Kudos on the launch! Most of the real work isn’t the chat box. It’s keeping context stable, memory reliable, and tool calls from drifting when things get complex. That’s where projects usually break, and also where the interesting problems are now. :)
Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
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Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#112Does 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.
I was mostly ranting about open-webui and hoping onyx would be better than the current state. My usecase involves pdfs with lots of complex figures, ocrd through mistral ocr witch gives text, and images for figures (have tried multiple other as well). I would really like to keep the figures as images, as ocr captions really struggles getting the full semantic meaning.
But stoked to get alternatives to the area, will try it out once i get time soon.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#113Have you considered making a version that is packaged as a desktop app?
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#114Kudos on the launch! Most of the real work isn’t the chat box. It’s keeping context stable, memory reliable, and tool calls from drifting when things get complex. That’s where projects usually break, and also where the interesting problems are now. :)
Yes indeed! Our belief is that tool design, compaction (e.g. tool result summarization), and reminders are the things that separate a product that works magically vs one that falls over on any slightly more complex task.
And this is all made all the more important when supporting the wide range of models, even "weaker" open-source models.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#115Have you considered making a version that is packaged as a desktop app?
We have! Likely not for a while, since we want to focus on the web app for a bit more. But long term that would be the plan.
Things like shortcuts to access the chat + ability to reach into the local file system are very compelling.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#116One thing I really care about is extensibility. Every now and then one of the big consumer apps adds a feature I really like and the self-hosted solution should have some way to integrate that.
The main thing I really care about is voice mode, as that's my far preferred way of interacting with LLMs for longer backs and forths (most apps I've seen disable a lot of other functionality during it, which I hate, btw).
Two other things I would like to see are canvas mode and scheduled actions (with decision making capability - e.g. "send a notification if X happens").
I assume such features are going to continue being invented, so I find extensibility to be a huge deal. So much so that one thing I could imagine going really well would be a UI on top of Langchain, which already has most of the facilities for that!
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#117how is this different from Librechat?
What struck me most was the requirement. I've been self-hosting librechat on a raspberry pi. I was hoping to test Onyx on it, but no way. Its requirement is 4 vCPU and 10GB RAM? I wish I can take out components that resource hungry and have only the basic so that I can serve it on a less demanding server.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#118Looks awesome! I'm really trying to switch off Open WebUI due to its general slowness and bugginess, as well as documentation which is almost entirely slop.
However it doesn't seem to have MinerU as a supported backend, which is hands-down the best PDF extraction tool I've ever used (and is self-hostable on a machine with a modest GPU). Could it be added?
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#119That sidebar of past chats is where they go to be lost forever. Nobody came up with a UI that has decent search experience. It's like reddit internal search engine, but a bit worse.
I face the same problem and agree with your "search experience" remark. But it triggered something and raised this idea: just add the search bar to the top of the page instead of hiding it in the sidebar. That would solve 100% of my need to open the sidebar. Maybe show 5 most recent chats under the search bar when I click it before typing anything.
Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI
#120This was funded by YC? Why? It's more of a developer project/tool. It will become useless really quickly.