fabulous work. ive been following you since danswer. you certainly create a lot of value and have been successful in getting the community to cover the long tail of integrations.
its interesting to see how "lock-in" is the main pitch here. all things considered, i don't think "lock-in" is relevant at all unless the activity performed with the tool is highly strategic to the company.
you could argue that some orgs may not want openai/anthropic to have their sensitive data leave the parameter, but im also here to tell you that even the most privacy sensitive companies in the world probably resolve this by having a proxy in between the users and the LLM APIs from the labs.
so where does this leave you ? cost savings from OSS? maybe, but its hard to imagine that we are in the phase of the adoption cycle where companies have become as acutely aware of costs as you think they are.
my 2c - focus on the integrations and see which one gets most traction. that will be your value capture mechanism long-term.
Looks like Mira/Brad Lightcap were under the impression tha gdb was essentially fired from Stripe. Also, interestingly, Ilya seems not to know who is paying his legal bills?!
Maybe that's driven by the long and embarrassing track record of lawyers, court clerks and admins somehow failing to properly redact text from PDFs again and again (eg only covering text with black boxes while leaving the text metadata intact). This despite it now being an infamous recurring mistake in a common yet crucial part of their jobs.
It was never about price or performance. Price and performance may be things you care about as a hobbyist, but as a business you have a lot of other considerations.
at ng3n.ai ive been using datalab.to for document processing. currently its mostly for conversion to markdown and some extraction.
ng3n is more of a grid-like workflow solution on top of documents. it's a user-facing application geared towards non-technical users that have processing needs.
if there are all these new problems that became solvable, what exactly are they?
id be interested in replacing datalab with extend, but im not sure what avenues that opens for ng3n. would be very curious to learn!
thanks! Datalab is great, I've met Vik a few times and their team has done some impressive work. We can also support the conversion to markdown use case, and might be a better fit depending on your use case. Feel free to create an account to try it out!
Absolutely! But this is not a replacement of those files, this is a different (better?) way to navigate through those learnings instead of having to read whole files.
I think the discussion about normie users vs twitter bubble is fascinating. As times goes on, power users are going to have a worse and worse experience.
Most engineers will scoff at the idea of patching up a legacy project if they see the slightest deviation from “best practices”. They will slam their fists on the table and claim that management keeps “piling on tech debt”. They will argue for a total rewrite and dismiss any concern of said rewrite taking years because “this is what it means to have high standards and best engineering practices”. They wear this as a badge of honor and frame the conversation as a question of morality and purity, in which they of course have the upper hand since they are not motivated by petty business concerns such as profit.
Engineers that refuse to acknowledge constraints, whatever the nature of those constraints may be, are not engineers. At best they are ideologues, at worst they are just incompetent. The most pathetic thing you can do is just continuously deny the laws of physics and reality, because it doesn’t suit you at some ideological level.
Truly elegant solutions are those that account for all constraints in the simplest, most concise way. It is those that do more with less.
despite the title..i read this post as an exhaustion with SV culture. everything starting with the personality types that are elevated (ie some flavor of antisocial personality disorder) and ending with the activities that earn you social capital (ie identifying the next anti-consensus big industry).
i've seen this happen with people that have had much much smaller financial success in the industry..or even ones that haven't had any at all. you are either naturally inclined to identify with the culture or you trick yourselves into it so that you may belong.
<insert paragraph about social desire to be connected and how we construct an image of ourselves through others>
the culture of SV today is an amalgamation of Taylorist ideas, Randian objectivism, Utilitarianism etc etc. there is a lot of social capital to be earned by embodying the values of these currents. DOGE is a quintessential representation of this. it is not surprising at all that author had such a visceral reaction to it.
its important to emphasize that there have been very successful companies that have gone against the current (ie Apple), with an emphasis on craftsmanship, obsession with the process, taste-driven vs data-driven decisions and appreciation for things that are outside of profit maximization.
My take is the opposite of yours. The guy loves SV culture. Most of the article is a humble-brag about it.
His problem is that $60m is not enough to be an important player in that world. He was just a cog in the DOGE machine which wasn't enough after being number 1 at Loom.
He has now decided to study physics to try and be like the tech bro messiah Elon.
As a former Amazonian (2017-2020) I was a big believer in the leadership principles partly due to how often they were referenced during my time there and partly due to the business world's obsession with Amazon's secret sauce. The company does a very good job at indoctrinating everyone by using them extensively throughout the hiring/performance management lifecycle. In fact, during the interview loop each interviewer is tasked with evaluating whether the candidate exhibits a specific leadership principle.
As many have pointed out, with time you notice the principles being used in all sorts of ways against you depending on the context. The management class is conditioned to tell you that "principles are deliberately in contention with one another"...which gives everyone the necessary cover to spin a particular guiding principle in whichever way suits them in that moment. Or you could buy the kool-aid and pretend that whoever architected these principles was so linguistically adept that they truly figured out the perfect way of articulating a set of contentious principles that taken together distill the exact cultural nuance that Amazon is all about. Wittgenstein is rolling in his grave.
In their current state, the leadership principles are simply a way of defining the lingo for work conversations and providing some sort of framework for decision making (emphasis on framework)...which still has a bounding effect on how things are done at Amazon, albeit in a very very limited way. I do think most people would have trouble coming up with their own decision-making framework if they had to, never-mind articulating or communicating it to their peers. However, it would be preposterous to claim that the Amazon principles have any significant cultural value, at least in the narrow definition that most people commonly ascribe to "business culture" (ie language is also culture, but in this context its more about unique behavior specific to a company).
What drives the culture more than anything at Amazon is the insane growth that the company has seen in the past couple of decades. People there have felt it very deeply and have the battle scars to prove it. Everyone that has been at the company long enough will point to the often counter-intuitive things that one should do to succeed at sustaining this type of growth. Bear in mind this is a different type of business than the other high growth behemoths of the industry and Amazon has its own peculiar aspects..
As far as the article goes, I think that the most important aspect that the author gets right is that. the decline is probably due to the influx of people in middle management that don't have any idea about what it really took to build Amazon into what it is today.
This video is a fake representation of Chisinau. The author deliberately chose the one derelict area (despite being on a central street, it’s the equivalent of being in the Harlem but yet still on Madison ave) that’s been a point of contention between the local authorities and central government for 20+ years. The hotel is being deliberately left unattended by local authorities as a fuck you to the parliament. Nothing more than a bargaining chip.
its interesting to see how "lock-in" is the main pitch here. all things considered, i don't think "lock-in" is relevant at all unless the activity performed with the tool is highly strategic to the company.
you could argue that some orgs may not want openai/anthropic to have their sensitive data leave the parameter, but im also here to tell you that even the most privacy sensitive companies in the world probably resolve this by having a proxy in between the users and the LLM APIs from the labs.
so where does this leave you ? cost savings from OSS? maybe, but its hard to imagine that we are in the phase of the adoption cycle where companies have become as acutely aware of costs as you think they are.
my 2c - focus on the integrations and see which one gets most traction. that will be your value capture mechanism long-term.