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Alex, have you played with ChatPDF yet?

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I've seen more than a few apps on this same line. Which exactly are you talking about?

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https://www.chatpdf.com/

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Oh yeah looks like it's really full featured. In the bottom they're doing something very similar to what I did here but of course the devil is in the details, and adding a good UX layer on top makes a world of difference.

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Nice, I was curious as to whether you solved some of the underlying problems a little differently. I don't know any of the specifics under the hood, but I was using ChatPDF for a while there, especially in the earlier days of LLMs.

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I don't think, I haven't done anything especially innovative here, this is the barebones implementation that everyone doing LLMs plus retrieval is using. It can improved a lot!

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Well, you made this independently and from scratch! That is bad ass. Maybe some of the ideas/features from the existing apps can be used to improve this one, and it can become like best in class... but I also have a feeling the point is to make stuff, not to use stuff (although the utility part is a very nice bonus).

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Oh yeah for me this is a learning exercise, plus I did this app for an upcoming lecture in my college AI class, so I'm just reusing that work.

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Man, you get to make some really cool toys.

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Haha yeah that's the upside of being a college professor. The downside is the salary of course.

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The upside of spending 3 hours a day here on Substack (trying to be kind to myself with that lowball estimate) is interactions like these, and thinking with a group of people every day.

The down side, you probably already know!

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