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Hello! One of the developers of Khoj here. The way we see it, building in the open is going to be critical for creating an aligned, trustworthy AI assistant.

Hello! One of the developers of Khoj here. The way we see it, building in the open is going to be critical for creating an aligned, trustworthy AI assistant. Note: while all LLM tools look fairly similar on the surface these days, our specific approaches are fairly different. Give us a try and see what you think :-)

weekay 3y ago
>Are you all working on providing an easy way to maybe use LLMs for chatting/search without sending my data to OpenAI? From a brief look at the github repo there seems to be need to setup OpenAI API key so not sure if this currently has the ability to chat / search w/o sending or needing a OpenAI API access ?
- sabaimran 3y ago
  Search does currently work 100% offline - none of your data would be sent to OpenAI if all you're doing is searching for your local documents. You could completely disable your internet connection and it would still work. Chat currently is only integrated with OpenAI because it had the highest quality + lowest barrier to entry. We're experimenting with open source LLMs and hope to have an alternative available soon.
kossTKR 3y ago
"The way we see it, building in the open is going to be critical for creating an aligned, trustworthy AI assistant." Isn't this service just a very thin wrapper around chat-gpt? How on earth do you have any influence on alignment or trustworthiness. That's like saying your coffee cup makes your coffee fair trade. This whole thread is very disingenuous, it's literally a simple interface for the OpenAI-API drenched in fake buzzwords boosted to the top of HN to scam investors.
- Kiro 3y ago
  You're being overly critical. You can definitely control the alignment of your assistant with prompt engineering and embeddings. They never say they control the underlying model. It's an open source project and I don't see why you need to be so obnoxious about it.
  - croes 3y ago
    It says open source AI personal assistant. The AI isn't open source and sending your data to a third party isn't really trustworthy personal.
    - Kiro 3y ago
      I don't understand the presumption that the AI should be open source here. If I release an open source SDK for talking to an API, it's still open source even if the underlying API isn't.
      - morelisp 3y ago
        > I don't understand the presumption that the AI should be open source here. Because it literally says "open-source AI".
        Kiro 3y ago
        It says "open-source AI assistant".
        morelisp 3y ago
        Be serious.
        Kiro 3y ago
        I'm dead serious. The assistant talking to the AI is open source. How else would you describe it? You guys are really doing everything in your power to miscredit this. I really don't understand the hostile attitude.
        oarsinsync 3y ago
        This threads reminds of a repeated scene in The Office, where one man repeatedly calls himself the “assistant manager”, and is constantly corrected as “assistant to the manager.” Open source AI assistant. Open source assistant to the AI.
- villgax 3y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. This person is just gaming the system on here
- peaceforall 3y ago
  [flagged]
badtension 3y ago
And yet you didn't answer them at all.
- 110 3y ago
  I can expand on that (I'm the other developer working on the project). > Seen a few of these. Are you all working on providing an easy way to maybe use LLMs for chatting/search without sending my data to OpenAI? If yes, how will you verify the quality is "reasonable"? We're working on building a helpful AI assistant, with or without OpenAI. We use offline SentenceTransformer models for search and OpenAI (currently) for chat. To allow user to verify quality, with search you've to look at the quality of the results returned. For chat we pass references (from your docs) used to generate the response. A lot more should be done, open to suggestions. We also have our own chat quality test suite that "benchmarks" chat capabilities (via pytest) > How is this better than Rewind, Needl, Mem, etc all the personal search engine that have been doing the rounds lately from various knowledge bases? Is the selling point that it's Open-source? Also if Apple improves spotlight, I wonder how useful this will be. - I've tried Rewind. It's a neat project with a slick UI, no doubt about it. But 1. It has a cold boot problem (you can only search stuff you've opened since you installed Rewind) and 2. It's limited to Mac (M1+) machines. Khoj will index all supported files across your data sources and it can run on other machines easily. - Needl, based on their homepage, seems to provide fuzzy/keyword based search. Khoj search works offline and supports natural language queries (e.g search for "sold my car for" and it'll find notes about your Toyota Corolla or Ferrari) - Mem.ai is pretty neat as well. We'd love to add all the features they have. With Khoj you can self-host if you prefer or use Khoj cloud if you want to sync across devices. And it integrates into your existing tools (Emacs, Obsidian and Web) In summary, Khoj being open-source is a critical differentiator for an AI assistant to be trustable (you can see what the code is doing). But all the AI assistance approaches are also different.

weekay 3y ago

>Are you all working on providing an easy way to maybe use LLMs for chatting/search without sending my data to OpenAI? From a brief look at the github repo there seems to be need to setup OpenAI API key so not sure if this currently has the ability to chat / search w/o sending or needing a OpenAI API access ?

sabaimran 3y ago
Search does currently work 100% offline - none of your data would be sent to OpenAI if all you're doing is searching for your local documents. You could completely disable your internet connection and it would still work. Chat currently is only integrated with OpenAI because it had the highest quality + lowest barrier to entry. We're experimenting with open source LLMs and hope to have an alternative available soon.

kossTKR 3y ago

"The way we see it, building in the open is going to be critical for creating an aligned, trustworthy AI assistant." Isn't this service just a very thin wrapper around chat-gpt? How on earth do you have any influence on alignment or trustworthiness. That's like saying your coffee cup makes your coffee fair trade. This whole thread is very disingenuous, it's literally a simple interface for the OpenAI-API drenched in fake buzzwords boosted to the top of HN to scam investors.

Kiro 3y ago
You're being overly critical. You can definitely control the alignment of your assistant with prompt engineering and embeddings. They never say they control the underlying model. It's an open source project and I don't see why you need to be so obnoxious about it.
- croes 3y ago
  It says open source AI personal assistant. The AI isn't open source and sending your data to a third party isn't really trustworthy personal.
  - Kiro 3y ago
    I don't understand the presumption that the AI should be open source here. If I release an open source SDK for talking to an API, it's still open source even if the underlying API isn't.
    - morelisp 3y ago
      > I don't understand the presumption that the AI should be open source here. Because it literally says "open-source AI".
      - Kiro 3y ago
        It says "open-source AI assistant".
        morelisp 3y ago
        Be serious.
        Kiro 3y ago
        I'm dead serious. The assistant talking to the AI is open source. How else would you describe it? You guys are really doing everything in your power to miscredit this. I really don't understand the hostile attitude.
        oarsinsync 3y ago
        This threads reminds of a repeated scene in The Office, where one man repeatedly calls himself the “assistant manager”, and is constantly corrected as “assistant to the manager.” Open source AI assistant. Open source assistant to the AI.
villgax 3y ago
Exactly my thoughts. This person is just gaming the system on here
peaceforall 3y ago
[flagged]

badtension 3y ago

And yet you didn't answer them at all.

110 3y ago
I can expand on that (I'm the other developer working on the project). > Seen a few of these. Are you all working on providing an easy way to maybe use LLMs for chatting/search without sending my data to OpenAI? If yes, how will you verify the quality is "reasonable"? We're working on building a helpful AI assistant, with or without OpenAI. We use offline SentenceTransformer models for search and OpenAI (currently) for chat. To allow user to verify quality, with search you've to look at the quality of the results returned. For chat we pass references (from your docs) used to generate the response. A lot more should be done, open to suggestions. We also have our own chat quality test suite that "benchmarks" chat capabilities (via pytest) > How is this better than Rewind, Needl, Mem, etc all the personal search engine that have been doing the rounds lately from various knowledge bases? Is the selling point that it's Open-source? Also if Apple improves spotlight, I wonder how useful this will be. - I've tried Rewind. It's a neat project with a slick UI, no doubt about it. But 1. It has a cold boot problem (you can only search stuff you've opened since you installed Rewind) and 2. It's limited to Mac (M1+) machines. Khoj will index all supported files across your data sources and it can run on other machines easily. - Needl, based on their homepage, seems to provide fuzzy/keyword based search. Khoj search works offline and supports natural language queries (e.g search for "sold my car for" and it'll find notes about your Toyota Corolla or Ferrari) - Mem.ai is pretty neat as well. We'd love to add all the features they have. With Khoj you can self-host if you prefer or use Khoj cloud if you want to sync across devices. And it integrates into your existing tools (Emacs, Obsidian and Web) In summary, Khoj being open-source is a critical differentiator for an AI assistant to be trustable (you can see what the code is doing). But all the AI assistance approaches are also different.