8 ms·

"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 wrappe

"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.
        ubertaco 3y ago
        Assistant _to the_ Regional Manager! Seriously, this is such a misleading redefinition of a common phrase that it makes me suspicious of the whole project's trustworthiness. If they're playing shell games with "well, technically I didn't say that I meant this phrase the way it's most commonly used in this same industry", then what else are they redefining and misleading about? I'd encourage you to look into how Siri and "hey Google" and even Cortana and Bixby all describe themselves: as "AI assistants". Nobody thinks "the thing that takes audio and throws it into an AI model is the assistant _to the_ AI". They think of the whole package as their AI assistant — that is, an assistant that is an AI. That's how the phrase is most commonly used, and even if it were a new turn of phrase, parsing "adjective noun" out into "noun to the noun" is wildly unnatural.
        Kiro 3y ago
        So what should they call this to avoid getting hated on? People are saying this is "just a thin wrapper" but I don't think that's the case (and even if it was, what's the problem?). This is their architecture: https://github.com/khoj-ai/khoj/blob/master/docs/khoj_architecture.png https://github.com/khoj-ai/khoj/blob/master/docs/khoj_archit...
  - sabaimran 3y ago
    I understand your concerns, but let me zoom out a little here and talk about the nature of open source. Open source means that the source code which is developed for a piece of software is fully open (i.e, anyone can read, fork, modify the code) for what they are installing. According to your definition, it would be really hard to do anything that is fully, end to end, open source. We've developed the code on Macs, hosted the code on GitHub, written plugins for Obsidian and GitHub, hosted the website on AWS. All of those are closed sourced software. https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-source https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-so... That being said, we are planning to integrate an open source LLM soon. When we added chat, Open AI just had the best one, but the space is changing so quickly. We're both super enthusiastic about seeing all the open source tooling for this stuff evolve.
    - ubertaco 3y ago
      The problem is not that there is "glue" to closed-source apps. It's that the essential core of your product, without which your product has no content or meaningful use — is _someone else's closed-source model._ If I market "a totally creative-commons blockbuster Hollywood movie", but my actual product is just a creative-commons-licensed set of driving directions to some nearby movie theater where you can buy tickets to see the same copyrighted movies anyone else is offering, then _the fundamental essence_ of what I'm offering is not, in fact, creative-commons. I sold people on a _movie_ with that license, and then failed to deliver. That's what you've done here. To be clear, the fatal flaw is that your marketing is dishonest about what your product currently is, not that your product is something nobody wants. I'd recommend either making your marketing honest, or else making your product live up to what your marketing promises. _Then_ you do the PR push on HN.
    - morelisp 3y ago
      > it would be really hard to do anything that is fully, end to end, open source. We've developed the code on Macs, hosted the code on GitHub, written plugins for Obsidian and GitHub, hosted the website on AWS. Yeah, nobody did open source before those things existed...
- wokwokwok 3y ago
  Are they being obnoxious without cause though? The Khoj website says, and I quote: > Khoj's offline AI models allow you to find information using natural language queries. Search using terms that are similar to what you're looking for, rather than exact or fuzzy matches. Khoj search works offline. So if you self-host your data never leaves your machine and search works without internet. Emphasis mine. It seems somewhat disingenuous. I get it, parts of it run offline, parts of it use the openai api… but that’s not what it says on the box. Why is the project making a song and dance about self hosting and being open source when it’s just another openai app. If it’s not just another openai wrapper, cut the openai part of it out and pitch it that way, sure. …but as it stands, I’m pretty sceptical. Lots of people are doing the “ai magic” tech demo stuff at the moment, but when you cut them off from the openai api the magic goes away and what’s left isn't very good or interesting. Maybe this is different? …but it doesn’t look like it; and since they’re tied up with the openai api and you can’t use it without that, how would I even tell?
  - Kiro 3y ago
    It feels like you are reading too much into this. Really don't understand all the bashing here. It's an open source software for building things using OpenAI. Do you think LangChain is similarly disingenuous? Or the Vercel AI SDK?
    - wokwokwok 3y ago
      Neither of those things claim: > So if you self-host your data never leaves your machine
      - Kiro 3y ago
        You're quoting the paragraph under "Search", describing their search engine. I feel you're misrepresenting it. Anyway, I definitely don't think this deserves to be described as "a simple interface for the OpenAI-API drenched in fake buzzwords boosted to the top of HN to scam investors" or "twitter get-rich-quick-guru level lousy and fake, and is clearly boosted to the top of HN". Horrible reactions in this thread to open source software you can fork to use whatever you want. Really disappointing.
villgax 3y ago
Exactly my thoughts. This person is just gaming the system on here
peaceforall 3y ago
[flagged]

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.
        ubertaco 3y ago
        Assistant _to the_ Regional Manager! Seriously, this is such a misleading redefinition of a common phrase that it makes me suspicious of the whole project's trustworthiness. If they're playing shell games with "well, technically I didn't say that I meant this phrase the way it's most commonly used in this same industry", then what else are they redefining and misleading about? I'd encourage you to look into how Siri and "hey Google" and even Cortana and Bixby all describe themselves: as "AI assistants". Nobody thinks "the thing that takes audio and throws it into an AI model is the assistant _to the_ AI". They think of the whole package as their AI assistant — that is, an assistant that is an AI. That's how the phrase is most commonly used, and even if it were a new turn of phrase, parsing "adjective noun" out into "noun to the noun" is wildly unnatural.
        Kiro 3y ago
        So what should they call this to avoid getting hated on? People are saying this is "just a thin wrapper" but I don't think that's the case (and even if it was, what's the problem?). This is their architecture: https://github.com/khoj-ai/khoj/blob/master/docs/khoj_architecture.png https://github.com/khoj-ai/khoj/blob/master/docs/khoj_archit...
- sabaimran 3y ago
  I understand your concerns, but let me zoom out a little here and talk about the nature of open source. Open source means that the source code which is developed for a piece of software is fully open (i.e, anyone can read, fork, modify the code) for what they are installing. According to your definition, it would be really hard to do anything that is fully, end to end, open source. We've developed the code on Macs, hosted the code on GitHub, written plugins for Obsidian and GitHub, hosted the website on AWS. All of those are closed sourced software. https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-source https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/open-source/what-is-open-so... That being said, we are planning to integrate an open source LLM soon. When we added chat, Open AI just had the best one, but the space is changing so quickly. We're both super enthusiastic about seeing all the open source tooling for this stuff evolve.
  - ubertaco 3y ago
    The problem is not that there is "glue" to closed-source apps. It's that the essential core of your product, without which your product has no content or meaningful use — is _someone else's closed-source model._ If I market "a totally creative-commons blockbuster Hollywood movie", but my actual product is just a creative-commons-licensed set of driving directions to some nearby movie theater where you can buy tickets to see the same copyrighted movies anyone else is offering, then _the fundamental essence_ of what I'm offering is not, in fact, creative-commons. I sold people on a _movie_ with that license, and then failed to deliver. That's what you've done here. To be clear, the fatal flaw is that your marketing is dishonest about what your product currently is, not that your product is something nobody wants. I'd recommend either making your marketing honest, or else making your product live up to what your marketing promises. _Then_ you do the PR push on HN.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    > it would be really hard to do anything that is fully, end to end, open source. We've developed the code on Macs, hosted the code on GitHub, written plugins for Obsidian and GitHub, hosted the website on AWS. Yeah, nobody did open source before those things existed...
wokwokwok 3y ago
Are they being obnoxious without cause though? The Khoj website says, and I quote: > Khoj's offline AI models allow you to find information using natural language queries. Search using terms that are similar to what you're looking for, rather than exact or fuzzy matches. Khoj search works offline. So if you self-host your data never leaves your machine and search works without internet. Emphasis mine. It seems somewhat disingenuous. I get it, parts of it run offline, parts of it use the openai api… but that’s not what it says on the box. Why is the project making a song and dance about self hosting and being open source when it’s just another openai app. If it’s not just another openai wrapper, cut the openai part of it out and pitch it that way, sure. …but as it stands, I’m pretty sceptical. Lots of people are doing the “ai magic” tech demo stuff at the moment, but when you cut them off from the openai api the magic goes away and what’s left isn't very good or interesting. Maybe this is different? …but it doesn’t look like it; and since they’re tied up with the openai api and you can’t use it without that, how would I even tell?
- Kiro 3y ago
  It feels like you are reading too much into this. Really don't understand all the bashing here. It's an open source software for building things using OpenAI. Do you think LangChain is similarly disingenuous? Or the Vercel AI SDK?
  - wokwokwok 3y ago
    Neither of those things claim: > So if you self-host your data never leaves your machine
    - Kiro 3y ago
      You're quoting the paragraph under "Search", describing their search engine. I feel you're misrepresenting it. Anyway, I definitely don't think this deserves to be described as "a simple interface for the OpenAI-API drenched in fake buzzwords boosted to the top of HN to scam investors" or "twitter get-rich-quick-guru level lousy and fake, and is clearly boosted to the top of HN". Horrible reactions in this thread to open source software you can fork to use whatever you want. Really disappointing.

villgax 3y ago

Exactly my thoughts. This person is just gaming the system on here

peaceforall 3y ago

[flagged]