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Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#121

Post by ranger_danger »

_pdp_ wrote: post #21

> We’re building an open-source chat that works As long as you have Pricing on your website your product is not open source in the true spirit of open sourceness. It is open code for sure but it is a business and so incentive is to run it like a business which will conflate with how the project is used by the community. Btw, there is nothing wrong with that but let's be honest here if you get this funded (perhaps it…

> As long as you have Pricing on your website your product is not open source in the true spirit of open sourceness

I think there can be other valid perspectives than your own.

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#123

Post by novoreorx »

Weves wrote: post #115
NullCascade wrote: post #113

Have 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.

Cherry Studio is my daily go-to, I hope Onyx deskktop can be a great alternative for personal users who just want a dedicated app to access any LLMs with full power of MCP and various tools

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#125

Post by Weves »

solarkraft wrote: post #116

One 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…

> One thing I really care about is extensibility

Totally makes sense! We've defined simple `Connector`, `Tool` and (soon) `Agent` interfaces to make it easy to plug in your own implementations/apps. If you wanted, you could just use Langchain under our Agent class to build arbitrary flows.

Additionally, the main chat is created from a series of `Renderer` components, and it should be easy to build your own.

Do you think that's in-line with what you're thinking of, or do you want to build outside of those confines?

> canvas mode and scheduled actions

Yes, writing and recurring are two big areas we want to tackle next year.

> The main thing I really care about is voice mode

Interesting. Why do you think that is?

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#127

Post by Weves »

throw4039 wrote: post #118

Looks 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? https://github.com/opendatalab/MinerU

Great suggestion! I haven't heard of it before, but I'll definitely add it to the list.

Would love to hear your feedback after you get a chance to try Onyx out.

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#128

Post by Weves »

thedangler wrote: post #89

If I'm understanding this right. I can train it on private data only for my company and then I can use the chat bot only for my site to acquire customers?

You could! We have a number of users who do something like that (e.g. Ramp's in-app chat bot is powered by Onyx)

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#129

Post by Weves »

enoch2090 wrote: post #124

GW! How does Onyx differ from Open WebUI and its alike?

Reposting from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46047430:

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Broadly, I think other open source solutions are lacking in (1) integration of external knowledge into the chat (2) simple UX (3) complex "agent" flows. Both internal RAG and web search are hard to do well, and since we've started as an enterprise search project we've spent a lot of time making it good.

Most (all?) of these projects have UXs that are quite complicated (e.g. exposing front-and-center every model param like Top P without any explanation, no clear distinction between admin/regular user features, etc.). For broader deployments this can overwhelm people who are new to AI tools.

Finally trying to do anything beyond a simple back and forth with a single tool calls isn't great with a lot of these projects. So something like "find me all the open source chat options, understand their strengths/weaknesses, and compile that into a spreadsheet" will work well with Onyx, but not so well with other options (again partially due to our enterprise search roots).

Re: Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

#130

Post by elpakal »

Weves wrote: post #110
elpakal wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

awesome, thank you
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