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Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

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Re: Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

#51
> Facts are the meaning pulled out of each episode, stored as subject-predicate-object records with a plain summary and timestamps for when the fact was introduced and when it was invalidated (subject=person, predicate=works_at, object=company). Facts form a graph with typed edges between them: X is in tension with Y, A is derived from B, J supersedes K.

I've always thought that knowledge graphs/expert systems, and even the broader concept of entity-attribute-value storage, got an unfairly bad reputation because of the 1970s/1980s "AI Winter."

And I think that perhaps this reputation is why so much of the oxygen in the RAG space has been consumed by the notion that "RAG = retrieval of fragments by vector similarity."

The difference now from decades ago, of course, is that now LLMs can do both the job of maintaining that graph at scale, and being able to agentically run successive queries to explore for best practices in any situation! And these have reached the scalability where any small business can build and use their own expert system.

I really want to see this approach win, because I think there's such an opportunity to explore even more data structures and approaches from the past and how their impact can be reimagined. If LLMs do indeed approach AGI, it will be in large part due to the ability to use tools (there's some evolutionary irony there, too) - and we should be trying every kind of underlying storage for those tools that we can, standing on the shoulders of giants.

(And curious what database you use for the knowledge graph - those are also a place where we stand on the shoulders of giants!)

Re: Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

#52
post #51

> Facts are the meaning pulled out of each episode, stored as subject-predicate-object records with a plain summary and timestamps for when the fact was introduced and when it was invalidated (subject=person, predicate=works_at, object=company). Facts form a graph with typed edges between them: X is in tension with Y, A is derived from B, J supersedes K. I've always thought that knowledge graphs/expert systems, and e…

really great perspective. A lot of techniques from the past aren't conceptually wrong, we just have the tools today to make them efficient. The intuition behind them was always reasonable, if you could amortize the cost of making them work at scale. Appreciate the vote of confidence!

And re: the graph -- Postgres stays king here. There are a lot of fancy database mechanisms for building systems like this, but the convenience of a SQL data structure that can tie the graph into structured metadata is pretty unbeatable. This may evolve with time as well.

Re: Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

#53
post #49

It's a good idea to bet on this. There's a lot of business and domain knowledge trapped in random places and mostly aggregated in employees heads. Not very accessible to AI agents currently. That said, this is the ultimate moat. Once everything about how to operate a business lives in your product, the business must rely heavily on it. I personally would only use something like this if I knew it was open source and t…

Appreciate the vote of confidence! And definitely hear the concerns re: data control. We're of the opinion that it's much easier to have a trusted vendor securely handle the system, keep it up-to-date, fix issues with some SLA, etc. and prioritize that part of the user experience. Your data is always yours to export, port, delete, whenever you want it. And should something catastrophic happen, we'd make sure that we give you enough resources/guidance to make sure you don't lose any of your hard-built intelligence.

Re: Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

#54
How does your technical approach actually create accurate fact extract?

You loose sooooooo much meaningful context and information when you transform something into a knowledge graph. Simple cases like "Gabe is CEO of Valve" map nicely to a graph, but things like "Matt Garman is CEO of AWS" don't represent that AWS is a sub-company of Amazon (with it's own CEO).

Additionally, one of my biggest gripes of Claude's memories and every memory system I've worked with is they completely fail to capture intent. The architecture notes I documented while doing a wild spike on a critical infrastructure component absolutely should not be referenced in every day work. Yet, somehow, that type of memory always works it's way into unrelated sessions.

Re: Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

#56
post #4

Congrats on the launch! How are you handling cases where multiple sources of truth contradict each other? Does Hyper assume best guess or is there any human in the loop verification?

The current conflict resolution is fairly simple: always trust humans, and trust recent human info more than old human info. We're very aware that as the knowledge system gets more complex, we'll need more sophistication, including: - Human-in-the-loop verification - Role-based ranking, i.e. be more skeptical when an intern contradicts the CEO Unlike many other memory systems, Hyper never actually deletes memories. I…

That is a relatively simple system. It cuts out use cases.

For instance, history, newer information is mixed with older authoritative information.

The same thing for religious institutions, where the older items may be the more authoritative for the purposes.

Re: Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

#57
post #51

> Facts are the meaning pulled out of each episode, stored as subject-predicate-object records with a plain summary and timestamps for when the fact was introduced and when it was invalidated (subject=person, predicate=works_at, object=company). Facts form a graph with typed edges between them: X is in tension with Y, A is derived from B, J supersedes K. I've always thought that knowledge graphs/expert systems, and e…

really great perspective. A lot of techniques from the past aren't conceptually wrong, we just have the tools today to make them efficient. The intuition behind them was always reasonable, if you could amortize the cost of making them work at scale. Appreciate the vote of confidence! And re: the graph -- Postgres stays king here. There are a lot of fancy database mechanisms for building systems like this, but the con…

Yay for Postgres! Curious if you find yourself using recursive queries in Postgres to traverse the graph - or is there an LLM in the mix that's looking at the "frontier" of relevant facts and choosing whether to go deeper, and whether an entity has an alias?

(Along those lines, I recall lots of this getting messy in a pre-LLM project the moment someone said "merge these two CRM accounts and their histories, but oh whoops turns out they were different all along, and only some of the updates should have applied" - there's a whole set of interesting challenges around attributing EAV when the very notion of object identity evolves over time. Whether a fact is relevant is really a judgment that can only be made with full context - but we now have tools that eat context for breakfast!)

Re: Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

#58

How'd you get the license to use "The Jetsons" cartoons?

I can answer that one. They're public domain as a result of a trademark lapse by Hanna Barbera many years ago. Widely available and downloadable on the Internet archive.

Re: Launch HN: Hyper (YC P26) – Company brain to power agentic development

#60
post #49

It's a good idea to bet on this. There's a lot of business and domain knowledge trapped in random places and mostly aggregated in employees heads. Not very accessible to AI agents currently. That said, this is the ultimate moat. Once everything about how to operate a business lives in your product, the business must rely heavily on it. I personally would only use something like this if I knew it was open source and t…

Appreciate the vote of confidence! And definitely hear the concerns re: data control. We're of the opinion that it's much easier to have a trusted vendor securely handle the system, keep it up-to-date, fix issues with some SLA, etc. and prioritize that part of the user experience. Your data is always yours to export, port, delete, whenever you want it. And should something catastrophic happen, we'd make sure that we…

How does this relate to your privacy policy? Will you train on or sell the data that you host? Or inferences about it?
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