Phind 2: AI search with visual answers and multi-step reasoning
198 comments
·February 13, 2025tenpoundhammer
Paid for it and tried out the full experience, beats anything else I've tried by a wide margin.
My prompt,
"I'm considering buying stock in the company with symbol NU. The most important thing to me is answering the question, is the stock likely to rise in the future. Please help create a list of questions that will help me to understand the likely hood of this. Also please help to anwser those questions. Please highlight the global economic environment for the company. Any unique challenges and unique advantages. Finally let me know what others think of it"
Results: I know this stock well all though I'm not a pro. It nailed all of the relevant aspects and hits the analysis right on for everything I know about it. Pulled lot's of helpful resources and most importantly the information was timely enough to be relevant. The timely part is where other LLMS have failed miserably. I've gotten good analysis from other LLM products but they have always been way out of date which makes them useless.
omdv
My experience was different. I have a particular question, which I am yet to see any model to answer correctly and I just tried it out.
Q: "what are the major economic and earnings events next week and how they can affect SPX volatility and price?"
A: It gave a long and nicely formatted answer with clever visuals, using the right words about FOMC and inflation. Coherent reasoning overall, albeit quite shallow. But the economic and earnings calendars for next week are complete hallucinations, even the dates, so the whole analysis is nonsense:
Wed, Feb 21 Consumer Price Index (CPI)
Wed, Feb 21 EIA Crude Oil Inventories
Thu, Feb 22 Producer Price Index (PPI)
toastau
I think this is a pretty good answer. "Why?" could extend to the theory or more detail on the influences I guess. https://chatgpt.com/share/67b38dc9-d1b8-8000-bfca-c4db93f38e...
rushingcreek
Thank you! Really happy to know that it's working well for you -- we made the additional searches feature exactly for this type of use case.
tenpoundhammer
If you want more feedback, I work in software engineering and I'm happy to chat outside of HN.
rushingcreek
That would be great! Can you email me at (my first name) at phind (dot) com?
yieldcrv
Very nice, I use LLMs to get a quick understanding of a publicly traded company too. I spent 30 minutes researching Kopin last night using Claude, as I heard they Kopin is a supplier in the $22bn IVAS contract, giving way more upside than Anduril. Starting from just that tidbit of information I got much more detail and had it make predictive models about future market caps, and negatives.
It was enough to give me timelines and risk reward models from a company I had never heard of. This used to take me many hours and a level of obsession that I find incompatible with being social. Verifying is fairly quick, but even if you aren't compelled to do that, now you can at least talk about the company in the associated trading communities and be further corrected or have your understanding challenged.
clark-kent
How does it compare to https://decodeinvesting.com/chat ?
fiiico
This is amazing! Curious how it compares to openai deep research, did you try?
tenpoundhammer
I was not willing to pay $200 just to try deep research. But I'm happy to except donations if the people want a comparision :)
fiiico
Fair
jgalt212
That's great to hear. LLMs are great when you can trust and verify, or the trust, but verify process is inexpensive. However, you can take get caught out in finance when you can't trust and verify.
hathawsh
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.
goatlover
But electrons do possess negative charge. A decelerating car has negative velocity. You can say those are just labels, but they are labels for physical things that have opposite values. Things in the physical world do gain and lose values in various properties over time.
hathawsh
Correct, and that (intentional) misunderstanding was part of the point. I had a 6th grade teacher who struggled with the idea that multiplying two negative numbers produces a positive number. I imagine someone like her asking a question based on their misunderstanding. They'll get a corrective answer that may not help them much. I'll show them how to improve their question and I hope the response will be enlightening and informative.
The response to my second question included a link to an article that suggests all numbers (including natural and whole numbers) are in fact human constructs and may be considered imaginary. That is an enlightening insight that would help us both stop thinking of the words "negative" and "imaginary" as perfectly well defined in our heads. Those words are just tools that can help us convey the most appropriate meaning for the context.
Without the link to the article, that hypothetical conversation probably would not have worked out as well.
cess11
Kind of weird splitting hairs over this with a machine, don't you think?
I think it should have told you it's called complex numbers, because they are composites.
nurettin
A decelerating car would have negative acceleration, not negative velocity.
placebo
They are indeed labels, just like complex numbers are labels and just like natural numbers are labels. All of them can be regarded as imaginary if one wants to nitpick but all are very useful imaginary models
Spivak
This is also why imaginary numbers aren't really imaginary either because real things in the physical world are well-modeled by the operations in the complex plane. When you're in R2 you do some hairy trig or switch to polar cords to express rotations orrrr you switch to the complex plane and multiply by i.
null
keerthiko
> A decelerating car has negative velocity.
not really your point, but ??
a decelerating car has negative acceleration, and until it starts reversing relative to its start, it has velocity in whichever direction it started in -- presumably positive if that was your initial frame of reference. of course if you decided positive was the opposite direction from which the car was already going in, well, it started with negative velocity.
also to the GP, if you owe someone a sheep but don't have any, you really do have -1 sheep.
pyinstallwoes
Yeah but a speaker moving in vs out which is positive or negative doesn’t mean having imaginary things, it’s positional relative to displacement of a thing. Sine waves +1, 0, -1. -1 is exactly like +1 but the other way. So it goes for electrons.
refulgentis
Category error created via multiple mathematical and physics misconceptions.
- A decelerating car does not have negative velocity
- "negative velocity" is assuredly nonphysical, which rips the middle out of an argument based on physicality
- Velocity is a vector quantity, as is acceleration. (the steelman'd version of this argument is s/velocity/acceleration)
- The negative isn't physical, it's pidgin for algebra so late middle high schoolers / early high schoolers can imitate physics without learning any of the above
d0mine
There is no one true theory of everything. All models are false -- some are useful.
Many different math concepts are used successfully in physics. Even if they may be outside everyday intuition for a layman, that doesn't make them less "real"
toxik
Newton’s third law? Pidgin for high schoolers. Got it.
d0mine
You can own -1 sheep. It is called debt.
null
fosterfriends
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.
CSMastermind
I'd agree with this. I tried Phind just now and found it still behind Perplexity for the product search use cases I tried it out for. Glad there's competition in the space though.
rushingcreek
We have a products UI on the way :)
iszomer
Pretty cool, visual learners are gonna' be thrilled. Also sorta' ties into r/FUI quite neatly too..
ruffered
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?)
rushingcreek
Thanks for the feedback. Have you tried setting your answer profile in https://www.phind.com/settings/profile?
You can tell it to "only answer using plaintext" there and it will be automatically applied across your searches.
ruffered
That would require me to make an account, which requires providing you my email, and I am uninterested in doing either of those things.
do_not_redeem
So the product has a builtin feature where you can tell it what you want, but instead of using that feature you want it to read your mind?
econ
Why bring up the email if you are not making an account?
I gave up on account creation for some projects and store the user preferences in local storage. It is an amazingly annoying feature in that it is very hard for the user to erase the data but you can't smoke your cigar and have it too.
evrenesat
You can create an address bar search entry for your browser, like this:
"https://www.phind.com/search/?q=%s Only answer using plaintext."
omega___
You don't have to go through the trouble of setting up a custom search engine for that, you can just use keyword bookmarks
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/bookmarks-firefox#w_how... https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/o3yfeo/just_discov...
cholantesh
>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.
Did you try including that in your prompt?
rufferedd
I mentioned that I do exactly that in the comment you are replying to.
Is it a sad state for any tool when one has to specify only wanting the thing they asked for with less verbosity?
Especially when said tool is costly to run, both financially for the service provider and environmentally.
To me, it is, but hey, opinions, ya know?
cholantesh
If it's costly to run, maybe it's reasonable to expect that persisting settings, which is also costly, has some level of gatekeeping? I'm as ambivalent about LLMs as the next guy, but these are frankly nonsense concerns.
albert_e
Settings > Profile > Preferences
New Threads Are Public [Enabled By Default]
Do Not Train on My Data [Disabled by Default]
The first one seems problematic -- does it mean what it seems to suggest? all conversations are "public" ?? Do users know this going in? i am afraid they could be pasting lot of private or confidential stuff without realizing this.
Sn0wCoder
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!
rushingcreek
Thank you! We do plan to support an API this year. We have deprecated our VS Code extension, however, as we're going all-in on search.
mikestorrent
I think it's a great move. I use Phind daily because I can ask it a question like "hey, what should I use for X" or "how do I connect Y to Z" and with refinement I can hone in on serious answers in ways that I cannot with Google searches.
I think building comparison tables is one of my favourite things to do here. Saves me considerable amounts of time and saves me from my biases to some extent.
I think the new Mermaid support is a great idea. It sure is handy that, before LLMs were even a thing, we were already collectively working on so many textual, readable languages to describe things like this! I am going to try to use it to create some architectural diagrams by adding requirements one by one.
pcchristie
VS Code is the main way I use Phind. I love it as a way to assist my learning to code.
WhitneyLand
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?
rushingcreek
Ah, great question! We tried using off-the-shelf models and found that they are incredibly bad at generating these visual components reliably, let alone with the nuance (such as color, placement, details, etc.) that would be expected in a great answer.
We write more about this in the technical model blog post: https://www.phind.com/blog/phind-2-model-creation.
anon373839
That's a great blog post, really informative and interesting. Do you recommend any other helpful resources on creating and curating datasets for post-training?
Xmd5a
I'd love to read an in-depth explanation of how you improved your LLM abilities to lay out diagrams.
rushingcreek
We used a system of LLM critics to generate a high-quality dataset for this. More in the blog post linked in the answer above.
schmorptron
Oh hey, I used phind a lot a while back and really enjoyed it. Sort of fizzled out of it for other stuff a few months back, but this looks pretty exciting! The visual explanations are great. I've been getting gemini to output ASCII diagrams to explain things, will definiely be checking this out.
srameshc
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.
pdq
It just summarized this page and included a few of the images.
asadm
probably shown in the photosynthesis video example but yes it seems it uses mermaid or something similar to express diagrams?
rushingcreek
Yep, we trained the model to produce Mermaid when a diagram might be helpful. There are a lot of nuances that went into this, such as where in the answer to place the diagram and how to ensure a good contrast within the diagram for maximum readability.
We have some more details on this in the model technical deep dive blog post :)
sddhrthrt
I still don't understand why these models can't be more "trustworthy", but I also don't understand the theory, I'd love to hear what you all think about this.
I asked it a question that's pretty subjective and culturally specific, and I appreciate that I got a reasonable answer back. The question was "should I?" and the answer was "definitely, don't miss it" in three different ways. However, I found that the literal sources it quoted didn't have the same opinion it expressed to me so convincingly. I asked a clarifying question and it goes "okay so I read the material, and it actually says it's optional".
So why not read the material? I wonder if it could even embed the website in the results, giving the website the traffic and ad space. I wonder if a meta browser is a better product for these tools.
brap
I think one factor is that all these LLMs are tuned to be ridiculously agreeable, almost everything you say will be met with some variation of “you’re absolutely right!”.
It’s like, look, I’m definitely not “absolutely right” 90% of the time, so how the hell am I supposed to trust what you’re saying?
I would prefer a model that’s tuned to prefix answers with “no, dumbass. Here’s why you’re an idiot:”. And yes you can promot them to answer this way, but they’re simply not wired to challenge you except for very trivial things.
real_jiakai
Congratulations on the impressive Phind 2 rebuild! The visual answers and multi-step reasoning capabilities look fantastic. I noticed that currently only the Phind series models support image uploads, while Claude 3.7 Sonnet in Phind 2 doesn't have this functionality yet. Do you have plans to enable image upload support for Claude 3.7 Sonnet in the near future? Being able to use Claude's multimodal capabilities within Phind would be a great addition, especially considering how powerful Claude's latest updates have been. Thanks!
Gabriel_Martin
Hi Michael, the range of unique interactions and little pieces of visual feedback for users in your demos is super impressive, and as a designer, I hope you don't mind if I shoot my shot.
I'm ending a MIT xPro course on designing AI products in about a week, and I've been looking for places to put all my learnings to work, might your team have some room for a coding/prototyping UX developer/designer who has spent a lot of time thinking about AI-oriented HCI?
I think in 8 weeks of a co-op / or even part time basis, I could build out a ton of ideas you haven't gotten around to defining yet, but want to get a feel for the UX of. I'd love to hear from you (my email in in my profile).
Hi HN! Michael here. We've spent the last 6 months rebuilding Phind. We asked ourselves what types of answers we would ideally like and crafted a new UI and model series to help get us there. Our new 70B is completely different from the one we launched a year ago.
The new Phind goes beyond text to present answers visually with inline images, diagrams, cards, and other widgets to make answers more meaningful:
- "explain photosynthesis" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTCpnyICukM#t=7
- "how to cook the perfect steak" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTCpnyICukM#t=55
- "quicksort in rust" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTCpnyICukM#t=105
Phind is also now able to seek out information on its own. If it needs more, it will do multiple rounds of additional searches to get you a more comprehensive answer:
- "top 10 Thai restaurants in SF, their prices, and key dishes" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIQQcDIIHFQ#t=11
It can also perform calculations, visualize their results, and verify them in a Jupyter notebook:
- "simulate 100 coin flips and make graphs" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP3PZ4MKGCg#t=8
- "train a perceptron neural network using Jupyter" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP3PZ4MKGCg#t=45
This blog post contains an overview of what we did as well as technical deep dives into how we built the new frontend and models.
I'm super grateful for all of the feedback we've gotten from this community and can't wait to hear your thoughts!