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

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

#151

Post by Weves »

Tsarp wrote: post #141

If we are already comfortable with our enterprise chatgpt subscription, how might this be of value. Given that it does RAG, tool calling, has all the SSO stuff/collab? Or are we not the target customer. Just curious. Especially with both OpenAI and Anthropic really also outpacing startups in release cadence unlike previous cycles. Guessing your selling point is any model no locking (Assuming we are happy with the pri…

A few reasons:

1/ No model lock-in / ability to use the ideal model for each use case.

2/ More connectivity. A fuller connector library (contributed to by the open-source community). More built-in tools (similar to the ^).

3/ Customizability and flexibility. If you really need a feature, you can build it rather than waiting months (years?) for your request to go through.

4/ White-labeling. You can make it feel like a product built for/by your company rather than generic.

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

#152

Post by Weves »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #148

I would love to set this up, I really want all my chats to be on one platform. The problem is, the AI companies seem to want the opposite. My main concern is how well do all the extra features work compared to the native versions? Like web search, RAG on a document, or deep research, adding images, voice chats - my understanding is the models providers don't provide any API's for any of this stuff, so you have your o…

Yep, we have our own implementations! We've spent a lot of time on them, and in our internal benchmarks they compare pretty favorable to the native versions.

RAG specifically is our speciality - we've done a ton of optimizations there (hybrid search, document age-based weighting, giving the LLM the ability to read more from interesting docs and less of irrelevant docs, etc.) and we outperform the implementation within ChatGPT quite substantially in internal blind testing.

Curious what you find if you compare them head to head though!

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

#153

Post by unleashit »

Side question: It looks interesting but what's with the trend of open source projects providing such bloated installs? The recommended getting started with docker (which first recommends cloning a 350mb repo) seems to assume you need to scale to 100s+ users. At a glance, in their default docker compose I counted no less than 12 containers including nginx, redis and minio. I can't imagine any of these are necessary to run an app on a single localhost machine.

I understand they're trying to attract enterprisy customers, but even some of those are probably going to want to try it out first. Would be nice to have an easy minimal install option that doesn't require a deep dive into the project to figure out.

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

#154

Post by nibab »

fabulous work. ive been following you since danswer. you certainly create a lot of value and have been successful in getting the community to cover the long tail of integrations.

its interesting to see how "lock-in" is the main pitch here. all things considered, i don't think "lock-in" is relevant at all unless the activity performed with the tool is highly strategic to the company.

you could argue that some orgs may not want openai/anthropic to have their sensitive data leave the parameter, but im also here to tell you that even the most privacy sensitive companies in the world probably resolve this by having a proxy in between the users and the LLM APIs from the labs.

so where does this leave you ? cost savings from OSS? maybe, but its hard to imagine that we are in the phase of the adoption cycle where companies have become as acutely aware of costs as you think they are.

my 2c - focus on the integrations and see which one gets most traction. that will be your value capture mechanism long-term.

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

#155

Post by Weves »

unleashit wrote: post #153

Side question: It looks interesting but what's with the trend of open source projects providing such bloated installs? The recommended getting started with docker (which first recommends cloning a 350mb repo) seems to assume you need to scale to 100s+ users. At a glance, in their default docker compose I counted no less than 12 containers including nginx, redis and minio. I can't imagine any of these are necessary to…

Have you checked out https://docs.onyx.app/deployment/getting_started/quickstart#...?

We should definitely update the Local guide to reflect the ^, thanks for pointing that out.

For the container footprint - pretty much all of them are necessary to run locally. We hope that just a large # of containers shouldn't be a problem, as long as they are all lightweight (e.g. total resource utilization is low). We of course could bundle them together into a single "mega container", but that seems against the best practices of Docker.

On a related note, we are looking to have a version that doesn't require the vector database (the heaviest part of the system in terms of resource utilization). Our goal is to have a deployment mode with less than 1gb of RAM required.

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

#156

Post by DANmode »

nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote: post #131
bks wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Onyx (and Danswer before it) for over a year, and I'd push back on this. We have Freshdesk, Bookstack, Google Drive, YouTrack, and Slack all connected. It seamlessly answers questions like: "What's Max's GitHub username?" "I need wire transfer instructions for an incoming wire" We also index competitors' helpdesks and KB articles to track new features they're rolling out. Our tech support team uses it…

> "I need wire transfer instructions for an incoming wire" Ooooof. Careful with that.

Definitely follow the sourced permalink as a default on that one.

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

#158

Post by toobulkeh »

crocowhile wrote: post #66

In a landscape where every week we have a different leading model, these systems are really useful for the power users because they keep the interface and models constant and allow to switch easily using API via openrouter or naga. I have been using openwebui which is under active development but I'll give this a try.

Have you tried LibreChat? I spun that up to great success inside an org.

Personally, I use Raycast for all my personal work

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

#159

Post by unleashit »

Weves wrote: post #155
unleashit wrote: post #153

Side question: It looks interesting but what's with the trend of open source projects providing such bloated installs? The recommended getting started with docker (which first recommends cloning a 350mb repo) seems to assume you need to scale to 100s+ users. At a glance, in their default docker compose I counted no less than 12 containers including nginx, redis and minio. I can't imagine any of these are necessary to…

Have you checked out https://docs.onyx.app/deployment/getting_started/quickstart#... ? We should definitely update the Local guide to reflect the ^, thanks for pointing that out. For the container footprint - pretty much all of them are necessary to run locally. We hope that just a large # of containers shouldn't be a problem, as long as they are all lightweight (e.g. total resource utilization is low). We of course…

Hey, the bottom line is the project looks promising and I'm sure it's a lot of hard work. That said, because time is limited, for now I'll have to pass on spinning it up for the reasons mentioned. I took a look at the shell script, and it just seems like a helpful wrapper (with cleanup) over a manual install. I didn't mean to say it's about the amount of containers. All of those services take up a lot of resources, especially compared to the alternatives.

For example, Openwebui can be run with just a sqlite database and a backend. Why is nginx needed, or Minio on a single machine with a nice local file system? But I also understand it takes more work to support multiple service configurations so please accept the criticism as constructive (and it's more a general observation of what I've noticed over the past few years).

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

#160

Post by adam2221 »

Weves wrote: post #15
katzskat wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I immediately thought of Google's Agentspace when I saw this product. The value for me sits in its ability to do RAG via connectors.

RAG + connectors is a huge reason why people deploy Onyx (enterprise search roots means we do a pretty good job there). Also, open-source works really here, since connectors are a long-tail game. We've tried to make it easy to add connectors (a single python interface), and as a result over half of our connectors are contributed by the community. We expect that percentage to grow over time. This means that compared t…

Do you accept connectors? For instance, I saw that someone wished to develop a file system connector (which I saw that many people need) by himself, but there didn't appear to be much cooperation.
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