[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Roe AI (YC W24) - AI-powered data warehou...
___________________________________________________________________
Launch HN: Roe AI (YC W24) - AI-powered data warehouse to query
multimodal data
Hey HN, we're Richard and Jason from Roe AI (https://getroe.ai).
We're building a query engine that lets data people do SQL queries
on various kinds of unstructured data (videos, images, webpages,
documents) using LLM-powered data processors. Here is a 3-minute
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-WwJk1v5mI, showing how to
create an LLM data processor to process videos, build a semantic
search for image data, and use it with SQL. The problem we tackle
is that data analysts cannot quickly answer their business
questions around unstructured, multimodal data. For example,
product teams want to understand user session replay videos to
understand the painpoints of using their product. Ads teams need to
know everything about an advertiser based on their web pages, such
as the products they offer, payment methods, etc. Marketing teams
need to know how product placement or music in a marketing campaign
could get more views. And so on. For data that is structured,
questions like these can be answered quickly with SQL queries in
Snowflake / BigQuery. But when you have unstructured multimodal
data, it becomes a complex analysis process: open a Python
notebook, write custom logic to get these multimodal data from blob
storage (or write a crawler first if you need webpage data), find
an AI model, do prompt engineering, do data ops to productionize
the workload in a data workflow, etc. We simplify this process to a
few lines of SQL. How it works: first, we leverage multimodal LLMs
as data processors because they're good at unstructured data
information extraction, classification or any arbitrary tasks.
Next, we've built a user interface for data people to explore
multimodal data and manage AI components. Then we have a quick
semantic index builder for multimodal data. (We often see databases
provide vector search functionality but not indexing building, so
we built that.) Utility functions deal with multimodal data, like
video cutter, PDF page selector, etc. Finally, SQL is the command
line for slicing and dicing multimodal data. How we got here: I've
experienced 3 data evolutions in the last 10 years. At UC Berkeley,
I was a data researcher using a supercomputer cluster called Savio.
It was a bare-metal way to analyze the data--I had to move CSV
between machines. Then at LinkedIn, I had Hadoop + Pig / Scala
Spark. That abstracted most of the work, but I spent hours tuning
jobs and had a headache manipulating HDFS directories. Later I
joined Snowflake, and was like, holy - data analysis can be this
simple - I can just use SQL to do everything within this data
warehouse! I asked myself: why can't we make something like
Snowflake for unstructured data? That was the impulse behind Roe.ai
and it's been driving me ever since. To get started, you can sign
in at https://app.roe-ai.com/ and there are docs at
https://docs.roe-ai.com/. You can load unstructured data via our
SQL and File API, Snowflake Staging Data Connector, S3 Blob Storage
Data connector, Zapier Roe AI Zap, or the SQL function
load_url_file() to get a file from a URL. Some logistics: the
product is free to start, and we've preloaded $50 AI credits--
enough to process 3000 one-pager PDFs. If you use all $50, just
email us, and we'll give you more. The solution is not open-sourced
because it is too complex to be self-hosted, but let us know if you
see the potential for open-source. The product is early and could
have bugs and UX problems. It'd be incredible if you could give it
a spin anyway and we hope it will be interesting and that you'll
let us know what you think! Jason and I will be around in the
thread and are really interested in hearing from you!
Author : richardmeng
Score : 50 points
Date : 2024-08-09 15:17 UTC (1 days ago)
| atak1 wrote:
| This is awesome :) can we use this directly on our entire db?
| richardmeng wrote:
| Likely, can you elaborate on your use case and what db do you
| use?
| airstrike wrote:
| Congrats on the launch. Sounds cool and potentially useful, but I
| don't want to read blog posts or book a demo. I'd put a proper
| video at the very top of the page instead of the animated typing
| you currently have.
|
| FYI your <title> tag needs to be updated.
| richardmeng wrote:
| Good points! We'll update our landing pages as you suggested.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Is this more for data engineers or data analysts?
|
| Seems like the type of thing that would be very useful in helping
| build data pipelines on semi-structured data.
| zswzs wrote:
| Right now it's more for data analysts who's data eng team
| doesn't have the capacity to support all types of data
| processing requirements. Data analysts can just do it
| themselves simply with SQL! But we are also open to explore the
| opportunities for the data eng teams if we see a strong use
| case of automating their data pipelines.
| richardmeng wrote:
| I guess to add to Jason's point, it depends on how data
| engineers/data analysts are perceived in their roles within the
| company. For some companies, we see a data analyst taking end-
| to-end responsibility from the data engineering to BI, but for
| others we also see a clear separation, data engineers doing
| data pipelining and data modeling, but data analysts are, in
| fact, business analysts. Regardless, we think that SQL is the
| common interface for both of the parties, and we're excited to
| see who will be the power users.
| fsndz wrote:
| Why this when I can just use postgreSQL and pgvector ? Like in
| this example I found recently:
| https://www.lycee.ai/courses/91b8b189-729a-471a-8ae1-717033c...
| gigatexal wrote:
| Not saying roe is the next Dropbox but the same sort of thing
| was said when Dropbox did their show HN...
| xwowsersx wrote:
| I don't think OP's question is the same as the one asked
| about Dropbox. The Dropbox question was about why the service
| was needed at all when you could use Unix tools like rsync to
| achieve the same thing. The answer to that was simple: not
| everyone is a tech-savvy user who wants to mess with command
| lines. On the other hand, OP's question was about whether
| there's already a mainstream database and extension that does
| what Roe AI does. They got a response, and it was helpful.
| The "You can do this with rsync!" argument became a meme, but
| now it's almost overshadowed by the knee-jerk "That's what
| they said about Dropbox!" response.
| meiraleal wrote:
| This is really getting old and abused. If that was the case,
| Roe would be against at least another 20 dropboxes for AI
| like Roe only at YC.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Indeed, it is a big factor of survivorship bias. The
| refrain against Dropbox is notable because _Dropbox is the
| exception, being successful,_ not the norm. People don 't
| realize how many startups have failed where people echoed
| the same old HN comment regarding these startups as having
| been said about Dropbox too.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| it's the same as the quote we keep hearing "every big new
| thing started out looking like a toy". Somehow a bunch of
| people who should know better (intentionally?)
| misinterpreted that as every new toy is the next big
| thing.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yep, well said. It's hard to understand the arrows of
| logic if one is not well versed in them.
| zswzs wrote:
| Great question! The answer is two fold: 1. Not like a vector
| database, in addition to searching, VolansDB also store the
| files (pointers) directly in the table. So you are able to
| manage files (RBAC etc.) as table cells, apply batch data
| processing jobs easily with SQL, and even unstructured data
| lineage & pipeline. 2. VolansDB is columnar so it's optimized
| for analytical use cases rather than for product DB access
| patterns.
| richardmeng wrote:
| To add to Jason's point -
|
| There is a big UI part here, because for multimodal data
| analytics, we think it's crucial for people to see and hear
| data.
|
| For the RAG search, many DBs have built-in vector search, but
| chunking, indexing, and maintaining the index are kind of on
| your own. This may not be a problem for technical people, but
| it's a hassle for data people who own hundreds of data products
| within a company. Therefore, we have a semantic search index
| builder that allows one to build an auto-refreshing semantic
| search index with no code, and completely keep hands free from
| coming up with their own vectors.
|
| In addition, data analysis often needs to interrogate the
| search results further. For example, let's say we have used
| pgvector to find all the photos related to the Golden Gate
| Bridge. But then we want to interrogate questions like which of
| these images has someone wearing a blue shirt. We have to apply
| another model, and that is outside of a normal DB's
| responsibility.
| funnyenough wrote:
| Will this work with Redshift via SQL interface? Or am I looking
| at this wrong?
| richardmeng wrote:
| This does not work with Redshift. This is a query engine for
| unstructured data like documents, images, videos. Those data do
| not quite fit into Redshift / Bigquery data warehouse.
| dmpetrov wrote:
| Bridging the gap between AI and data warehouses is crucial, but
| I'm not sure SQL is the best fit for AI engineers who mainly work
| with Python and AI APIs.
|
| At DataChain, we are solving this by creating a Python API that
| translates to SQL under the hood, which is pretty easy now with
| Pydantic. https://github.com/iterative/datachain
|
| WDYT?
| richardmeng wrote:
| Right, our product is designed for data practitioners who want
| snappy data analytics on unstructured data.
|
| Thanks for sharing your project, super cool idea! What does it
| take if we want to integrate our SQL engine with datachain?
| dmpetrov wrote:
| It uses SQLite in open-source. In SaaS - proprietary data
| warehouses where your engine can be integrated.
| 7thpower wrote:
| You are on to something here. Look forward to seeing this evolve.
| richardmeng wrote:
| Thanks!
| nextworddev wrote:
| Why not just focus on the UI part and make it integrate with
| different data sources?
| namanyayg wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! What are you using to make the LLM
| understand a video file?
|
| Are you doing transcription + sending frames to a vision or is
| there a third party service for this?
| hartator wrote:
| Why the name? It sounds like it will be about US politics.
| throwup238 wrote:
| The rest of the world thinks of fish eggs.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-08-10 23:01 UTC)