[HN Gopher] Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for e...
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       Phind-405B and faster, high quality AI answers for everyone
        
       Author : rushingcreek
       Score  : 143 points
       Date   : 2024-09-05 16:22 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.phind.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.phind.com)
        
       | mritchie712 wrote:
       | Does anybody use Phind? What do you use it for?
        
         | fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
         | I use it periodically for things that I'd typically search on
         | google and then read stack overflow for. I started this
         | workflow before chatgpt had web search, so might be irrelevant
         | now, but I've found it decent. Back then it was nice to be able
         | to see the sources vs chatgpt just giving a random answer from
         | who knows where.
        
         | sgc wrote:
         | I use it, with the phind models, instead of chatGPT. I had to
         | change my user agent to Chrome since too many sites would
         | refuse to work with FF otherwise, and now chatGPT is stuck in
         | an endless captcha loop whenever I go there. I am just a casual
         | user, to help write a quick script or to get some bit of
         | relevant info. It works just as well or better for my use case,
         | and of course having actual citations with links is worlds
         | better than just playing "guess the hallucination". I am happy
         | chatGPT kicked me out.
        
           | TaylorAlexander wrote:
           | My friend has the endless captcha loop on ChatGPT too. Does
           | anyone know how to fix it?
        
             | bishfish wrote:
             | I had that recently and it went away last time on its own.
             | Not sure what triggers it or how to fix.
        
         | paranoidxprod wrote:
         | I was subscribed for about 6 months between the end of last
         | year and beginning of this, but canceled and haven't looked
         | back. The web interface was constantly buggy for me, and they
         | seemed to be very focused on the VSCode extension without
         | integrations for other editors, so I ended up canceling.
        
         | axpy906 wrote:
         | I've use it since last year as a paid subscriber. I like it
         | because of the technical nature as it will help you know the
         | exact steps on how to get something done. I also use it for
         | random things like bouncing ideas off or to enhance my
         | knowledge retention of a subject.
        
         | smusamashah wrote:
         | I use it to summarise articles :)
         | 
         | I just paste the page link as a query and it tells me what the
         | page is about and even pulls key points.
        
         | thoughtpalette wrote:
         | Been subbed for 8+ months.
         | 
         | Mostly use it for API questions. It's been amazing at MomentJs
         | stuff. Also use it for code optimization and debugging error
         | messages.
        
           | rushingcreek wrote:
           | Thank you for being a Pro sub :)
        
       | johndough wrote:
       | For me, the website says: "Sorry, you have been blocked. You are
       | unable to access phind.com"
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | Sorry about that, can you please email me at
         | hello(at)phind(dot)com?
        
           | johndough wrote:
           | Sure! I've contacted you.
           | 
           | Edit: It has been resolved for me. Thank you!
        
       | jncraton wrote:
       | It would be nice to see the Phind Instant weights released under
       | a permissive license. It looks like it could be a useful tool in
       | the local-only code model toolbox.
        
       | NelsonMinar wrote:
       | Phind continues to be my favorite AI-enhanced search engine. They
       | do a really nice job giving answers to technical questions with
       | links to references where I can verify the answer or learn more
       | detail.
       | 
       | Some recent examples from my history:
       | 
       | what video formats does mastodon support?
       | https://www.phind.com/search?cache=jpa8gv7lv54orvpu2c7j1b5j
       | 
       | compare xfs and ext4fs
       | https://www.phind.com/search?cache=h9rmhe6ddav1bnb2odtchdb1
       | 
       | on an apple ][ how do you access the no slot clock?
       | https://www.phind.com/search?cache=w4cc1saw6nsqxyige7g3wple
       | 
       | The answers aren't perfect. But they are a good gloss and then
       | the links to web sources are terrific. ChatGPT and Claude aren't
       | good at that. Bing CoPilot sort of is but I don't like it as
       | much.
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | Thank you! We think there's quite a bit of room for improvement
         | still and are working on better answer organization and
         | verifiability.
        
         | smusamashah wrote:
         | I see references here but when I ask questions, I get answer
         | but no citations, and I am logged in. This used to be an issue
         | but was fixed but still an issue for me. If I logout and ask I
         | get reference but the answers are using instant model.
        
         | jadbox wrote:
         | In my tests, it does hallucinate answers, even with Phind 70B.
         | For example, I asked for bluetooth earplugs that have easy
         | battery replacements. It always kept giving me answers for
         | earplugs with I know have their battery soldered into the
         | casing. Tbf, perplexity also fails at this question.
        
       | ashleyn wrote:
       | I was a Phind user for a bit but I've switched to Perplexity
       | lately. Anyone know how the two compare?
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | We should have higher quality and faster answers across the
         | board with this new update. Would love to hear your thoughts.
        
           | fshr wrote:
           | It'd be cool if you showed off and did your own comparison
           | and posted it on your blog. It'd also be cool if your blog
           | was sorted newest to oldest - it's currently the reverse.
        
       | dsp_person wrote:
       | Hmm this versus Kagi Assistant?
       | 
       | Plan page says $20/mo Unlimited powerful Phind-405B and Phind-70B
       | searches; Daily GPT-4o (500+) , Claude 3.5 Sonnet (500+), Claude
       | Opus (10) uses
       | 
       | > Phind-405B scores 92% on HumanEval (0-shot), matching Claude
       | 3.5 Sonnet.
       | 
       | Any other benchmarks?
        
         | freehorse wrote:
         | > Hmm this versus Kagi Assistant?
         | 
         | It has a vscode extension. So if you use that, it makes some
         | sense. Purely for search, I dont know. Ime phind is not that
         | great with internet access, sometimes people disable the search
         | function to get better answers.
        
           | rushingcreek wrote:
           | Have you tried the new internet answers that are a part of
           | this update?
        
             | freehorse wrote:
             | Not really, as I do not have subscription anymore. Is it
             | better compared to no-internet-access?
        
         | nicce wrote:
         | I payed and used 6 months for Phind. I am more satisfied with
         | the Kagi Assistant currently. It does not give that many links
         | but overall results are as good or even better, and you can use
         | lenses. You get general search engine too.
         | 
         | There was one UI related annoyance with Phind; scroll bar
         | sometimes jumped randomly, maybe even after each input or
         | during token generation (on Firefox). You start wasting a lot
         | of time if you always need to find again the part you were
         | looking. Or even just scrolling back to bottom.
         | 
         | Primary issue is still that both hallucinate too much when you
         | ask something difficult. But that is the general problem
         | everywhere.
        
           | rushingcreek wrote:
           | Thanks for the feedback. We've fixed the UI jumping issue.
           | The new Phind update today should also work as a general
           | search engine.
        
       | thibran wrote:
       | wow it finds the correct answer to a Scheme niche language
       | question.
       | 
       | "How to replace a string in Gerbil Scheme?"
        
       | Citizen_Lame wrote:
       | Can the new model provide creative writing with high token
       | context or is Phind purely focused on answering questions
       | (enhanced search).
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | It can, via our Playground mode, but it's not optimized for
         | that. Phind-405B does seem to generate good poems though.
        
       | hleszek wrote:
       | Are the weights available since it's based on Meta Llama 3.1
       | 405B?
        
         | TacticalCoder wrote:
         | Serious question: does the Meta LLama ToS / EULA even _allow_
         | fine-tuned models based on Llama to be used for commercial
         | purposes without making the weights available?
        
           | darwinwhy wrote:
           | I believe it does unless you're another tech giant with
           | billions of users / revenue.
        
       | jmakov wrote:
       | Phind is the best productivity booster I've found in the last
       | years. Congrats and keep up the great work!
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | Thank you!
        
       | itorcs wrote:
       | Been subscribed to phind pro for the last 5 or 6 months I think?
       | Feels like the pollution from search results has gotten a bit
       | better but it sometimes still messes with answers when I ask a
       | follow up question. Like I will reference the answer aboves code
       | in my question, and the next answer will answer based not on the
       | conversation but some code in the search results. I'm not versed
       | enough in rag to know how you would fix that with like a
       | prioritization or something. Other than that I'm REALLY looking
       | forward how you guys tackle your own artifacts in the web
       | interface. Something about that ui in Claude's version of
       | artifacts works really well with my work flow when using the web,
       | plus having the versions of different files, etc.
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | We're working on artifacts :)
         | 
         | May I ask which models you're seeing the pollution with?
        
           | itorcs wrote:
           | Has happened with both 4o and sonnet, probably 4o more if I
           | had to say for sure. I need to use 405 more to see if it has
           | that same problem. I guess I didn't think about how the issue
           | might be better or worse depending on model, I assumed the
           | rag stuff applied the same
        
       | BikeShuester wrote:
       | I'd suggest offering at least one free query to allow users to
       | evaluate the service.
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | Our fast model, Phind Instant, is completely free
        
           | johndough wrote:
           | Maybe OP was referring to Phind-405B (the model from the
           | article). I certainly wonder how good the 405B model really
           | is.
        
           | fshr wrote:
           | Why not let us try the new model for free like the 5 uses
           | available for the 70B model? Seems like a no brainer to hook
           | new users if what you're selling is worth it, eh?
        
       | asadm wrote:
       | Any perplexity pro user tried Phind? how good is it? specially
       | for code/tech research etc.
        
       | jadbox wrote:
       | "Phind-405B scores 92% on HumanEval (0-shot), matching Claude 3.5
       | Sonnet". I'd love to see examples of actual code modifications
       | created by Phind and Sonnet back-to-back. This level of
       | transparency would give me the confidence to try to pro. As it
       | is, I'm skeptical by the claim and actual performance as I've yet
       | to see a finetuned model from Llama3.1 that performed notably
       | better in an area without suffering problems in other areas. We
       | do need more options!
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | The effectiveness of any given model depends on the specific
         | use cases. We noticed that Phind-405B is particularly good at
         | making websites and included some zero-shot examples in the
         | blog.
        
         | Simorgh wrote:
         | I've been a customer of Phind for a number of months now, so
         | I'm familiar with the capabilities of all the models they
         | offer.
         | 
         | I found even Phind-70B to often be preferable to Claude Sonnet
         | and would commonly opt for it. I've been using the 405B today
         | and it seems to be even better at answering.
         | 
         | I've found it does depend on the task. For instance, for
         | formatting JSON in the past, GPT-4 was actually the best.
         | 
         | Because you can cycle through the models, you can check the
         | output of each one, to get the best answer.
        
         | trees101 wrote:
         | Hopefully it gets evaluated on this leaderboard
         | https://aider.chat/docs/leaderboards/
        
       | J_Shelby_J wrote:
       | Accessible by api?
        
       | natrys wrote:
       | Does an API not make economic sense for you? Personally I would
       | rather use my own tooling (not VSCode based).
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | So far an API has been less of a priority than focusing on the
         | user-facing product. But it seems there's a reasonable amount
         | of demand for it, which we'll consider.
        
           | therealmarv wrote:
           | I consider AIs without API access even as non existent. Not
           | everybody wants a web interface and waste time on copy&paste
           | all the time. APIs can hook the filesystem directly with an
           | AI, make complicated prompt engineering and multi file
           | changes a non-issue. And they should also help you to make
           | more money (don't undersell the API access and you're fine).
           | Without an API the community can also not compare Phind-405B
           | to other models easily.
           | 
           | Would be great to have access to your model in a LLM gateway
           | like https://openrouter.ai/
           | 
           | I would give your API a try as minimum.
        
       | 11101010001100 wrote:
       | Looks cool, but anyone not familiar with 'founder mode' will be
       | confused....
        
       | spirodonfl wrote:
       | I just tried. Asked a question on a research topic I'm digging
       | into. It gave me some answers but no references. Then I copy the
       | answers it gave me and specifically ask for references. Then I
       | got:
       | 
       | I sincerely apologize for my earlier response. Upon reviewing the
       | search results provided, I realize I made an error in referencing
       | those specific studies. The search results don't contain any
       | relevant information for the claims I mentioned earlier. As an AI
       | assistant, I should be more careful in providing accurate and
       | supported information. Thank you for bringing this to my
       | attention. In this case, I don't have reliable references to
       | support those particular statements about software tools and
       | their impact on developer experience and software quality.
       | 
       | Not sure about this...
        
         | rushingcreek wrote:
         | Sorry about that, could you make sure that "Always search" is
         | enabled and try that first query again? It should be able to
         | get the correct answer with references.
        
           | spirodonfl wrote:
           | It was on. If I ask the same question again it _now_ gets the
           | right answer. Maybe a blip? Not sure.
           | 
           | To be fair, I don't expect these AI models to give me perfect
           | answers every time. I'm just not sure people are vigilant
           | enough to ask follow up questions that criticize how the AI
           | got the answers to _ensure_ the answers come from somewhere
           | reasonable.
        
             | mokkun wrote:
             | I found that quite often even though the always search
             | option is on, it won't search at times; maybe that was the
             | case here.
        
         | spirodonfl wrote:
         | Just to follow up on this: I asked it to give me a brief
         | explanation on how to use laravel 11 blade fragments, which it
         | did reasonably well.
         | 
         | I then offered 3 lines of code of a route I'm using in Laravel
         | and I asked to tell me how to implement fragment usage where
         | the parameter in the url determines the fragment returned.
         | 
         | Route::get('/vge-frags/{fragment}', function ($fragment) {
         | return view('vge-fragments'); });
         | 
         | It told me to make sure I have the right view created (which I
         | did) and that was a good start. Then...
         | 
         | It recommended this?
         | 
         | Route::get('/vge-frags/{fragment}', function ($fragment) {
         | return fragment($fragment); });
         | 
         | I immediately knew it was wrong (but somebody looking to learn
         | might not know). So I had to ask it: "Wait, how does the code
         | know which view to use"?
         | 
         | Then it gave me the right answer.
         | 
         | Route::get('/vge-frags/{fragment}', function ($fragment) {
         | return view('vge-fragments')->fragment($fragment); });
         | 
         | I dunno. It's really easy to find edge cases with any of these
         | models and you have to essentially question _everything_ you
         | receive. Other times it 's very powerful and useful.
        
           | rushingcreek wrote:
           | This is a good point, and we have new application-level
           | features coming soon that to improve verifiability.
        
             | spirodonfl wrote:
             | I dunno if you need it but I'd be happy to come up with
             | some scenarios and help test
        
       | minkles wrote:
       | I asked it a question and it answered authoritatively.
       | 
       | > The impedance of a 22 mH capacitor at 400 THz is approximately
       | 1.80 x 10^-24 O.
       | 
       | The correct answer should have been "what the hell are you
       | talking about dumbass?". Capacitors are not measured in henries
       | and the question really has no meaning at 400THz. Another
       | stochastic parrot.
        
         | CamperBob2 wrote:
         | At 400 THz any real-world capacitor will look inductive. :-P
         | 
         | Although it's not gonna look like 22 uH.
        
       | davidcollantes wrote:
       | The "About" is not "Who we are" at the time I am typing this.
       | Please add information about the company, founders, etc.
       | 
       | It looks good, thought!
        
       | rainbowjelly wrote:
       | I get a blank page with the text "Service is unavailable in this
       | region."
       | 
       | Any reason why Phind is region-locked? Is there a list of what
       | countries Phind is available in?
        
         | zx8080 wrote:
         | Interesting. I'm not working for phind, but can you share which
         | region are you trying to access it from?
        
           | rainbowjelly wrote:
           | I tried to access it from Malaysia. VPN works but I'd rather
           | not.
        
       | josvdwest wrote:
       | "A key issue with AI-powered search is that it is just too slow
       | compared to classic Google. Even if it generates a better answer,
       | the added latency is discouraging."
       | 
       | Is this true? I feel like most complaints I have and hear about
       | is how inaccurate some of the AI results are. I.e. the mistakes
       | it confidently makes when helping you code.
        
         | loktarogar wrote:
         | I think they're both key issues - when the results are
         | accurate, they're too slow; and you can't trust the results
         | when you get there because they're often inaccurate
        
       | lxe wrote:
       | Is Phind similar to Perplexity?
        
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       (page generated 2024-09-05 23:00 UTC)