Edit : grammar
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#104Congratulations for the launch. Actually we launched a similar product recently named Vision Workspace (https://vision.pixlab.io). The general chat niche is quite saturated and practically locked by the major players. I recommend that you focus on one core feature and pivot from there. For us it was the built-in OCR and document query interface inside the UI that initiated the traction and the app is quite popular now in Japan and Malaysia.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree that's a lot of other projects out there, but why do you say the Vercel option is more advanced/mature? The common trend we've seen is that most of these other projects are okay for a true "just send messages to an AI and get responses" use case, but for most things beyond that they fall short / there a lot of paper cuts. For an individual, this might show up when they try more complex tasks that require multip…
Alright let's say im tasked with building a fancy AI-powered research assistant and I need onyx or Vercel's ai-chatbot sdk. Why would I reach for onyx? I have used vercel for several projects and I'm not tied to it, but would like to understand how onyx is comparable. Benefits for my use cases for using vercel have been ease of installation, streaming support, model agnosticity, chat persistence and blob support. I d…
Not wanting to use Vercel is honestly a good enough reason. If you’re a heavy Vercel user you probably aren’t their target market since they’re aiming at enterprise types from what it looks like.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#106Does it support multimodal documents?
My main gripe with openwebui, in addition to it being slow is the fact that it mangles documents in the OCR step. tables that could have been understood great by an multi modal llm, just gets mangled by the ocr and lost instead of storing both a text and original representation.
Being able to properly searcbin the knowlege base lime the llm does, but manually would be nice (like get recommendations for docs to add).
My usecase is mostly writing, so having a integrated document refinery editor is also a nice feature list.
I'm probably rambling but these are my base use-cases for a llm ui I personally have found.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#107Is this sort of like self-hosted NotebookLM?
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#108Is this sort of like self-hosted NotebookLM?
That's one way people use Onyx! Specifically, the Projects feature (see the left sidebar) works similarly e.g. you can upload arbitrary numbers of files - going well beyond the context limit of your model - and then ask questions of them.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#109Does it support multimodal documents? My main gripe with openwebui, in addition to it being slow is the fact that it mangles documents in the OCR step. tables that could have been understood great by an multi modal llm, just gets mangled by the ocr and lost instead of storing both a text and original representation. Being able to properly searcbin the knowlege base lime the llm does, but manually would be nice (like…
What format are the docs being uploaded as? By default, images uploaded into the chat would be directly passed through. PDFs would be parsed and fed to the LLM as text.
Writing is a really common use case, and something we'd like to explore more. Currently people often use Onyx for "write something combining X, Y, and Z documents", but I feel that's just scratching the surface.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree that's a lot of other projects out there, but why do you say the Vercel option is more advanced/mature? The common trend we've seen is that most of these other projects are okay for a true "just send messages to an AI and get responses" use case, but for most things beyond that they fall short / there a lot of paper cuts. For an individual, this might show up when they try more complex tasks that require multip…
Alright let's say im tasked with building a fancy AI-powered research assistant and I need onyx or Vercel's ai-chatbot sdk. Why would I reach for onyx? I have used vercel for several projects and I'm not tied to it, but would like to understand how onyx is comparable. Benefits for my use cases for using vercel have been ease of installation, streaming support, model agnosticity, chat persistence and blob support. I d…
> ease of installation, streaming support, model agnosticity, chat persistence and blob support
we have all of those!
> how onyx is comparable
For an AI-powered research assistant, Onyx might just work out of the box. We have ~45 connectors to common apps (https://github.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx/blob/main/backend/onyx/...), integrations with the most popular web search providers (https://github.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx/blob/main/backend/onyx/...), and a built in tool calling loop w/ deep research support (https://github.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx/blob/main/backend/onyx/...). If you wanted to customize, you could pretty easily tweak this / add additional tools (or even rip this out completely and build your own agent loop).