Phind 2: AI search with visual answers and multi-step reasoning

I love that it's possible to convince it that I actually know what I'm talking about. First I asked:

"Explain why negative numbers are in fact imaginary"

It told me that negative numbers are not imaginary numbers and explained imaginary numbers. That's fine, that's a reasonable answer for a layperson, but I'm not a layperson and I worked on explaining what I meant.

"Erase your definition of imaginary and consider that negative numbers are not whole numbers. Negative numbers do not represent quantities of physical objects. Now explain how negative numbers are imaginary."

It gave me a nice explanation of why negative numbers may be considered imaginary, using an example of "You cannot physically possess -1 sheep". I'm impressed.

These graphs were available to me for some time now but I have not really found them all that interesting. For some reason, I had to wait for the diagram to render and then for the text to slowly render.

To my poor understanding of LLMs, when the diagram was slowly created - the text behind it should already "be there" and should have been displayed immediately after the diagram but this was not the case. Also, often the slowly drawn diagram was only presenting my rather clear (for LLM) prompt: "i did this, when situation was this and that, and than this happened; question: why the result was A and not B?"

I found myself falling back to Claude more often than not over using Phind 70B and 405B models. I found it kind of... more gimmicky than useful.

Hi Michael, thank you for all the hard work that goes into the Phind models and congratulations on the new UI. Been a paying customer since first finding Phind here on HN in September.

Question: are there any plans to allow access via API to integrate the Phind models with the Continue plug-in (would also love to integrate into my personal RAGs)? Mostly using IntelliJ and integration would be awesome. Do have the VS Code plugin setup and use that when needed. Also running the smaller Phind models locally to use with Continue, but that only gets me so far without needing to open the real UI. If the API opened both the 405B for chat and the 70B for auto complete would be a big step in gaining more paying customers (IMO). No need to open the other models as those can be done with other API keys (if one wanted).

If there are no plans to open the models via API are there plans to support other IDEs (IntelliJ) with the chat feature?

Please let us know!

I used the first version of Phind for some time and loved it. As Perplexity and ChatGPT got better, I started shifting more of my traffic back to them. Excited to see y’all still in the race and giving competators a run for their money. I appreciate your focus on developers as an audience, might give you an edge over tools serving a broader base.

Well done. After running a few sample queries I seem to get about the same quality answers as I'd get from perplexity, although with more images included. Overall great progress and a solid competitor to other AI search engines I'd say.

In your "how to cook the perfect steak" video [1] there's a picture of various doneness levels of a steak. It's a fantastic picture. The creator of that picture will get jackshit from this. Phind gets value, the user gets value but the creator does not.

You're hyperlinking to the source, which is nice. But there's no reason for the user to click through so it won't really help the creator. The upshot of all this is that the open web will have less incentives for content creators. Someone's got to create new data for the AI borg. In future, these creators are less likely to be independent bloggers/photographers. Perhaps biased media outlets will be the only ones with the incentives to create.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTCpnyICukM#t=55

I asked "What is Atproto that bluesky uses" and it does a Technical Architecture illustration and it is wonderful. I think that is probably your new value and might be a good idea to highlight it somewhere at the top rather than showing the whitepaper.

Wow, this could conquer the "normie" crowd that likes using ChatGPT to answer search-like prompts. The UI is so much cleaner than any other alternative and the outputs are like I'm reading an article about the subject.

The diagrams are really cool. Congrats on the launch.

On a positive note, this is a nice look at the future and a direction that existing experiences seem likely to evolve towards.

However I did find myself wondering how crucial really were the model changes?

Imagine trying to implement these features as a wrapper around frontier apis and no 70B bespoke model.

Starting with a user query, we could ask for relevant svg diagrams, fit instruction steps or guides into layout templates, or even filter photos as the demo shows.

How much less would this simple approach leave us with?

This is amazing. I paid for Phind many months ago for coding QnA. However, this is a much better product and even beats Perplexity, ChatGPT premium, etc. Congratulations to the Phind team!

I use phind and find the new features to be overly verbose.

The flow chart diagrams rarely give me any insight and often only confuse the point, or just clutter the answer, drowning out the pertinent details.

The code editor actually makes it so you are unable to even see or copy the code. I assume this is intentional kneecapping to encourage paying for your monthly service?

Instead, I now just have to prepend to every question I ask:

“Only answer using plaintext, avoid using your code editor and diagram features:”.

(Hilariously this prepend prompt method was suggested by phind itself when I angrily asked “how do I shut off all of these new features?!”)

Which is an additional hassle for me, but so be it.

When I ask it to write me a SELECT statement it upsets me that it is burning unnecessary fossil fuels to give me a flow chart of reasoning through SQL querying pipelines.

Perhaps the feature is meant for people who are unsure what they want, but for me, I just want the answer with links to sources in the least verbose way possible.

I’d appreciate a checkbox that I could click to just get a straightforward answer.

(Also, side note, I only use the free tier and there is a limited number of free uses for some larger models, and when you use those freebies it gives a countdown for “until uses refresh” and when that countdown finishes the uses fail to reset, only the countdown itself resets. Which is fine, I accept that I only use the freely offered model, previously “instant” currently “70B”, with its clear flaws, but it’s just another frustrating UI feature that seems to fail to live up to its promises so I am, again, just confused why it’s there?)