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Launch HN: Openlayer (YC S21) – Testing and Evaluation for AI

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Launch HN: Openlayer (YC S21) – Testing and Evaluation for AI

#1
Hey HN, Rish, Vikas and Gabe here. We're building Openlayer (https://www.openlayer.com/), an observability platform for AI. We've developed comprehensive testing tools to check both the quality of your input data and the performance of your model outputs.

The complexity and black-box nature of AI/ML have made rigorous testing a lot harder than it is in most software development. Consequently, AI development involves a lot of head-scratching and often feels like walking in the dark. Developers need reliable insights into how and why their models fail. We're here to simplify this for both common and long-tail failure scenarios.

Consider a scenario in which your model is working smoothly. What happens when there's a sudden shift in user behavior? This unexpected change can disrupt the model's performance, leading to unreliable outputs. Our platform offers a solution: by continuously monitoring for sudden data variations, we can detect these shifts promptly. That's not all though – we’ve created a broad set of rigorous tests that your model, or agent, must pass. These tests are designed to challenge and verify the model's resilience against such unforeseen changes, ensuring its reliability under diverse conditions.

We support seamlessly switching between (1) development mode, which lets you test, version, and compare your models before you deploy them to production, and (2) monitoring mode, which lets you run tests live in production and receive alerts when things go sideways.

Say you're using an LLM for RAG and want to make sure the output is always relevant to the question. You can set up hallucination tests, and we'll buzz you when the average score dips below your comfort zone.

Or imagine you're managing a fraud prediction model and are losing sleep over false negatives. Openlayer offers a two-step solution. First, it helps pinpoint why the model misses certain fraudulent data points using debugging tools such as explainability. Second, it enables converting these identified cases into targeted tests. This allows you to deep dive into tackling specific incidents, like fraud within a segment of US merchants. By following this process, you can understand your model's behavior and refine it to capture future fraudulent cases more effectively.

The MLOps landscape is currently fragmented. We’ve seen countless data and ML teams glue together a ton of bespoke and third-party tools to meet basic needs: one for experiment tracking, another for monitoring, and another for CI automation and version control. With LLMOps now thrown into the mix, it can feel like you need yet another set of entirely new tools.

We don’t think you should, so we're building Openlayer to condense and simplify AI evaluation. It’s a collaborative platform that solves long-standing ML problems like the ones above, while tackling the new crop of challenges presented by Generative AI and foundation models (e.g. prompt versioning, quality control). We address these problems in a single, consistent way that doesn't require you to learn a new approach. We’ve spent a lot of time ensuring our evaluation methodology remains robust even as the boundaries of AI continue to be redrawn.

We're stoked to bring Openlayer to the HN community and are keen to hear your thoughts, experiences, and insights on building trust into AI systems.

Re: Launch HN: Openlayer (YC S21) – Testing and Evaluation for AI

#9
post #4

how is it different from Traceloop and openllmetry ( https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry )?

For one thing, the name is certainly better than the latter's lol

I find OpenLLMetry to be better.

1. OpenLayer does not say metrics or monitoring to me

2. OpenLLMetry builds on OpenTelemetry, which it very much reminds me of as a name. It's also a much easier add-on to our existing stack. I don't want to have to log into some company's website to view metrics for a single part of my stack when trying to understand why things are not working as expected.

3. OpenLLMetry is open core, which is what devs desire. Who is really using closed source software in this space now (the logmon space, not ai, though both are largely chasing after open dreams)

Re: Launch HN: Openlayer (YC S21) – Testing and Evaluation for AI

#10
post #4

how is it different from Traceloop and openllmetry ( https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry )?

Broadly, on the monitoring side, we’re more focused on evaluating the quality of the model’s outputs (is it violating your rules, handling specific subpopulations / edge cases correctly etc.). OpenLLMetry is more focussed on telemetry and tracing, whereas for us ‘monitoring’ is a means to running your tests on production data.

Openlayer’s also intended to be used on non-LLM use cases. Here are a few other ways we’re different:

1. Support for other ML task types

2. Includes a development mode for versioning and experimentation

3. Native slack and email alerts (openllmetry might integrate with other platforms that do that, but not sure)

4. Collaboration is deeply embedded into the product

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