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Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by kossTKR on Saturday July 08, 2023 @05:13AM (#36642715)
"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.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by Kiro on Saturday July 08, 2023 @05:22AM (#36642768)
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.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by croes on Saturday July 08, 2023 @05:54AM (#36642921)
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.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by Kiro on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:05AM (#36642970)
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.
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by morelisp on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:10AM (#36642992)
> I don't understand the presumption that the AI should be open source here.

Because it literally says "open-source AI".

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by Kiro on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:11AM (#36643004)
It says "open-source AI assistant".
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by morelisp on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:30AM (#36643091)
Be serious.
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by Kiro on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:37AM (#36643128)
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.
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by oarsinsync on Saturday July 08, 2023 @08:07AM (#36643606)
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.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by ubertaco on Saturday July 08, 2023 @08:11AM (#36643625)
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.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by Kiro on Saturday July 08, 2023 @08:50AM (#36643892)
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_archit...
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by ubertaco on Saturday July 08, 2023 @05:46PM (#36649101)
I'd call it "an OpenAI client that also has something like grep built in."
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by kristiandupont on Saturday July 08, 2023 @09:53AM (#36644418)
Would you consider an "open source database connector" to be a new, open source database that also has a connector?
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by croes on Saturday July 08, 2023 @10:08AM (#36644564)
That's the problem of the English language, it doesn't have compound words. A database connector is a connector to a database. An AI personal assistant is a AI powered assistant that I can use to do tasks for me. If it's an assistant help using an AI that's something completely different.
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by Kiro on Saturday July 08, 2023 @11:05AM (#36645087)
You're just making up arbitrary rules that you apply inconsistently. My language has compound words and it wouldn't make any difference in this case. "An open source AI assistant" refers to the assistant in the same way "an inexperienced lab assistant" refers to the assistant being inexperienced and not the lab.
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by oarsinsync on Saturday July 08, 2023 @05:27PM (#36648945)
> You're just making up arbitrary rules that you apply inconsistently. My language has…

I’m not sure what your language has, but you definitely hit the nail on the head with your inadvertent description of the English language: (seemingly) arbitrary rules applied inconsistently.

You’re absolutely correct that an inexperienced lab assistant does not refer to the lab.

The GP isn’t wrong either.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by morelisp on Sunday July 09, 2023 @05:33AM (#36653018)
Given how many people made the same reading (even to the point of the same joke), I'd argue they're arbitrary rules applied largely consistently, except when some marketing droid shows up.
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by ubertaco on Saturday July 08, 2023 @07:47PM (#36649905)
No, because the common usage of "database connector" has consistently taught me enough context to expect "a connector to a database," much like the common usage of "AI assistant" has consistently taught me enough context to know that I should expect "an AI that acts as an assistant."
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by croes on Saturday July 08, 2023 @10:04AM (#36644531)
Open source Assistant for AI
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by croes on Saturday July 08, 2023 @09:35AM (#36644257)
Exactly, it doesn't say AI open source assistant. Everything mentioned after open source should be open source.
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by sabakhoj on Saturday July 08, 2023 @01:00PM (#36646294)
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-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.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by ubertaco on Saturday July 08, 2023 @08:12PM (#36650053)
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.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by morelisp on Sunday July 09, 2023 @05:35AM (#36653027)
> 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...

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by wokwokwok on Saturday July 08, 2023 @05:54AM (#36642925)
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?

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by Kiro on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:10AM (#36642994)
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?
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by wokwokwok on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:26AM (#36643075)
Neither of those things claim:

> So if you self-host your data never leaves your machine

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by Kiro on Saturday July 08, 2023 @06:34AM (#36643105)
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.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by villgax on Saturday July 08, 2023 @08:39AM (#36643805)
Langchain works completely offline with appropriate LLM/API backend & vectore store if needed
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by Kiro on Saturday July 08, 2023 @08:46AM (#36643867)
No-one is preventing you from creating a PR or fork this project to add whatever backend you want. Did LangChain fully cover all backends on release? Are you not allowed to release a project that only supports OpenAI?

You really need to explain what you are hating on here.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by villgax on Saturday July 08, 2023 @09:06AM (#36644009)
STFU all I said is that what they claim is not what's the state of their project today. Don't even get me started on their alignment BS.
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by outofpaper on Saturday July 08, 2023 @07:54AM (#36643528)
Yes! It's a bit more than, "somewhat disingenuous," to say a system built to use the OpenAI API works with you to make sure, "your data never leaves your machine".

That's like saying I invented a new form of transportation where you're feet never leave the ground but in actuality I'm just a travel agent sending you to the airport.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by Kiro on Saturday July 08, 2023 @08:53AM (#36643909)
"your data never leaves your machine" is only mentioned in the Search section, where it is it true. No-one reading that would assume that meant everything considering the two last sentences above in the Chat section explicitly says it's using OpenAI.

Really feels like people are nitpicking and hating on this project for no good reason. I feel sorry for the authors.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by seanhunter on Saturday July 08, 2023 @07:58AM (#36643546)
>> 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've been trying it. Khoj search does work offline. Khoj chat (they are literally seperate functions in the app) requires an openAI key and if you give it one, uses openAI.

Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by villgax on Saturday July 08, 2023 @08:38AM (#36643799)
Exactly my thoughts. This person is just gaming the system on here
Re:Khoj: An AI Personal Assistant for Your Digital Brain by peaceforall on Saturday July 08, 2023 @01:11PM (#36646381)
Yo why you so nasty though? All okay with you?