Show HN: Geppetto, an open source AI companion for your Slack teams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Geppetto, an open source AI companion for your Slack teams

github.com

57 pointswslh35 comments

Our team just published Geppetto. Geppetto is an open source Slack App to use ChatGPT inside your workspace. It is written in Python and super easy to tinker and fork:

- GitHub: https://github.com/Deeptechia/geppetto

- Our first public release: https://deeptechia.io/blog/geppetto-ai-companion-for-slack/

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Haha, good name. When ChatGPT was released, together with a friend we personified it for fun and called "him" Geppetto. We've even had many conversations with ChatGPT trying to convince it by various strategies to accept the nickname (which it is rather hesitant to do).

But Geppetto was the scientist. The puppet was called Geppetto's Monster.

  Marduk 1st millennium BC
  Jehovah 2nd century BC
  Eliyahu of Chelm ~1640 
  Victor Frankenstein 1818
  Geppetto 1883
  Susan Calvin 1941
  Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai 1982
  Noonien Soong 1990

Woodworker, not scientist [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geppetto

Cool! What are the use cases this is built for? It looks like it is a bridge from ChatGPT and DALL-E to Slack? How do you improve upon/customize their models for your use cases?

Tangentially related: The company "Deeptechia" is mentioned a lot, without a lot of details, which makes it seem like a general software consultancy business, is this the aim? And do you really have 500 companies as consulting clients? The company seems pretty young, based on the blog posts on their site numbering exactly 1, posted today, about this, and based on the DNS records being updated today, and based on the wayback machine having no captures for it at all, and based on them posting only a few hours ago that they were "revealing" themselves on LinkedIn (albeit with a company size of 50-200 employees?).

Thanks for your time and for sharing your work!

Looking at the source code [0] it's a bare bones wrapper around the OpenAI API, and not much else.

[0] https://github.com/Deeptechia/geppetto/blob/main/geppetto/op...

Look at the video please. We are using it at work. For example, we have a #learning-and-teaching Slack channel when the team members ask and answer questions. Now, you can ask questions to @geppetto which makes all the discussion more appealing and everybody in the channel can continue the thread. This includes generating images.

Also, have you look at the size and quality of the code? It is enough small so that other people can fork and play with it without requiring a lot of knowledge.

One of the code reviewers is a top Python community participant though.

I did watch the video.

> which makes all the discussion more appealing

I have never experienced AI making anything more appealing. YMMV. I also have no need to generate images.

> have you look at the size and quality of the code? It is enough small

I agree it is a very small code base, in that it does basically nothing. Not sure how I'm supposed to view this as a positive. As far as quality, it looks like pretty much all the other python code I've seen.

> One of the code reviewers is a top Python community participant though.

Cool.

It seems you don't need Geppetto. Which is fine.

We need it and for several reasons (e.g. security) we write it from scratch.

The use case for integrating Slack with ChatGPT is well known, so it is useful for several organizations. Enough.

I have actually built a tool very similar, slack <-> openai interface.

Except it does things like augment the input prompts, and can perform additional action based on the outputs.

So no, I don't have a need for something as simple as a ChatGPT pass through.

You might get a better reaction if you weren't so defensive over a sub 500 LOC project.

The sub 500 LOC is a positive thing. If someone is looking for code to fork, learn and/or copy 500 is ideal instead of knowing a lot of details of more complex piece of code.

I receive a good reaction though.

> makes all the discussion more appealing

Yuk.

> One of the code reviewers is a top Python community participant though.

Double yuk.

Something to add?

Ahaha, the video is a GIF one can't fast-forward through, at least it simulates in real time the long wait for the generated image. I've seen enough marketing stuff that I'd like to tell you, that long wait in your advertisement will bore the hell out of people.

Ahaha, the video (on the github readme) is a GIF one can't fast-forward through, at least it simulates in real time the long wait for the generated image (and on your website it's 20 seconds, 33% of the whole video!). I've seen enough marketing stuff that I'd like to tell you, that long wait in your advertisement will bore the hell out of people.

Simplicity doesn't mean lack of value. Evaluate on value.

I was responding to the question in the comment

> How do you improve upon/customize their models for your use cases?

It does not do this.

Geppetto is useful for us internally, we think others will also find it useful. Geppetto is not the first integration of ChatGPT with Slack, there are several and it seems like we are not the only ones finding it useful.

If you are looking to an AI/AGI/ML innovation, this is not what Geppetto is. It is clear from the beginning.

BTW, all this does not imply we are not working on the ML field in cybersecurity static analysis though.

> If you are looking to an AI/AGI/ML innovation, this is not what Geppetto is. It is clear from the beginning

I think part of the confusion, and why it isn't clear, is that releasing an "A.I. assistant" implies that you've put work into the A.I. or assistant aspects of it. The A.I. assistants in this case seem to be ChatGPT and DALL-E, and this seems to be a connector between existing A.I. assistants and Slack.

Adding to the confusion is the human-sounding name, which makes it seem like an A.I. assistant, rather than an integration.

As an aside, show H.N. is about being open and collaborative, and your replies to several people on this thread seem quite secretive and adversarial. Would you consider sharing more information, rather than less? Let us in :)

From what I can see the only thing it does above and beyond Slack's own integration is generate images. To me that's the most low-value part of the value proposition.

https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/slack-news-dreamforc...

OpenAI also has a teams product:

https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-team

I mean, I understand, it's an internal tool and all, you're not building a business here, out of this tool, but I'm going to guess that you end up ripping this out within months as Slack invests big bucks into integrating AI into their platform.

Has no value considering that Salesforce/Slack already built it into Slack.

https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/slack-news-dreamforc...

OpenAI also has a teams product that allows collaboration in a team:

https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-team

A little wrapper like this is going to get eclipsed fast.

Are they open source?

Does that matter? Some open source code that wraps a proprietary service and presents it to another proprietary service is basically entirely proprietary anyway.

Clearly yes, you can modify our software to use Ollama and will save you hours of work. Full non-proprietary.

Currently "Deeptechia" is working behind the scenes and have not make it public its work. It is not a general software consultancy business. It is a conglomerate that connects different companies that existed for more than 20 years. This includes research, development, and security auditing. It also includes specific products. You can check my profile for more information.

Does deeptechia indeed have 50-200 employees (non-contractors) on payroll?

Does deeptechia indeed develop products, rather then consulting? If so, what are they?

Does deeptechia indeed count Microsoft, Raytheon, USAF, and 500+ other organizations among the consumers of their products?

Since deeptechia is "revealing" themselves as of today, can they now come out from behind the scenes and make public their products? Why do they want people to contact them if their products are secret? How do we know their product offerings are right for us if they are secret?

We launched yesterday Geppetto. We did that for sharing it to the community because it is being useful for us.

Deeptechia was not formally launched. All what you read is true. Again, you can check my profile for more information and not only narrow to DT.

This thing reeks of web3 and crypto style marketing. Claims such as “it is used by teams”, “we already have many users” and claims of “large” companies among their sponsors are dubious at best. Common among ai companies these days.

Where are these claims?

Your company website has a lot of typos.

Thank you, it was a quick launch. Please feel free to send it through the contact form.

on the off chance it is relevant to anyone's legal requirements, it seems the project was relicensed about the time they rebranded/forked/whatever so if you prefer the MIT version over wiring AGPLv3 to your Slack, then that's available https://github.com/CoinFabrik/geppetto/commit/c1f1224cc4827d...

We are flexible, so if someone has any inquiry about the licensing we can adapt to different needs.

This is cool! Do you have any plans to add open source capability, maybe through something like LangChain?

We have lots of compute, but no OpenAI api haha

For sure, one of the points of doing Geppetto was to speed up the link between Slack and LLMs or other interfaces.

I am sure that everyone capable can do a similar project but the concern is that developers and organizations want to lower the learning curve.

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