[HN Gopher] Show HN: Hello - A conversational search engine powe...
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Show HN: Hello - A conversational search engine powered by
transformers
Author : rushingcreek
Score : 20 points
Date : 2022-01-14 19:07 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (beta.sayhello.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (beta.sayhello.so)
| vagabund wrote:
| I tried a couple of the prompts from the WebGPT paper: "How do
| trains turn?", "How do neural networks work?", "Why was the Suez
| Canal blocked in March 2021?" and got a 'No Relevant Answer'
| response on each. Are there no search APIs you could integrate
| instead of maintaining your own index? Either way this is a very
| cool project and I'm excited to see this space progress.
| lettergram wrote:
| I also had many of those "where do I find food?" Nothing...
| rushingcreek wrote:
| It should be able to answer all of those. The backend is still
| having issues and it seems request success is probabilistic at
| the moment, working on a fix.
| lettergram wrote:
| Seems similar to a slack bot / platform I wrote
|
| Bot: https://insideropinion.com/
|
| Platform: https://metacortex.me/
|
| I think the main thing that needs to be more personal, ask follow
| up questions and let users click IMO
| [deleted]
| azinman2 wrote:
| "Who was smarter, Neanderthals or humans?" (something like this,
| was suggested)
|
| Reply: Relevant information that didn't answer the question.
|
| Follow up: "what language did neanderthals speak"
|
| Reply: Happiness is a state of well-being, characterized by a
| sense of satisfaction and enjoyment.
|
| Not a very interesting conversation, I'm afraid :)
| leobg wrote:
| What transformer models are you using? How are you training them?
| Are you using them for semantic search, or only for
| "transforming" the output (from a found snippet of text to an
| actual answer sentence)? On what hardware are you running this?
| With such a large index, and using transformers, I would guess
| that would be quite expensive, wouldn't it (GPU, lots of RAM)?
| slightknack wrote:
| This is a neat idea. Would love to run some queries against this
| with a larger index. Here's one instance of the question just
| going over the transformer's head, I guess:
|
| My question:
|
| > how does google work
|
| The response:
|
| > A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a software
| running on a distributed ledger that offers users a built-in
| model for the collective management of its code. To become a
| member of a DAO, users need to first join the DAO by buying its
| currency. Unlike traditional organizations, there is no hierarchy
| in DAOs. One of the key features of DAOS is the internal capital
| that is used to incentivize these actors and ensure that the
| organization runs smoothly.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| So there seems to be a race condition leak with the session
| cookie, which occasionally results in one user's results
| incorrectly being shown to another. Will be fixed shortly.
| Otherwise, it should be able to correctly answer this question.
| supermatt wrote:
| Is it possible its using context from other users sessions,
| instead of just your own? It seemed to be answering questions
| unrelated to the "conversation" I was having.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Yes, there seems to be a race condition leak with the session
| cookie, which occasionally results in one user's results
| incorrectly being shown to another. Will be fixed shortly.
| Otherwise, it should be able to correctly answer this question.
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Maker here. Hello is part of a research project I'm working on at
| the University of Texas at Austin. The goal is to reimagine
| search as a conversation you're having with your best friend,
| where your questions are answered directly and in detail and you
| can ask follow-ups in the context of your conversation. There are
| still some rough edges and our independent index of ~350 million
| web pages is not yet large enough to answer every question, but
| we'll give it our best shot!
| haolez wrote:
| Slightly related, but could I make something similar using
| Haystack[0] and feeding it with a large index?
|
| [0]https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Haystack could be a good starting point, but I evaluated it at
| the beginning and did not suit the project requirements. It's
| fine for managing the document store (I use Elasticsearch) but
| there needs to be article reranking/relevant info extraction
| logic beyond what Haystack provides.
| yellowapple wrote:
| https://beta.sayhello.so/search?q=What+is+love%3F
|
| :(
| tentacleuno wrote:
| Oh cool! Never seen anything quite like this before, especially
| the concept of _two_ search fields. Did you have any inspiration
| for creating this, OP?
|
| Of course, the major problem with this (I just tested it) seems
| to be performance. Have you performed any performance
| optimisations / have anything in mind?
| rushingcreek wrote:
| I was always curious about what search would be like if it was
| more conversational, so became interested in research about
| long-form question answering.
|
| As for performance, this is tricky because every search
| involves running multiple large transformers (3 billion+
| parameters). I'm working on optimizing the GPU infrastructure
| (using TensorRT and DeepSpeed Inference) to make it faster.
| There's a lot of work to be done :))
| smallerfish wrote:
| I typed in "hello" and it replied that it only accepted queries
| in english. (Maybe because the backend had crashed.)
| gk1 wrote:
| Looks like it's getting the HN hug of death. The progress bar
| goes to 100% and just freezes there. What's the performance
| bottleneck? Clearly it's not the CDN/hosting since the site is
| loading fine.
| arkits wrote:
| Same here, the progress bar animation seems to be a dummy. The
| actual search result is eventually returned over a `text/event-
| stream`... which seems to be struggling currently.
| [deleted]
| rushingcreek wrote:
| Yep, the backend which runs the ML models is currently
| experiencing issues from the HN onslaught. Thanks for your
| patience, should be fixed soon.
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