Do not assume that companies are willing to put ALL of their intellectual property into your hands. Even if you would not be some startup where any sysadmin could steal and sell my data any time without you even noticing it, you will get hacked just like everyone else that stores interesting data. The data you have access to is absolutely perfect for the global data blackmailing gangs. As soon as you are successful, you will have every black hat hacker and their dog knocking on your doors.
Onyx.app has a self hosted option. I just did the docker setup yesterday. It’s not a great home user option imo but seems like it’s functional for enterprise.
Just had a quick look - while they have that self-hosting option, they still assume you will use a cloud LLM. I started digging because I got confused of them not mentioning any GPU when it comes to resource requirements. There is some documentation on using it fully self-hosted including the LLM, but the emphasis here is on "some".
To be clear: I am looking at this from a CEO perspective, not a "I will play with it in my spare time" nerd one.
controlcore.io was brought to the market for the same exact reason. Not AI Powered, but to control AI and its interactions with your Data, APIs,. Applications etc. And yes, we just give our service as a self-hostable solution. However is the encryption and SOC compliance be, we want our clients to know that none of their internal data or interaction transaction leave their control.
People can usually tell if an answer isn't helpful, but not always that it isn't accurate. Depending on the context, 85% accurate might not be good enough.
I've been using Grapevine at my company for the last couple weeks. One of the coolest features is that it proactively answers questions (with citations!). Not everyone thinks to tag the bot but it often surfaces the relevant answer and document and saves everyone some time.
Interesting to see this now launching, when most companies have their own customGPT solution and MCP makes headway towards decoupling the frontend layer.
Data seems to be stored outside of the customers control, so this will be a difficult sell for many companies.
In terms of what businesses we're targeting: we wanted to provide either 1.) a turnkey solution for a company GPT for all the people who don't have it yet, or 2.) a higher quality company GPT for people who do have an internal solution.
Our sense is that ~70% knowledge companies at large still don't have a custom GPT yet, and that of the people who do, our system can be more performant because we're spending more effort than their internal team is. There's a lot of details we've solved on data ingestion and search algo that improved our accuracy dramatically, and things breadth of data connectors is the kind of thing that is expensive for an internal team but worth it if you're providing the service at large.
Not sure what you mean by "data seems to be stored outside of the customers control," but fortunately I think many SaaS apps that were trying to lock down customer data from themselves are walking that back a little bit.
Please look into the Zero Data Retention policies of the subprocessors that you are using. For example, Open AI does not include files as falling under their ZDR [1], thus utilizing OAI as an LLM solution inherently adds unnecessary risk of data exposure that many enterprise clients do no want to onboard. Also, you have to think about those companies obligation to their clients/customers when it comes to data security, along with the risk of IP being exposed to 3rd party systems that they do not have control over, when they make their decisions when it comes to utilizing various business solutions.
The Gather work product is unfortunately going into maintenance mode. We still have a strong team working on the core AV and performance, and the business is very decent and more than supports that team (and we still use the Gather product heavily ourselves).
However, it didn't reach the growth trajectory we needed, so a majority of the company will be working on Grapevine + new products instead.
I've seen Gleam and Onyx, and I think the real problem is that there is a lot of garbage coming in. If you want to solve the problem, you need to find a way to clean the information coming in. And if you've cleaned the information coming in, you have a lower need to have an LLM answer the question.
Our experience, especially with the most recent reasoning models, is that the LLM's are a lot better now at sifting through the garbage. So if you last gave these products a try more than a month ago, I would try them again.
(Additionally, there are a lot of details that do make a big difference in data processing / search algo too, which have taken our own internal accuracy on hard questions from 30% => 80%+)
No self-hosted version yet. You would need to trust us in the same way you trust your other SaaS apps that host company IP (e.g. Slack, Notion, Github, etc.)
I get that's a big ask from a startup. If it helps, we are a company that's been around for 4+ years and have built a work tool (https://gather.town) used for 100k+ people for their daily work, Sequoia-backed, are SOC II certified, and go way beyond that for the security considerations for this product.
YCS19 - so 6 years. Obviously you did well enough to survive. Interesting that the pivot is something so basic after all this time. Kind of interested in the story there.
Is the "ChatGPT" brand name becoming a generic term, like Baid-Aid or Kleenex?
There is the ChatGPT product, operated by OpenAI, Inc, which you can access via their web site or their API. OpenAI does publish gpt-oss as an open-weights model. I suppose you could argue that gpt-oss is "a ChatGPT," though I'd normally think of it as "a large language model." Much like Claude, DeepSeek, Qwen and so on are other large language models.
I can't speak for other people, but our strong opinion about how companies should work is to reduce the massive amount of chores and tedium that exist in our work days today.
With the company GPT, we want to tackle things like: 1.) having to answer a repeated question from a colleague, 2.) answering questions to coworkers that are purely informational, and eventually 3.) things like standup updates, written updates to leadership on status, etc.
I think human interaction at work is one of the most valuable experiences if you're lucky enough to have good colleagues and interesting work. But I think they should almost entirely be around creativity, decision-making, debate, etc. rather than sharing information that exists elsewhere.
Your product is a bot that SPEAKS as an alternative to OTHER PEOPLE talking.
> reduce the massive amount of chores and tedium that exist in our work days today.
See... is that really a strong opinion? Like look what I asked you. How should COMPANIES WORK?
I'm being a little funny about this. I guess my point is that, there are a lot of Grapevines, including all the companies whose technologies you use. Paul Graham invests in all of them, and so he will be fine. But what about YOU? A soft and friendly Enterprise Sales tone... like give me a strong opinion. People at Google and Meta have better sales teams and technology. But they don't have strong opinions. Do you get it now?
Offer self-hosted and I would buy.
Do not assume that companies are willing to put ALL of their intellectual property into your hands. Even if you would not be some startup where any sysadmin could steal and sell my data any time without you even noticing it, you will get hacked just like everyone else that stores interesting data. The data you have access to is absolutely perfect for the global data blackmailing gangs. As soon as you are successful, you will have every black hat hacker and their dog knocking on your doors.
Onyx.app has a self hosted option. I just did the docker setup yesterday. It’s not a great home user option imo but seems like it’s functional for enterprise.
Just had a quick look - while they have that self-hosting option, they still assume you will use a cloud LLM. I started digging because I got confused of them not mentioning any GPU when it comes to resource requirements. There is some documentation on using it fully self-hosted including the LLM, but the emphasis here is on "some".
To be clear: I am looking at this from a CEO perspective, not a "I will play with it in my spare time" nerd one.
controlcore.io was brought to the market for the same exact reason. Not AI Powered, but to control AI and its interactions with your Data, APIs,. Applications etc. And yes, we just give our service as a self-hostable solution. However is the encryption and SOC compliance be, we want our clients to know that none of their internal data or interaction transaction leave their control.
">85% of answers are helpful & accurate"
People can usually tell if an answer isn't helpful, but not always that it isn't accurate. Depending on the context, 85% accurate might not be good enough.
95% of answers could be accurate. Combined with the 85% that are helpful and you have “85% of answers are helpful & accurate.”
I've been using Grapevine at my company for the last couple weeks. One of the coolest features is that it proactively answers questions (with citations!). Not everyone thinks to tag the bot but it often surfaces the relevant answer and document and saves everyone some time.
Thanks for using it! Any feedback on what could be made better? And did you guys try any of the alternatives before using Grapevine?
Interesting to see this now launching, when most companies have their own customGPT solution and MCP makes headway towards decoupling the frontend layer. Data seems to be stored outside of the customers control, so this will be a difficult sell for many companies.
What type of businesses are you targeting?
In terms of what businesses we're targeting: we wanted to provide either 1.) a turnkey solution for a company GPT for all the people who don't have it yet, or 2.) a higher quality company GPT for people who do have an internal solution.
Our sense is that ~70% knowledge companies at large still don't have a custom GPT yet, and that of the people who do, our system can be more performant because we're spending more effort than their internal team is. There's a lot of details we've solved on data ingestion and search algo that improved our accuracy dramatically, and things breadth of data connectors is the kind of thing that is expensive for an internal team but worth it if you're providing the service at large.
Not sure what you mean by "data seems to be stored outside of the customers control," but fortunately I think many SaaS apps that were trying to lock down customer data from themselves are walking that back a little bit.
Please look into the Zero Data Retention policies of the subprocessors that you are using. For example, Open AI does not include files as falling under their ZDR [1], thus utilizing OAI as an LLM solution inherently adds unnecessary risk of data exposure that many enterprise clients do no want to onboard. Also, you have to think about those companies obligation to their clients/customers when it comes to data security, along with the risk of IP being exposed to 3rd party systems that they do not have control over, when they make their decisions when it comes to utilizing various business solutions.
1. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/your-data#zero-data-...
Was a huge fan of gather.town, is this the official notice that it's going into maintenance mode?
The Gather work product is unfortunately going into maintenance mode. We still have a strong team working on the core AV and performance, and the business is very decent and more than supports that team (and we still use the Gather product heavily ourselves).
However, it didn't reach the growth trajectory we needed, so a majority of the company will be working on Grapevine + new products instead.
Is there a recommended migration path ? or another product that you would suggest here?
This is sad to hear. We loved Gather but the technical issues stacked up and we made the choice to kill it around 2 weeks ago.
We've still been searching for a proper replacement for go-karting. Our team greatly enjoyed that little mini game.
A thought for any lurking vibe-coders.
I've seen Gleam and Onyx, and I think the real problem is that there is a lot of garbage coming in. If you want to solve the problem, you need to find a way to clean the information coming in. And if you've cleaned the information coming in, you have a lower need to have an LLM answer the question.
Our experience, especially with the most recent reasoning models, is that the LLM's are a lot better now at sifting through the garbage. So if you last gave these products a try more than a month ago, I would try them again.
(Additionally, there are a lot of details that do make a big difference in data processing / search algo too, which have taken our own internal accuracy on hard questions from 30% => 80%+)
The name is way too long for people to type queries using it.
Fortunately, Grapevine is just the name of our system, we let people white-label their Slack bot when they actually set it up :)
Is this self-hosted? If not, am I to work under the assumption that my company's IP is worth ~$0?
No self-hosted version yet. You would need to trust us in the same way you trust your other SaaS apps that host company IP (e.g. Slack, Notion, Github, etc.)
I get that's a big ask from a startup. If it helps, we are a company that's been around for 4+ years and have built a work tool (https://gather.town) used for 100k+ people for their daily work, Sequoia-backed, are SOC II certified, and go way beyond that for the security considerations for this product.
Are slack/github/notion dumping company data into an unknown set of LLM APIs under the hood?
(My company uses Zulip/Gitea/Affine for data sovereignty reasons, but this kind of thing seems worse)
YCS19 - so 6 years. Obviously you did well enough to survive. Interesting that the pivot is something so basic after all this time. Kind of interested in the story there.
Is the "ChatGPT" brand name becoming a generic term, like Baid-Aid or Kleenex?
There is the ChatGPT product, operated by OpenAI, Inc, which you can access via their web site or their API. OpenAI does publish gpt-oss as an open-weights model. I suppose you could argue that gpt-oss is "a ChatGPT," though I'd normally think of it as "a large language model." Much like Claude, DeepSeek, Qwen and so on are other large language models.
Well GPT = general purpose transformer
Generative pretrained transformer, I think? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_pre-trained_transfo...
It’s actually generally prime t-bones
> the day-to-day questions that actually blocked people
do you have a very strong opinion about how companies should work?
"No"
Okay, does Dario Amodei? He thinks more than half the workforce should "just" be replaced. That's a strong opinion! Do you see what I am saying?
I can't speak for other people, but our strong opinion about how companies should work is to reduce the massive amount of chores and tedium that exist in our work days today.
With the company GPT, we want to tackle things like: 1.) having to answer a repeated question from a colleague, 2.) answering questions to coworkers that are purely informational, and eventually 3.) things like standup updates, written updates to leadership on status, etc.
I think human interaction at work is one of the most valuable experiences if you're lucky enough to have good colleagues and interesting work. But I think they should almost entirely be around creativity, decision-making, debate, etc. rather than sharing information that exists elsewhere.
> I can't speak for other people
Your product is a bot that SPEAKS as an alternative to OTHER PEOPLE talking.
> reduce the massive amount of chores and tedium that exist in our work days today.
See... is that really a strong opinion? Like look what I asked you. How should COMPANIES WORK?
I'm being a little funny about this. I guess my point is that, there are a lot of Grapevines, including all the companies whose technologies you use. Paul Graham invests in all of them, and so he will be fine. But what about YOU? A soft and friendly Enterprise Sales tone... like give me a strong opinion. People at Google and Meta have better sales teams and technology. But they don't have strong opinions. Do you get it now?
what's your point, you ask for strong opinion without any context, what answer do you expect?
I don’t think anyone knows what you’re saying.