Here’s a general demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpK9PWo0lUw
And here’s a demo that includes math and code blocks: https://type.ai/code-math-demos
There are a lot of AI writing products out now, but we've found that most of them treat writing like a one-shot activity that should be delegated to AI. We don't think that's the optimal way to write. We think of great writing as the product of clear thinking, which requires a lot of time tinkering with and refining ideas. So we’re building a user-friendly document editor that puts the author front and center.
As you write in Type, you can press cmd+k to summon simple AI commands. Most of our commands are grounded in familiar writing primitives (ex. “Write paragraph”) and attempt to understand the context of your document.
Type supports multiple rich block types, including code and math and our commands are able to both interpret and output these block types. So if you're writing an introductory essay about machine learning, for example, you can use Type's chat feature to generate and refine equations and code blocks you'd like to include in your document. Once you’re satisfied with what Type has generated, you can drag and insert the block anywhere in your document (as seen in the demo video above).
We’ve also built a "what to write about next" feature in the document sidebar that offers suggestions on ideas you may consider adding to your document.
We’ve built some editor features that aren’t AI-specific but which we think make for an enjoyable authoring experience: (1) Type is built from the ground up to be offline-first. This means most interactions (search, loading documents, etc.) are instant; (2) Mobile support as installable PWA; (3) Keyboard shortcuts for the most useful commands; (4) Markdown copy/paste support.
We designed Type to be most useful for longer-form writing, so we encourage you to try it out in the context of something like an essay or a technical tutorial. If you try it out at https://type.ai, we’d love to hear what you think. We think Type feels pretty different from other AI writing tools that produce fairly shallow content, but would love to get your honest feedback on whether we're hitting the mark.
Each account comes with a free allocation of AI commands, after which you can activate a paid plan for unlimited AI usage (you can still create and access unlimited docs on the free plan). If you'd like some additional free credits, please just drop us a note at founders@type.ai and we'll refill your free credits.
We'd love your feedback on what feels helpful and what feels confusing or missing. Thanks!
I relate to the other comments that (1) Explosion of AI generated blogs / copy etc is not what we need and it's hard to see the value of it long term (2) this looks like a simple usage on top of GPT4, no real IP / innovation - this is risky from a business model perspective.
Good luck!
I think it's safe to assume more models will be introduced and vendor lock-in can be avoided, but I find it hard to believe some of the "simpler" ideas can create compelling, VC-scale businesses.
Not every experience is going to be best suited to fit in a chat box like ChatGPT which opens the door for startups like this one to build something new.
I'm excited when I see products like this, and I think we really need to retire the critique of "Its just an API call to OpenAI". While yes that is a core part of it, there is a lot of time and effort that goes into developing these experiences that has value
I'm sure they imagine that when they figure out something actually worth doing, they'll already have a user base and revenue stream and reputation. If there's somebody out there doing something more innovative, they'll either buy them out or reproduce their idea in-house.
Me, I'm skeptical that there's a "there" here. But that's why somebody else is getting rich and I'm not.
> The thing that excites me most about generative AI isn't "more," it's better. I often use Type to write satire and now whenever I hit a block, I don't tab over to Twitter – I have Type generate some ideas. Often, I don't use them as-is but they do inspire a new angle I hadn't thought of.
One #2, I think there's some truth to that today. But our belief is that over time, these products will start to evolve into something more advanced and useful. A product like Type, for example, won't really look like Google Docs + AI in 3 years, it will start to feel like a more novel category of tool. We'll see, though!
You can generate the first draft in the chatGPT-4 window, then ask it to add a section or expand a list and it works pretty well in the chat interface. So it's not really hard to write articles with bare chatGPT UI.
I would happily pay a token or credit-based fee to use this while in heavy writing mode.
A MRR or ARR license for this? hmmmm... it would need to be multi-modal with dynamic page layouts and images to justify a subscription (for me).
Or auto-update a doc in the background via async AI.
0: https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/learning-a-chinese-song-w...
1. This should've been an addon/plugin for the top-5 most used text editors (Word, Google Docs), potentially also a plugin for WordPress/Drupal/Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, instead of a standalone text editor that nobody's going to download.
2. Looks like every YC startup now is going to be a thin wrapper around OpenAI's GPT endpoints. "Dump your ideas into this textbox and let the magical black box add some fluff". Things are going to get boring, old and non-original very quickly.
29.41% of the world's top 10K websites use WordPress. 29.65% of the world's top 100K websites use WordPress. I wish nobody cared about me like that.
I’d say they already have. I have half a mind to write a HN front end that filters out any posts with the phrases “GPT”, “LLM”, and “AI”.
I like this idea. So simple, but a great product on top of ChatGPT
(Cited from one of the lates YouTube videos, don’t remember which one)
Tons of amazing products have also completely failed to gain traction.
In this case, the goal is to build a business. If they can get enough people excited about their offering, it doesn’t matter if you consider it a feature or a product. You are not their target market, and that’s ok.
FWIW I am their target market. I will use AI powered document editing when Atlassian, Github and Notion integrate it as a feature.
In general, if you want guaranteed success this is the wrong industry for you. Sometimes you've just got to accept the risk.
And indeed, human got a good skill to skip ad blocks on pages.
Next will be any texts on web pages: why to bother reading stuff that AI throws on us?
But then I remembered that I had already stopped reading some common Google search results because they seemed too low effort for a very long time. And they often looked like they were generated, not written. Just three examples from different fields: Quora, CNN, and CNET. But the list is much longer. In non-English parts of the Internet, there is also poorly auto-translated content from websites like Stack Overflow, which is weirdly high in the Google results. Fortunately, I found extensions to block these websites in Google search. So for me, and I believe for many people, it has already happened.
On the other hand, I enjoy reading articles from Simon Willison and Adam Johnson. And even though now we have very powerful chatbot services that can explain anything to you or effectively teach you some skill, I will most likely continue to read the content that they put on their blogs or elsewhere.
Reputation did matter, and it will matter even more in the future. I believe people will continue to read other people's texts. At least I will.
Example: videos uploaded in the YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips have a high probability of being made by the Linus Tech Tips people and not just being completely AI generated, unless of course if that made the videos better, but I still think that the videos would be curated by the Linus Tech Tips team.
I, for one, would rather read an insightful piece by an author who has been helped by an AI than a soulless product of a content farm.
When do we get AI Hunter Thompson?
I closed the browser tab and haven't gone back since.
The Launch HN posts are a special case because that's one of the things HN gives back to YC in exchange for funding it; and as you can imagine, there are a ton of AI related startups wanting to launch right now. However, Demo Day starts tomorrow, so you have two more threads to endure today (the other one being https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35445097) and Launch HN season should simmer down after that.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
9/11, the 2nd US-Iraq Gulf War, the 2007-8 Global Financial Crisis, and Covid-19 come to mind.
I consider this a strong indicator that there is in fact a significant story developing, and whilst AI has certainly presented us with sixty or seventy years of false starts, the prospect and impacts of fast take-off make it the sort of thing that 1) is hard to judge either in advance or as it's happening and 2) would absolutely change the world. Exceptions include fad/fashion, political, and some investment hype-cycles.
Even if the current OpenAI / LLM fuss is a false alarm / limited breakthrough, it's breathtaking enough as it stands and as has already been demonstrated to take very seriously. Soaking up solid takes (and yes, they're hard to sort from the chaff, another characteristic of major stories) does seem worthwhile.
You can flag or hide stories on HN, so long as you're logged in (and have met the fairly minimal karma thresholds).
Just think about Marvel movies, it’s a lot of CGI and mediocre story.
I am going to wait until smbd makes it on github for free
I might be wrong. And I had another feeling: soon every YC startup will do the same thing over an over again: pick any idea + chatgpt + pricing
>52% had nothing more than an idea.
https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1642566043053826048?s=52&t=...
Listeners don't really wants to know the truth. They don't really wants to know that Justin Bieber had nothing to do with the genesis of Sorry. They don't really want to know that most "live performance" videos were created in studios and filmed afterwards. Nobody is really interested in how music is made, because studio work is mostly draining, moving through the dark and an endurance test. Nobody wants raw and honest, because nobody even has any idea how that would sound.
But everyone imagines they do. It's not even that information is well hidden. Everyone wants there to be a great story so much, that they are very happy to ignore the flimsiest of veils and just believe what they must. And the industry has always been happy to provide. It is the essence of stardom.
I am fairly certain we are not going to notice of even care about how it was generated, as long as we can be made to love it, which will still require an entirely different set of skills.
AI content will surpass human content in quality and quantity. Moreover, it will enable vast numbers of people to do things they were previously unable to do due to budget, time, resources, depth of talent, opportunity cost, etc.
Meta point: I've never seen so many smart people so bearish about the future. The science fiction dreams and utopias we've celebrated since our childhoods might actually be feasible now, and yet so many are wearing frowns.
But I'll have to read AI content on both sides of that probability.
I think the phrase "if it seems to good to be true it probably is" is one way (among many) to interpret the scepticism.
I think that it's easy to jump to conclusions about the implications of this technology. Towards either over-optimism or over-pessimism.
Expect the worst and welcome the best seems as good approach as any?
LLMs are in many people’s opinion overhyped. Their capabilities are overhyped.*
People don’t trust the powers to be to use AI to benefit the masses. Instead of the Star Trek-like utopias, we are more likely to get Blade Runner-like dystopias.
* Tech has a real “hustler culture” problem, I guess it was always a part of tech culture, but with the advent of cryptocurrency it really exploded. With the implosion of crypto (and real people losing a lot of real money), all the hype people need something to hawk. “AI” is that something, it’s the new “blockchain”.
Our capitalistic society is salivating at the idea of cheapening the cost of production by eliminating all the creative and generative work that workers make. The capitalist class doesn't care who gets hurt or what gets destroyed as long as they make more money.
Unfortunately the people that are hurt the most are the middle and working class folks who use their skills to create things, make money, and immediately spend it. These are the folks that keep the whole system running by using their money to buy more goods.
> I've never seen so many smart people so bearish about the future. The science fiction dreams and utopias we've celebrated since our childhoods might actually be feasible now, and yet so many are wearing frowns.
As it stands we aren't heading towards utopia, we are running head first to a bleak dystopia; where critical thought and creativity is authorized only to the algorithms and probability machines of the wealthy and powerful. While the rest of us are relegated to cheap, often dangerous, labor.
If we had support systems: Universal healthcare, wages, education, etc. I might be more supportive, but we don't because capitalism.
sooooo. this is a classic business strategy sort of thing. you, an AI startup, have to build Notion, faster than Notion can build AI features.
your work is cut out for you. i dont have any suggestions but would love to hear your thoughts on how to outcompete massive incumbents.
As individuals, a lot of us have moved to Obsidian, but we aren't using it collaboratively. Personally I just use it as a simple note taking space; I keep a note for everything I've googled multiple times, and I can pull it up quickly with a simple cmd+p or cmd+shift+f. Notion provides basicallly the opposite experience (open a website, wait for it to load, use their shoddy search, wait for that to load, then maybe find what you're looking for).
As a team, we don't feel like we're missing anything without Notion. We collaborate in markdown using GitLab pull requests and Mattermost chat messages. Some of us write that content in Obsidian and then paste it into the GitLab text input (have you ever tried pasting markdown into Notion? Good luck with that!)
I think some non-devs might prefer Notion, but as a dev, the idea of using some proprietary React frontend as a note taking tool is the opposite of what I want. Obsidian is great.
IMO Notion got distracted with this "database" idea, where everything is a "block," because the reality of it is that the experience of everyday text editing becomes infuriating. Nothing will make me resent a product like unintuitive shortcuts that hijack my return key and closing backticks (also see: ClickUp).
I don't really produce documents with it. That does seem annoying with all of the blocks. I just use Google Docs for that use case. I find Notion to be something like Evernote with Airtable dropped right in. I don't think I would use it to replace Confluence or whatever. But as a way to share my Org-mode oriented brain with other folks, it works nicely.
At the end of the day though that thinking obviously needs to translate into a set of features that sets us apart. When comparing to Notion specifically we already have a few of those that make us stick out and that our customers appreciate such as offline first support, instant search, writing suggestions, and most recently our chat integration.
Btw huge fan of your new podcast! :)
We have a subtle but important difference in focus compared to a product like Notion. We're not aiming to build the best knowledge or workplace management product. We're really focused on building something that helps you author high-quality content (usually, that will be shared publicly).
Secondly, IMO the end-state of many of these products won't look like Microsoft Word/Notion + AI. I think entirely new interfaces and workflows will be discovered over the next 2-3 years that wouldn't have been possible without today's LLMs. The one advantage we have is no priors – we can take big swings on "risky" ideas.
Like Stefan said, I know both of those probably still sound a little hand-wavey but it's part of what keeps us motivated to keep building.
It’s noted that this editor supports offline - does this mean that the AI features also run offline? Or a limited version?
On a serious note, I hope AI will help me write documentation. But at that point, do we still need documentation?
Firstly, AI-powered document editors rely heavily on algorithms and pre-existing templates to generate content, which means that the output can lack creativity and originality. As a result, we risk losing the human touch and the ability to express unique perspectives and ideas that cannot be replicated by a machine.
Secondly, relying on AI to generate content can lead to a lack of accountability and transparency. It can be challenging to trace the source of information, and this could lead to widespread dissemination of false or biased information. This could have disastrous consequences, particularly in areas such as politics or finance.
Thirdly, AI-powered document editors could also lead to job loss and exacerbate existing societal inequalities. It's likely that many jobs that require writing skills could be automated, leading to significant job losses. This could particularly impact those who are already marginalized and disadvantaged.
In conclusion, while AI-powered document editors might seem like a convenient solution, it's essential to consider their potential downsides. In my opinion, it's crucial to maintain the role of humans in creating content, so we can preserve creativity, accountability, and fairness in our society.
There is no evidence that AI-powered writing leads to lack of creativity.
AI is not responsible for the publication of documents. It is your duty as (co-)author to make sure that what you say is valid, and to make the necessary fact-checking before publication.
If anything, AI will on the opposite gives access to work to MORE people, possibly people that are less proficient in writing, but still might have interesting ideas.
All this AI FUD, it's really the history repeating itself.
Just one small silly bit of feedback - in your demo video you show one of the use-cases as showing you coming up with fake user testimonials, maybe not the best use-case to show!
1) adding an "advanced" tab which enables the user to input more information about the document, e.g. formatting, length, etc...
2) learning the user's writing patterns and style - I'm not sure if this can be done by prompting, but my guess is that there are methods that you can use to steer the prose towards the user's default style
3) plagiarism detection - this would require a large document store and could be implemented using fuzzy/semantic search via Milvus followed by string matching
Keep up the good work.
Main issue preventing just* chucking this into one of the LangChains is (a) unrolling email threads mixing many people's writing, (b) keeping partitioned tones (workplaces, topics, networks, cultures) distinct.
* No such thing as "just".
The two things I'm missing, or didn't find how to use:
1. GPT-4 :) I know the API isn't public yet, but the reasoning abilities of GPT-4 are so much better that I'm having a hard time arguing with GPT-3.
2. I have a long prompt I give to GPT-4 (context on our product, writing style guidelines, text examples for style, words to avoid, etc.). It's about two pages long, in addition to the request for the specific article or paragraph I'm writing. How should I incorporate that into Type's UI?
3. How do I import/export a whole article, or paragraphs, as Markdown? EDIT: Copy-paste. Lol, simpler than I expected.
1. GPT-4 is definitely on our radar and is something that we are planning to support as an option. There are trade-offs though as it's a lot slower and as people have mentioned, a lot more expensive.
2. You can use the built-in chat the same way you would use ChatGPT. With that said I know that is not the ideal way to achieve what you're looking for. We have some ideas around features that will address this specific problem. If that is something important to you and you'd like to chat about it feel free to email me and we can talk about it: stefan AT type.ai.
Just because I can doesn't mean I want to. I have plenty of my own projects to work on; why bother wasting time down making something I don't care too much about when I could do something interesting instead?
Don't make a startup to do hard things. That's what a hobby is for.
Still learning this after 10 years of building something that didn't exist before.
What if the AI can sort and use all the information in the system in their writing (bookmarked webpages, other notes and text in type..). For example, when you were demonstrating the launch blog post creation, you likely had plenty of related content saved in folders within the system. It would be great if the AI could organize and incorporate that material into the blog post.
Achieving this will require significant optimization and fine-tuning, but it could potentially create an interesting competitive advantage. Mem AI is moving in a similar direction, but not specifically for writing purposes.
I am not looking forward to being deluged by pages and pages of AI generated content that will surely be sent out by MBA types looking to make a name for themselves as visionaries and flooding my inbox.
What I want is a tool that reads documents or corporate memo or email and extracts the key message into a small paragraph or two.
The thing that excites me most about generative AI isn't "more," it's better. I often use Type to write satire and now whenever I hit a block, I don't tab over to Twitter – I have Type generate some ideas. Often, I don't use them as-is but they do inspire a new angle I hadn't thought of.
That said, I can see how we have a lot of work to do making that more clear. And I can certainly see how a product like ours or ChatGPT could be used to produce lots of mediocre writing – which is undesirable.
Appreciate the feedback!
I was curious, is there any difference you noticed for your use case with GPT vs Claude?
But to write real quality articles is quite hard to get right.
It uses a lot of words, but a lot of fluffy filler sentences.
With code it just seems to get me, especially V4. But with writing it's always off.
Maybe it's me or maybe they've just put a lot of time in training it on coding feedback, or maybe writing is harder because it's much more interpretable what a good article is.
In some cases I actually got better results writing with 3.5.
Both require deep knowledge that surfaces in a few well chosen words that are packed together intelligibly. None of the GPT outputs can match that kind of linguistic mastery. I suppose I should add "yet", but I don't want to.
But it could also be that they are reinforcing gpt by senior devs.
But the writing in some cases maybe reinforced by "normal" people.
My only worry with this is that I'm not sure what the long-term edge will be. This whole product looks a bit like just a feature that will soon be added to MS Office Word. I'd love to hear more from the authors about how they plan to differentiate themselves here.
Edit: Intense cryptobro "I have my own coin" energy
2. *Sectional content generation* What's interesting is how you can format a prompt to give GPT-4 the context of a section. It then generates content relevant to that section and the overall document.
3. *Deciding what to write next* It's cool that GPT-4 can analyze a document and suggest possible sections to expand upon. We can then choose which direction to take next.
4. *One-click content generation* I like the idea of a simple button that generates context-appropriate content based on your current location in the document.
5. *Standardized text manipulation* This approach offers a standardized way to select a region, generate a prompt, and manipulate text. You can shorten or lengthen it, change the timing, fix grammar issues, or even adapt it for posting on Twitter. It's a versatile method for content generation.
I like this but would not pay for another note, bookmark, todo or markdown/rich text editor app service. Also arguably true to hn fashion someone could roll this or get very close as an obsidian or other widely used tool plugin in short time.
I also just checked reflect's page and they added a gpt4 prompt feature a couple weeks ago and you get all this for $10/mo. https://reflect.app/changelog
That being said, I do need a dark mode and markdown syntax conversion.
There's also more value on mobile because of how much slower it is to type on mobile. I can get close to typing at the speed of thought on a keyboard anyway. Something that types faster than the speed of thought means that it has to read my mind and get it accurate more often than not. Copilot works great because it's filling in blanks, but it hasn't done well for more creative forms of writing.
What a perfect use case for AI hallucinations!
EDIT: I've already built something like this for my personal blog (similar to ghost like editor). That was before GPT-3/4. Only thing remaining is to hook with GPT-4.
Hope it's better than Lex.
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What about an AI built self-employment model.
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What if you apply this to, say, making a decent self-shop for etsy-type users "Build me a hop using these product libs that I have made with descriptions and the picures" etc...
