eambutu

Great question. We are actually surprised more than anything that existing products aren't better. Other companies' algo work DID get disrupted by reasoning models, because newer models don't care about what the top 3 search results are, they're really great at reading hundreds of documents and picking up signal from noise.

I can't speculate exactly on the work that other companies have done, but my guess is we were way more focused on the type of questions people actually ask to each other. We know there's still a lot more you can do to continue to improve it, and so it's up to other folks if they do it too.

Lastly, a few ways we want to be distinguished from all the other offerings are: 1) super easy to setup, 2.) very developer friendly

2019-2020: We prototyped lots of telepresence ideas, our work shown here: https://siemprecollective.com/

2020-2022: We built https://gather.town, which during COVID blew up across every use-case possible: conferences, birthday parties, weddings, universities. It was a good business during COVID but eventually started to shrink.

2022-2025: We built Gather for remote workers, which was a long grind into in Audio/Video, performance, and making a game-interface that was good for work but replicated the parts of in-person work people enjoyed. It's a decent business, but didn't match our ambitions with how we wanted to change work for the better.

2025+: We have lots of ideas for how we can make work a lot better with AI. The general theme is, "can we make work as fun as a video game?" Idea being: video games are super similar to work at its core, and AI can both 1.) dramatically change how people need to spend their days, and 2.) help you "game design" someone's work day.

The Grapevine system is the first tablestakes layer people need to have for us to build the products we're excited about. Surprisingly, "company context" was not as good as we thought despite it being such an obvious, big business opportunity. So while I agree it's "basic," it does seem necessary, and is also not the full-scale of what we want to achieve still :)

Ah to be clear, the team is staffed well enough on Gather that the experience will be equal, if not better, than what you've been using already. So we haven't been telling customers to migrate (and unfortunately, there aren't many good alternative products right now).

Yep, the other commenter is right--85% is helpful AND accurate. I'd love for you to give it a try and see if 85% is not good enough though. There's always more to push on quality and the more real feedback we get the better we can prioritize what people need.

Yep, makes a lot of sense. We architected our system to be easy to self-host & open-source in the future for this very reason, though we decided to launch with hosted because it's easier to improve and iterate.

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.

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.

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%+)

Thanks for using it! Any feedback on what could be made better? And did you guys try any of the alternatives before using Grapevine?

Fortunately, Grapevine is just the name of our system, we let people white-label their Slack bot when they actually set it up :)

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.

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.

tl;dr, We built an internal GPT that connects to all your data sources (Slack, Notion, Gdrive, codebase, etc.) and it works remarkably well. Don’t take our word for it though, you can get set up in under 30 minutes, for free, at https://getgrapevine.ai

Like many of you, we were interested in a ChatGPT that fully understands your company. We tried all the existing tools (including expensive enterprise ones), but while they were good at answering “what is X team’s Q4 goal,” they weren’t good at the day-to-day questions that actually blocked people.

So, our founders and early engineers created a set of 100+ representative questions, from hard technical questions to company-specific knowledge questions. At first, the state-of-the-art “enterprise search” products were getting about 50% of them correct, and our in-house system was getting 35%. But as we solved details in data processing, search algorithm, and more, we eventually achieved 85%. (For reference, the best human score our founders got was 70%)

It’s changed the way we work: popular engineering channels that have 5+ questions / day are fully answered proactively by AI, and people across departments go to the bot first for bug reports, incidents, and support tickets. Our 15+ beta customers have been consistently surprised by the quality of answers too.

We’d love for everyone to try it out themselves! We put a lot of effort into making it easy to set up (less than 30 min) and the first month is free. Grapevine is built with our company’s SOC 2 Type II standards and if it doesn’t work out, it’s super easy to delete your data.

Lastly: for the AI-native companies. We started down this path because we saw it as a prerequisite for all the interesting agents we wanted to build for ourselves. Expect additional launches very soon on how to build on top of Grapevine, and a few cool applications of our own!

Hey Cory! CEO of Gather.Town here. Connection issues are always our top priority, and at this point, we're chasing down and squashing the last 1% of bugs. If you run into this in the future, reporting a bug will help us solve the issue! (Grape icon > send feedback/bug)

As for the other issue, active speaker detection is on our near-term roadmap. It's become more pressing for us too, as our team has grown and no longer fits in one page :P

Thanks for the feedback!

As another commenter mentioned, we support this already! It was one of the first features we built, because our first paid customers were academic conferences. You can check it out here: https://gather.town/app/p4B9DUqB8NAazd3t/DemoConference

One of the most important features here for work is actually explicitly not doing always-on camera/mic. We have a setting that makes it so that when you're not looking at the tab, no one can see/hear you, but other people can come up to you and "tap on your shoulder". If you do decide to engage with them, it's super frictionless.

Yup! Feel free to email us at hello@gather.town , and provide these details, and we'll figure something out.

Thanks for the really thoughtful feedback. I definitely hear this, and I think it would be crazy for us to think that we can build a single tool that will be useful across all ranges of team dynamics and culture.

FWIW, just like how companies can have different cultures around their physical spaces, they could have different practices/expectations set around the virtual space. For example, if there is now an expectation for people to be in the Gather office all the time, that seems like an issue with the company (and you could expect them to do other unpleasant things like, expect you to respond to Slack messages at 10 PM).

Another q would be: under the current paradigm, are you enjoying work from home more than physical offices? One of our goals here is to replicate the physical ones, so maybe this is just not directionally correct for you.

I also admit that I haven't had any of the particular experiences mention, so maybe I'm talking out of my sphere of knowledge here.

I see! I think another angle, is to first create a virtual analog of a workplace, but then since it's virtual, it's super flexible and easy to experiment with. I think there's only so far you can get with these questions, off reasoning alone.

Another example of a project I worked on, which was similar, was this VR office: https://siemprecollective.com/vr.html . We basically made a one-to-one mapping of our physical office in VR, and the idea was after we had that, we could play around and tweak things very easily. And actually being able to TRY these new experiments was the whole point.

Good question. We have made a particular point of not involving traditional VC, at least not at this current moment (and besides YC). We're currently growing off of revenue, and had raised a small amount of money from angels only.

Oh man, thanks for pointing this out. I feel like we got an email once every month asking about something p2p, and was always confused why people kept getting this impression.

We have changed some UI issues with screenshare, and worked a ton on stability, so it might be worth another try! Thanks for the feedback too--it's very helpful for us to know where we might be losing people.

You can join Gather spaces from the phone browser, though it is missing features (most notably, you can't share your own video for performance reasons)

We posted an early prototype of this, https://theonline.town, back in March (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22818300). As others have mentioned though, there are a ton of people building similar things.

We're thinking of doing something like this for our team, so people can drink virtual water next to the virtual water cooler. Or, you could go to the bar and buy a drink for a friend!

All the avatars and assets are original, though I concede that there is an avatar that looks like the pokemon trainer (and you're not the only one who's pointed this out :P)

Thanks! We've been working very hard, and it's come a long way since then :)

Thanks so much! Curious why you think it would be nearly impossible to get your team on it?

Was there a reason that, in this case, you couldn't all walk closer to each other? We additionally have "private spaces" you can set up so that everyone in that area can see/hear each other: https://gather.town/features#feature-private-spaces . People often use this so that they can sit down on chairs and talk to only the other people at the table.

Thanks! I remember you reaching out in the early days of Online Town, good to see you again here!