13 ms·
LangChain Announces 10M Seed Round
- cs702 4y agoAs of right now, LangChain is the easiest-to-use and most popular software library for composing LLM-powered systems together. The funding will help the team make it into a polished product. In particular, I expect LangChain will start offering prebuilt hosted services that developers can use as components for building third-party apps. Congrats to the LangChain team!
- capableweb 4y agoMoney != polish, money means they now need to find a way of earning money from it. This is sometimes how FOSS goes to die.
- riku_iki 4y agothis is a seed round, the goal is to get growth, and after series C/D/E expectation will be to get into profitability.
- sharemywin 4y agobut you have to at least have a monetization strategy right?
- riku_iki 4y agoConsulting, paid plugins.
- sebzim4500 4y agoMaybe a managed solution, too.
- WalterSear 4y agoFYI: the signup link on your home page leads to the about page instead.
- riku_iki 4y agoSorry, which home page, I don't have any )
- WalterSear 4y agoDoh, I thought you were from LongChain.
- capableweb 4y agoMeaning, bait-and-switch users by all means necessary (but after series C). I'm really looking forward to it.
- visarga 4y agoThis one is right in the middle of the action - the plugin market. It is the Android to OpenAI's iOS. Everyone needs a second option.
- thequadehunter 4y agoAnother thing people seem to forget is that Langchain can use LLMs that aren't made by OpenAI. If OpenAI goes under, or a great open-source model comes onto the scene, Langchain can still do its thing.
- fzliu 4y agoThis is the path forward that I see for Langchain commercialization as well. As we begin to see more and more products built atop LLMs, these hosted services could form the backbone for a lot of those applications. Disclaimer: We - Milvus (https://milvus.io https://milvus.io) and Zilliz (https://zilliz.com https://zilliz.com) - and we have integrations as a vector store in Langchain.
- revskill 4y agoLangChain is bad at documentation. I hate it.
- quest88 4y agoSubmit some PRs!
- riku_iki 4y agothey received funding, they should be submitting PRs now?
- chatmasta 4y agoUnfortunately, depositing $10 million into a bank account does not also deposit the butts of 50 engineers into seats. But if you're looking for a job, now would be a good time to reach out to them and offer your services!
- sharemywin 4y agoOr write a competitor and and get some of that sweet sweet merger money.
- mediaman 4y agoYeah it’s kind of a disaster. Partly because they’ve been moving so fast, and their docs don’t keep up. But for actually building stuff on it, they have a ways to go. Good for quick demos on Twitter though.
- visarga 4y agoThey should use ... you know ... LangChain to write documentations.
- bfeynman 4y agokind of amazing that something that is haphazardly slapped together was able to pull a business plan together to get funding.
- raviparikh 4y ago"haphazardly slapped together" describes ~99% of all startups that raise seed funding, and is often correlated with success.
- froggychairs 4y agoLangChain is especially slapped together. Not something I would use in production (especially with the eval bug that was left unpatched for weeks despite an open PR) It feels at some point being too slapped together isn’t correlated with success Wishing the LangChain team well! But there are already alternatives cropping up that are far more polished (Microsoft’s Semantic Kernel being one)
- MisterPea 4y agoI don't know if it's as much slapped together as it is just "simple". I feel super arrogant and very HN-esque saying it but I did a deep dive into the code and it isn't anything to write home about engineering wise. What it does offer is standardization of composing LLM prompts - something that a team within a company can spend a week max to write an SOP doc/implementation for.
- karmasimida 4y agoYeah, it is not a deep layer of abstraction I don’t what the hype is about this. The effort to develop LLM stuff is surprisingly low, put a framework upon it seems overkill
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- the_royal_dude 4y agoWonder what the monetization route will be with so many alternative projects.
- rlt 4y agoWell $10M “seed” rounds are still a thing I guess.
- blandcoffee 4y agoThis was my first thought too - I'm starting to question it, because they do have a product. Whether they have fit, will be interesting to see. More than most of the hype seed rounds in 2021.
- debarshri 4y agoWhat was the most hyped seed in 2021?
- theturtletalks 4y agoI think LangChain will be the "backend" for many AI based SaaS companies in the future.
- screye 4y agoIt is hardly a seed round. Langchain is the most mature tool (not saying much) in this new LLM revolution. Like a market leader doing a seed round.
- ttul 4y agoAnything less than $10M would be wholly inappropriate for the moment. I’m shocked it wasn’t much more. Surely this will be followed by $100M within months. Rarely has there been a field of technology that has moved as rapidly as LLMs are in the last two months.
- truthsayer123 4y agoOpen source is the new marketing gimick for rasing funding.
- leobg 4y agoAnd hijacking HN to do so. Not sure what’s worse. That people do it, or that it works.
- WalterSear 4y agoNew?
- taosx 4y agoCongratz to LangChain. Wondering what's the dev workflow when doing prompt engineering using langchain/haystack. - Is there a way to view the final log? - Why there isn't a simple way how abstractions will look in the final output? - Can we change the output of those abstractions (tools, agents..etc)? Unfortunately, I see no plans about documentation whatsoever.
- truthsayer123 4y agoFolks interested in this space and actually wants to work on open source, now is a good time to fork Lang chain. The moment they raised VC funding the open source project is dead. All their incentives are now to 100x the investment they just raised. They would start putting core features behind an enterprise license. Contributors of langchain please fork the project and make a better project! Stop sending free contributions to make the investors rich.
- qwerty3344 4y agoThis isn't true, many open source companies make money in ways that don't diminish the core open source product, Kafka/ElasticSearch/MongoDB/Supabase/Vercel/Grafana/Red Hat/etc
- truthsayer123 4y agoMost of them have the core features put behind an enterprise license.
- la64710 4y agoCorrect
- tpae 4y agoCould use more competition
- la64710 4y agoThis is so true. Sad to see a promising open source project being sold out. I doubt now if langchain can truly ever reach its potential of supporting additional models beside OpenAIs and would be able to support user contributed tools or agents.
- tylersmith 4y agoWhy not provide the free contributions to an open source fork yourself instead of begging others to give up their own time?
- qwerty3344 4y agoCan someone explain how LangChain compares to Llama Index [1]? [1] https://github.com/jerryjliu/llama_index https://github.com/jerryjliu/llama_index
- Jimmc414 4y agoLangchain allows an LLM to initiate query and prompt workflows and observing the results in a sequential or conditional logic chain or workflow and invoking agents, while GPT Index (now Llama Index) excels at connecting an LLM to external data sources and implementing creative indexing schemes for querying within given token context windows. Right now they both fill a need and complement each other nicely.
- bugglebeetle 4y agoDo you have any good/interesting examples of these prompt workflows with langchain? I can see the utility in the abstract, but haven’t seen anything out in the world beyond clever toy projects.
- TrevorJ 4y agoEntirely notional as of now, but I plan on testing it for game development. The thought is, you could create an embedding of the lore, data, facts and state of your game world and then interrogate the LLM about this in various ways. I see this being very useful both during the authoring of the game, and at runtime.
- darkteflon 4y agoThat’s awesome, wonderful idea. “State Machine games” is incredibly hard to Google!
- TrevorJ 4y agoI'm realizing I probably should update my bio on here more than once every decade! Currently working full time in a related industry, so most of my AI experimentations are strictly on my own time these days. If anyone is interested in these same sorts of things I am on twitter @TrevorJ
- matthewgapp 4y agowow
- ggnore7452 4y agoThe place where I work was an early adopter of LLM, having started working on it a year ago. When I build stuff with GPT-3, especially in the earlier days, I get the strong impression that it's like we are doing machine learning without Numpy and Pandas. with LangChain, many of the systems I have built can be done in just one or two lines, making life much easier for rest of us. I also believe that LangChain's Agent framework is underappreciated as it was pretty ahead of its time until the official ChatGPT plugins were released. (contributed to LangChain a bit too.) Unfortunately, the documentation is lacking indeed. While I understand the need to move quickly, it is not good that some crucial concepts like Customized LLM have inadequate documentation. (Perhaps having some LLM builds on top of the repo would be more effective than documentation at this point.)
- startupsfail 4y agoI think LangChain is already outdated and it (and its copycats) are going to cripple the entire field.
- spacemanspiff01 4y agoWhy? What do you think the better model is?
- cube2222 4y agoCould you expand on what you think is the state of the art and direction we should be heading in?
- startupsfail 4y agoWell, had the community tried analyzing what could be done better? And iterating on the design? No, the design from an old academic paper was used with a much newer model. And now everyone is just copying that. It works, because new models are impressive. But the design is far from being elegant or particularly efficient. And now, because tons of data like that is going to be generated, we’ll be stuck with it.
- alphabetatheta 4y agoThe investment is all about the vision LangChain proposes & I guess they have 20K stars and a decent amount of users.
- strontian 4y agoThe LangChain community and ecosystem is one of the most interesting places in AI at the moment, but after spending some time with the codebase I can't shake the feeling that the constructs and way they are factored are hopelessly wrong. Not sure what to think about that.
- brofallon 4y agoI agree - LangChain is totally awesome and unlocks amazing new capabilities of LLMs (easily!), but the code itself is pretty awkward. No logging framework, for instance, and the strong typing enforcement with pydantic seems un-pythonic and brittle to me (what if I want to use a different kind of Mappable instead of a dict for something?). Still, great work overall and congrats to the team!
- strontian 4y agoIndeed, the team has done momentum, community and probably other things well, congrats to them!
- shepardrtc 4y agoWhatever time pydantic is supposed to have saved me from making dumb mistakes, I've wasted 100x more trying to shoehorn stuff into some poorly thought-out schema.
- mrlatinos 4y agoFor FastAPI, Pydantic ends up being part of the API contract. It's less about saving time and more about validating requests.
- maxbond 4y ago> what if I want to use a different kind of Mappable instead of a dict for something? You can use custom field types either by using a `validator` with `pre=True` or a define a class with a `__get_validators__` classmethod. But pydantic does have problems, imho it isn't strict enough & has given me the wrong types when using `Union`s a bunch of times. Defining custom encoding & decoding behavior is harder than it needs to be. The purely narrative documentation is easy to learn but difficult to reference. I would agree that strict typing is unpythonic but in this case I think this is an outdated opinion of Python, one that it's been backpedaling on with type annotations &c. I think Python made perfectly reasonable decisions about this some 30 years ago, and they haven't aged well, which isn't even really a criticism as much as a consequence of it's enormous success. Python had outlived a lot of the ideas & attitudes about language design that went into making it, and carries them as scar tissue.
- itsaquicknote 4y agoThe landgrab going on in this space is ferocious. If you weren't convinced this is mania, and a 10M "seed" round for Langchain doesn't do it for you, nothing will. Well done Harrison on the cash grab (take as much money off the table every round as you can), it's a smart move. But I can't shake the feeling that this ever increasing mania will sweep up anything OSS with vague traction and this whole AI space that used to be religiously defaulted to open and sharing will fairly quickly end up in VC-funded fiefdoms with pay-to-play being all that's left modulo the "forever free" community hobbled versions. Hope I'm wrong.
- TylerE 4y agoThe question is if the 2nd AI Winter kills python the way the first killed lisp.
- FractalHQ 4y agoGod I hope so.
- captaincaveman 4y agoCould it swap, so we can have lisp back?
- capableweb 4y agoIt would be absolute godsend if we could, so one measly error wouldn't require restarting a entire process just to rewrite some small part.
- TylerE 4y agoThat's really more erlang's niche.
- freilanzer 4y ago
- nothrowaways 4y agoThings are moving like Crazy!
- lmeyerov 4y agoGood luck to the team! We went back-and-forth in diff APIs here before coming back to langchain. The march release with async streaming, and growing plugin work, are examples of why. Balancing VC funding with OSS will be hard. I like having a neutral player here, separate from the model and DB co's, so huge value. But until they prove a scalable revenue model, huge risk of them fighting their community, and the biggest coders are smart enough nowadays to recognize and jump ship: who wants to give free work to someone else + risk donating their entire income stream to them? So I'd love to see a lot more clarity on business model and clear lines in the sand for this not being a big rug pull at the cost of its users & developers. The next 2-3 weeks are pretty critical here for community comms, especially given the competition. Again, good luck to the team!
- otar 4y ago$10m Seed Round?
- jfisher4024 4y agoCongrats to Harrison and the team. The pace of Langchain development is pretty stunning and they deserve the shot to make this happen.
- yding 4y agoCongratulations Harrison, Ankush, and team. I first heard about Langchain at the Scale hackathon when I think it was Colin who was like “half the people are using Langchain” and I was like whatchain? Amazing trajectory!
- fudged71 4y agoGood for them! If you've been following their Twitter and Discord, their speed has been remarkable
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- siliconc0w 4y agoI tried to use langchain but found some bits broken/suboptimal and quickly found myself hacking around it. It certainly has useful concepts/patterns but you aren't using most of them and it's generally easier to just implement what you need for your specific problem - at least at this stage. Maybe once the ecosystem grows more the value proposition changes.
- mattizzle81 4y agoGlad that others are having the same thoughts as I was and I’m not just crazy or missing something big here. I am trying to understand why I’d actually want to use it vs just interfacing with the LLM api directly. For most use cases it is very straightforward and it is good to understand every step of the interaction rather than a “black box”
- oldstrangers 4y agoAnyone know if they're hiring (Product Designer)? Their web presence is pretty sparse.
- enricoros 4y agoTL;DR & DIY: asked gpt-4 this prompt "Cluster the top10 categories of complaints by the users, and describe each category with a few adjectives/nouns in order or importance." as of rn. Crisp or too critical? 1. Documentation: lacking, inadequate, outdated 2. Code quality: simple, awkward, suboptimal 3. Production readiness: experimental, unreliable, limited 4. Monetization: unclear, risky, potentially detrimental to open-source 5. Community support: misinformation, poor communication, fragmented 6. Ecosystem: competing alternatives, redundancy, unclear positioning 7. Business model: potential rug-pull, VC-funded, uncertain sustainability 8. Developer experience: poor ergonomics, type erasure, confusing 9. Performance: slow, afterthought, poor observability 10. Maintenance: unpatched bugs, slow response to issues, dependency on contributors
- yawnxyz 4y agoWell, I was going to work on a couple of langchain document loaders and an agent this weekend, but now after this raise? nah. After reading about countless other awesome open source projects get tainted by VC cash, what makes it so different this time?
- lopatin 4y agoWhat will you use instead? Fixie?
- thequadehunter 4y agoFixie got a 17M seed so I guess not LOL
- lopatin 4y agoI see. So is the idea to avoid companies that are getting resources to improve their product and grow faster?
- capableweb 4y agoI think the idea is to avoid contributing to money-horny companies using FOSS as marketing plans. Growing faster is not end-all-be-all, sometimes it's best to go at a reasonable speed.
- lopatin 4y agoIt just seems like an emotional reaction rather than practical advice.
- capableweb 4y agoI find spending time working for a company without getting paid is impractical, but that might just be me.
- 4y ago
- ricklamers 4y agoInterestingly on Feb 13th it was already reported [0] LangChain was in talks with Benchmark about a Seed round. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/benchmark-expected-to-join-generative-ai-rush-with-deal-for-startup-langchain https://www.theinformation.com/articles/benchmark-expected-t...
- huslage 4y agoIs it no longer possible to just have a nice open source project without a company existing around it?
- dsabanin 4y agoPeople want to eat.
- lee101 4y ago[dead]
- monkeydust 4y agoLangchain has been amazing for me to demonstrate what's possible as a product guy but my engineers are highly reluctant to use it for production deployment - I half get their concerns, many of which are in this thread already. I would say they have 6 months to prove our their enterprise value, hope they can do it.
- bestcoder69 4y agoAre there examples of a langchain agent that uses chat API w/ gpt 3.5 or 4 and works well? I keep trying the library every once in a while, and I like it in theory, but the more impressive-seeming parts just don’t seem to actually work well. Eg - the Agent tool to retrieve webpage content just immediately fills up the context window. You can say “only use it for small pages”, but the agent picks the page! - “as an AI language model I can’t use any fancy tools” - I couldn’t mix and match ConversationalAgent with keeping intermediate steps and memory - gave me an error about only allowing certain chain output keys. This one could’ve been fixed by now, but to me it points to how the library’s features don’t necessarily work together just because they’re in the library together I do find the library to be useful as a survey of prompting techniques though. For my own chatbot that can use tools, I found I had to lean in to how ChatGPT _wants_ to respond, by getting it to reply in “code mode” (intro text, bullet list of steps, followed by code blocks and outtro). From there the trick is to get it to just write a single line of python (or another lang) where it just calls a function. Then the non-code reply is it’s “scratch pad”, followed by a code block of action invocation. So the only parsing I’m doing is just pulling out the code block and (don’t boo me, it’s just for fun) eval-ing it. But the response format is pretty consistent so I could make a little mini-parser for python func calls. Before that, I tried and failed to do what langchain does- prompt engineer in the System Prompt in order to get chatgpt to respond in the correct format (thought, action, observation, answer)
- jerpint 4y agoEvery time I read the langchain docs, I get confused, and realize that implementing these things myself won’t take much time and offer me transparency… maybe I’m not the target audience?
- mattizzle81 4y agoI feel the same way. I’m confused as to the value it’s really offering. The LLMs themselves do all the heavy lifting and all you have to do is feed in text and parse output text. Very basic programming. It seems like a bunch of hype to me. I’d rather build my own and have transparency with what’s going on and how prompts etc are being handled.
- bobvanluijt 4y agoThis is great news! Things are moving so fast; I remember we started to help out with our team after we saw the first Weaviate pull request https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain/pull/261 https://github.com/hwchase17/langchain/pull/261