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Retool AI

retool.com

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Re: Retool AI

#71

Post by kfk »

cuffe wrote: post #67
kfk wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have a problematic pricing model that punishes you for having a high number of users.

We changed our pricing earlier this year to be a lot more affordable for use cases with high end user counts ( https://retool.com/blog/pricing-v2/ ). Let me know if that works better for you? If you’re looking for external apps, check out portals ( https://retool.com/products/portals ) that has custom volume discounts for many, many users

I mean, let's be serious for a second, MS PowerApps, an Enterprise tool every CIO knows by now is potentially cheaper than Retool's unknown Enterprise price: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/

There is not much to talk about, I don't see it, maybe Retool is targeting a different ICP. I don't see how a CIO would go for Retool when they can reach for PowerApps which is also potentially cheaper. PowerApps also integrates with the rest of the MS stack.

I am not saying I like it, I prefer Slack over MS Teams too, but Retool is a very hard pitch right now for Enterprise, and I don't see AI driving any points in that discussion.

Re: Retool AI

#72

Post by civilitty »

cuffe wrote: post #20
mritchie712 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd imagine this is exactly what intercom is doing for their AI. Any ideas why the performance is worse? Maybe intercom didn't have access to forum data?

TBH, I was pretty surprised too. It made me pretty skeptical of off-the-shelf AI apps in general. I now think that most actually effective AI apps will need to be developed in-house, and that “bolting on” AI to existing apps (e.g. Intercom, Salesforce, etc.) won’t work. I think there are a few reasons: 1. A lot of the useful data for answering questions is in our public docs and community forum answers, which Interco…

> (And we wouldn’t feel comfortable giving them access to our internal Slack anyhow.)

I can't wait till people start using LLM chat bots with RAG to exfiltrate private Slack conversations.

Re: Retool AI

#73

Post by chrismorgan »

cuffe wrote: post #51
tipiirai wrote: post #50

How is it possible that Retool login page [1] loads 6.4MB of resources? The app.js [2] alone is 4.0M when loaded on local machine. Is this common? [1]: https://app.retool.com/auth/login [2]: https://retool-edge.com/app.cd90db16bade51faa017.js

That's a fair concern and something we're working on improving every day! It's fairly common when you consider Retool in the context of other development platforms. VSCode is a 200MB download and is considered small in the desktop space. Even gdocs is ~30MB. For context, these resources are cached on your machine. So you should find that the actual data transferred significantly decreases after the first visit.

> VSCode is a 200MB download

I presume that figure will be including a full browser, which is obviously inapplicable if you’re opening it in an existing browser, as you can and as the cited page is.

For comparison, on Arch Linux, the code package is a 15 MiB download, 90 MiB installed, and depends on electron22 (that is, it doesn’t include a browser itself).

> and is considered small in the desktop space.

Citation needed. I don’t think anyone reasonable would consider it small, not by a long shot. Not as huge as some very large things, sure, but certainly not small.

As for Google Docs, I hope no one uses Google stuff as an example of good or justifiable largeness. I can’t speak for Google Docs at all, but Gmail is one that I was historically somewhat familiar with, and around five years ago it was generally around 10× the download size and memory usage of Fastmail’s webmail on reasonably similar functionality (with one having more in one direction and the other more in another direction), and I know a more recent change made things at least twice as bad, though they could have clawed that back by now, and Fastmail resource requirements have definitely increased somewhat since.

Re: Retool AI

#74

Post by willsmith72 »

dvdhsu wrote: post #45
cj wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also very common for a small team (or individual) at a large company to use a tool, and the tool can plaster that logo on their homepage even if the use case was insignificant. For a lot of companies, logos on homepages is more of an “ask for forgiveness later” type of thing. Not uncommon to do it without permission. It’s also very common for TOS to include the rights to use your company logo for marketing purpo…

For us, every single one of the logos we display on https://retool.com has a committed contract with Retool where they agreed to display their logo. (Generally our champion does need to go ask a VP; in return we offer a discount.) 100% of the logos that we show pay us more than $50k a year. (80% of them pay us more than $100k a year, and some % of them pay us more than $1M a year, hah.) We wouldn't want to display th…

that's awesome. Just a thought, I wonder if users would appreciate knowing that. To me, the reason I asked is I tend to assume the worst (minimal permission, 1 person in the org, no contract, etc...). Maybe just me, but especially so when it's huge names like Amazon or Stripe

Re: Retool AI

#75

Post by meowtimemania »

tipiirai wrote: post #60
cuffe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair concern and something we're working on improving every day! It's fairly common when you consider Retool in the context of other development platforms. VSCode is a 200MB download and is considered small in the desktop space. Even gdocs is ~30MB. For context, these resources are cached on your machine. So you should find that the actual data transferred significantly decreases after the first visit.

> something we're working on improving every day! Great to hear that! There is hope to frontend obesity crisis. What actions have you done to slip down the login page to 6MB? How large was it in the beginning? What is the bulk of that file? I mean React framework would span only 0.1% of that room.

I imagine they have a huge task list with a lot of higher priority tasks than reducing the js bundle. Sure it'd be nice, but it's not what users most want.

Re: Retool AI

#76

Post by cuffe »

tipiirai wrote: post #60
cuffe wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair concern and something we're working on improving every day! It's fairly common when you consider Retool in the context of other development platforms. VSCode is a 200MB download and is considered small in the desktop space. Even gdocs is ~30MB. For context, these resources are cached on your machine. So you should find that the actual data transferred significantly decreases after the first visit.

> something we're working on improving every day! Great to hear that! There is hope to frontend obesity crisis. What actions have you done to slip down the login page to 6MB? How large was it in the beginning? What is the bulk of that file? I mean React framework would span only 0.1% of that room.

I checked in with an engineer who’s focussing on app performance. You're right that this screen should not be 6MB. One part of the bloat is due to our webpack configuration. In lighthouse, you can see that >50% of the app.js file is unused for login. Most of this is actually used for the app after login.

We’re working on getting this down significantly but, that being said, the login page isn’t our highest priority. It’s the first thing customers see, but >99% of the time, they’ll already be logged in and navigate straight to the apps page, or a specific Retool app. For these pages, we’ve:

1. re-written our core runtime to avoid excessive message passing with iframes (up to 75% faster page load for slowest apps)

2. parallelized resource fetching with JS execution

3. cached app graph information in IndexedDB

4. tweaked webpack chunking strategy to avoid very small JS/CSS chunks

5. optimized resource fetching to avoid over fetching

Hope that’s helpful context. Definitely let me know if you have thoughts/other ideas

Re: Retool AI

#77

Post by cuffe »

wpydcr wrote: post #56

I would like to know how do you ensure the query accuracy of the vector database?

Today we use a cosine similarity search but we're planning to integrate with more vector databases and allow you to customize the search logic soon. Is there a particular query method you're looking for?

Re: Retool AI

#78

Post by cuffe »

gaurangblaze wrote: post #70

Looks awesome, congrats! Do you provide any integrations for identifying hallucinated outputs and/or showing references with the output (like Bing does)? Such a feature is critical for AI outputs, so it might be nice if it's supported out of the box.

Thanks! Yes agree this is very important. We do show references from Retool Vectors out of the box, so you can see what embeddings were used to generate a response. If it'd be helpful I can walk you through a few internal Q&A bot examples which display references - jamie AT retool DOT com

Re: Retool AI

#79

Post by speedz007 »

cuffe wrote: post #69
speedz007 wrote: post #63

Looks neat. Do you guys plan to allow the use of custom AI models down the road? Especially for the enterprise use case.

Yes working on adding llama2 and AWS bedrock support right now for open source models. But we also want to let users bring their own models - is there a specific model you're looking for? Who knows longer-term I'd love to help users fine-tune their own models on llama2/gpt-3.5!

Llama 2 and Bedrock is exactly what we are looking at.

I have been playing around with it for a priority enterprise use-case at my org, and this seems promising. We tried using the Retool vectors, but it really struggles to pick up the right context if we dump data without pre-processing it. For example, adding a URL without stripping header/footers/disclaimers/cross links etc. I think adding some steerability to the context selection process is going to be key.

I also have to admit that while retool is extremely feature rich - the user-experience is clunky and the learning curve is steep.

Re: Retool AI

#80

Post by cuffe »

speedz007 wrote: post #79
cuffe wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes working on adding llama2 and AWS bedrock support right now for open source models. But we also want to let users bring their own models - is there a specific model you're looking for? Who knows longer-term I'd love to help users fine-tune their own models on llama2/gpt-3.5!

Llama 2 and Bedrock is exactly what we are looking at. I have been playing around with it for a priority enterprise use-case at my org, and this seems promising. We tried using the Retool vectors, but it really struggles to pick up the right context if we dump data without pre-processing it. For example, adding a URL without stripping header/footers/disclaimers/cross links etc. I think adding some steerability to the…

Thanks for the feedback. We're currently working on customization with the url parser and trimming headers/etc makes a lot of sense. If you're able to share more about your use case (jamie AT retool DOT com), happy to get it tuned on your dataset
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