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Show HN: Map with an LLM
Christmas project from a personal need to find ideal locations.
- zknowledge 2y agoThis is so well done. Very interested in new UIs with LLMs. Great work. How's it work under the hood?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sr-latch 2y agoDoes it have internet access? Looks like a very convenient interface for looking for hotels, planning travels
- ata_aman 2y agoIt does, I can certainly add it. I made it because I'm looking to open a new location for a brick and mortar business so I needed a way to look at the competitive landscape, high-level demographics etc... It would be cool for planning travels! I'll look into it.
- themanmaran 2y agoThis is a really great interface! Tried "wooded hiking trails near [my address]" and got exactly what I was looking for. Then threw in some common google maps searches and got fun results. "airport" => LAX "restaurant" => The Clove Club in London "coffee shop" => Philz in SF It doesn't seem to take into account the current map location, so I wonder how the randomness works.
- ata_aman 2y agoThat's awesome! I didn't even think about current location, I'll add it to the roadmap. I did notice randomness too, going on a limb to say it's standard LLM randomness.
- sztanko 2y agoHow does it work? Translating free text to overpass? Looks very promising!
- 3willows 2y ago"home of the pope" and "home of mozart" returned good results, but not "home of kant" or "home of newton".
- ata_aman 2y agoNot sure why this got nuked from the front-page all of a sudden but thanks everyone for checking it out. I'll be sure to incorporate the features mentioned here.
- Freak_NL 2y agoDon't forget the mandatory '© OpenStreetMap contributors'. https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guidelines https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guideline...
- kgeist 2y agoIt seems you can make it hang if you input something that triggers the LLM's guardrails. For example, I entered 'where they sell drugs,' and the API endpoint hung every time I submitted it. However, on a few occasions, it returned a response immediately (with an error in the API response). I suspect there are too many retries if the structured JSON output is not formatted correctly when the guardrails are activated
- sberens 2y agoThis is really cool! Though for some reason the lat/long coordinates of places are completely off, despite the addresses being correct. I searched "show me 5 parks in SF", and all 5 were in the wrong spot. For example: Lafayette Park Lafayette & Gough St, San Francisco, CA 94109 Latitude: 37.7955 Longitutde: -122.4668
- Quizzical4230 2y agoReally cool project!
- bloomingkales 2y agoWhat are your api costs from publicly serving this if you don’t mind sharing (especially from HN traffic)? I have some ideas I’d like to release, but LLM api pricing and sudden traffic from sites like this one seem scary.
- codetrotter 2y agoPrerecord video demos of it, and have your site swap out the live demo with the pre-recorded videos after $x amount of money has been spent by visitors.
- jll29 2y agoYou could use CPU inference on a smaller local model (either always or after a demo budget is spent). Don't forget to put up a "donate" button.
- Jabrov 2y agoThat sounds like a bad idea to me. CPU inference for LLMs takes forever (you'll get like 1tk/s on CPU) and limits you significantly in terms of model size/quality. You'll lock up all of your cores to provide service for a single user at a snail's pace. I don't think it should even be considered as an option
- underlines 2y agollama 3.2 3b, qwen2.5 3B quantized to 4bit runs CPU inference quite fast. You can get a beefier VM and still save a ton of money. Depending on the context token length of this soluion, it's either fast or slow. If it's below 1024 tokens per request, you get around 10 sec delay, if you are at around 128 tokens I guess you would be somewhere at 1 sec for time to first token...
- Jabrov 2y agoMy point still stands … 10 seconds is an eternity, and a 3B model isn’t that performant. I’d rather not offer a demo at all than offer it with these parameters.
- CTDOCodebases 2y agoNot that good IMHO. I asked it: "Show me all the train yards in New York." It only identified seven of them when there are many more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Subway_yards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Subway_y... Then when I tried to copy and past my prompt from the history it did not display the full prompt and had no option to copy it to the clipboard.
- Sparkyte 2y agoI think it is the novelty of the idea of what an LLM can do that is important. I suppose accuracy can be improved over time. Compared to using gmaps to search places, it seems to be a bit better.
- CTDOCodebases 2y agoOh yeah I expect LLMs to revolutionize search/UIs but a broken demo is a broken demo. I guess in this case it might be a flaw of the underlying data input though. If the locations aren't tagged then it's not going to pick them up. So it's probably similar to google maps but the search is just more configurable.
- shadowerm 2y agoSounds like the current zeitgeist. Seems like it should be useful beyond demos but we aren't sure what those use cases would be. Just need to wait for AGI and then.. I have actually spent about 20 minutes now and I can't think anything worth asking the model in this context.
- Sparkyte 2y agoI think with LLMs the tighter the constraints you give it and the bumpers the better it is. Something you could do with it is like a JackBox game that generates the content. However I think it is very dangerous to rely too heavily on it without writing something to kind of gate or filter the inputs. Almost as if it needs data sanitization.
- a10c 2y agoI asked it to find me soccer fields in <insert my suburb> and it showed me results but all 5 of them were misplaced. One of the fields was shown where a train station is, there are no parks nearby.
- stavros 2y agoSame for my question of bars in Thessaloniki, it found 5 in the whole city and the locations were off by km. I fear that we're missing the point, though, because the good bit here isn't "it can do what Google Maps can do", but we aren't asking the right questions to show that off.
- upa1 2y agoi asked "where the hoes at" and it marked home depot lol
- gunalx 2y agoI asked it "show me cityname" and it did not find it. First asking for country did not help at all either.
- Krasnol 2y agoIt seems you are using OSM data, could you please add the proper attribution to it? Here is a guide: https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guidelines https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guideline...
- Sparkyte 2y agoThis is kinda neat and far more intuitive than using google maps search. Although I wonder how accurate it is with the data points.
- purple-leafy 2y agodoesn't work, as in, no response at all and full of console errors
- dr_dshiv 2y agoLLMs are notoriously terrible at spatial thinking — if you can solve that with RAG and a database of actual locations, that’s promising. Or was there another approach?
- ata_aman 2y agoEasiest might be to cross check with some location APIs but it might get expensive. RAG can be a better long term solution though.
- faebi 2y agoAwesome, I really like it, but you must add the "© OpenStreetMap Contributors" Trademark somewhere on the map. It's usually on the bottom right.
- hyperknot 2y agoAbsolutely! It's actually shown by default, OP shouldn't be turning it off. Also, if you run out of free Mapbox credits, feel free to change the basemap to openfreemap.org (I'm the creator).
- ata_aman 2y agoTotally, it was old internal code so I think I had it removed then. I have updated it. Changing to openfreemap.org this weekend, I love your work.
- faebi 2y agoAre you on X? Would love to give a follow. I love OSM projects.
- ata_aman 2y agoyah! https://x.com/amantsegai https://x.com/amantsegai
- koopuluri 2y agoawesome. i can see future iterations of this becoming really useful. e.g. "i'm traveling to Tokyo this summer, show me good areas to live in if i want to run 10k every day through nature, as well as work out of highly rated cafes.". i want to see good areas highlighted on the map. and even better would be integrating with Airbnb / Yelp / Google business ratings, etc. to show places i can rent in those areas. another e.g. "best times to land in XYZ city if i want to avoid traffic getting to ABC". - to check this now i have to toggle some dropdowns in Google maps. natural language is a much better "interface" for most of what i want to do with maps.
- koopuluri 2y agoalso, "Godview" reminds me of that internal map that Uber had with realtime activity. inspiration?
- ata_aman 2y agoJust re-used a domain name, fyi "godview" is not exclusive to Uber, it's used mostly for internal tools with super-admin privileges. I'm not 100% certain if it comes from Uber originally because I remember using it internally in early 2010s before the Uber incident.
- koopuluri 2y agogotcha. regardless, awesome project. all the best!
- onebitwise 2y agoReally nice idea! Sadly in my prompt it replies with absolutely invented data. Same prompt, three times gives 3-4 different results, that era simply not true. Prompt: show me the best glass factories in valsassina, italy. (there are no glass factories, so it suggest glass worker that contains wrong coordinates and invented names)
- kiddz 2y agoNice job. . . I looked for kite boarding spots in Puerto Rico and everything showed up. I really like the clean UI too.
- throwaway_ocr 2y agoI tried "show me Portugal" and it showed me Madeira, which is an island that is indeed part of Portugal, but I was expecting it to go for the mainland. Repeating the prompt alternates between Madeira and Açores which is again, technically correct, but in this case not the best kind of correct.
- kiney 2y agonice idea, but it fails completely for me. e.g. "show me all IT companies in <suburb where I live>" should show my company (and only my company) - but it shows two other companies that aren't actually in the same city and draws the POI on a sugar beet field near <suburb> Is the LLM perhaps only trained on english language geo data?
- 01jonny01 2y agoThis is cool. Few suggestions: Use local storage to save the search history. The i icon does nothing. Have a open external window icon next to location/landmark title that searches Google for that location
- devbrianwhite 2y agoReally cool idea and fast response times, nice job! I noticed after a few searches the results seem to get less accurate, however. Pins dropping in the ocean, etc.
- ata_aman 2y agoThanks! I might have to hard reset the context on each request. Noticed it too.
- KTibow 2y agoThis has some meme potential, it succeeded at "show me the OpenAI data centers"
- ata_aman 2y agoNo way haha I was actually slightly concerned when I published it might have some OPSEC issues for some categories.