Launch HN: Type (YC W23) – AI-powered document editor
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!
239 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadI was curious, is there any difference you noticed for your use case with GPT vs Claude?
Claude seems to be especially strong with creative writing and writing in a wider breadth of styles, which ends up being really important.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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=...
Genuinely curious how this all pans out, it is an exciting time!
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.
This is almost certainly operating off of <=gpt3.5-turbo.
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.
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 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.
Thus, because the executives want Altman to succeed (to presumably advance their own career) and because they're in charge of YC, which is an investor in openai, they have every incentive in funding startups that then use OpenAI as the main platform.
That's not how YC or VC works.
Rather, YC is banking that some of the use cases get people hooked, thus causing vendor lock in, to these new apps, which end up benefiting YC both by benefitting the companies they're funding as well as benefitting open ai.
I don't share the sentiment that companies that are 'just' layers over OpenAI are incapable of building moats.
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.
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
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.
> 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!
We'll all be locked in to walled gardens (figuratively) since anything out on the wild/open/unverified internet will just be fake. This is what could rescue traditional media if they play their cards right. Providing genuine content by authenticated and verified-human authors.
"fake emotions"
"fake ideas"
"fake attractions"
"fake memes"
"fake dreams"
I imagine the Luddites were themselves angry about fake work and fake souls. We did okay though.
Humans will cope [1]. We are resilient as fuck. We once had to fend off lions and bacterial infections and getting throttled in the night. Now we worry about lattes, stock prices, and political hullabaloo. We'll be fine.
[1] (Not just cope. I'm willing to bet that it'll be better than everything that came before.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
Hahaha haha no
Their hallucinations are worse than ChatGPT's
0: https://chinesememe.substack.com/p/learning-a-chinese-song-w...
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.
Love the product demo/UI
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.
Are you sure about this?
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”.
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?
I closed the browser tab and haven't gone back since.
For example, the other day I asked it something about the Flask codebase, and it found the relevant part of the codebase immediately. When I asked it about the behavior of the code, it wasn't always correct, but it still showed me the relevant code so I could read it way faster than I would have found it myself.
Initially my impression of ChatGPT was the same as yours - I asked it some questions in a specialized domain I know well, and when it was wrong I decided ChatGPT is useless. But after enough people told me they find it useful, I took another look and tried finding more applications. And since then I've been impressed by what it can do.
Regarding certain medical conditions I've asked to list the studies and explain them, it does that pretty well.
But just as talking with a human, or with googling info on a website, or with Stackoverflow, Im always assuming I need to double check it.
When do we get AI Hunter Thompson?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Notion (and others) is undeniably an incumbent that as you say can’t be hand waved away. With that said we are already getting feedback from paying customers that feel we’re better at some things, including a snappier editing experience and a more natural way to interact with the AI portion. I also think our chat integrates in a way that sets us apart.
If you really think you are in the target audience I would encourage you to give it a chance. We’re very open to feedback and if there’s anything specific that you think other products are doing better, we want to address it.
When I read the description I immediately thought of Ben Evans talking about how what happens when your entire company is rendered into a feature by an encumbant [0] (FWIW I disagree with his attack on antitrust).
So, how are you going to make sure Type survives Microsoft adding ChatGPT to Word, or Substack offering something similar, etc.
[0] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/12/21/google-bu...
You just contradicted yourself. You said you are the target market and then immediately described why you are not the target market right now.
If you are not an early adopter of this thing, or if it doesn't have an immediate application for you, then you are not the target market. Whether you like it or not and whether the project owners know it or not.
When you consider it a viable alternative to solve your needs, then you will be their target audience.
Then in a few years Apple will do what it does and step in to make billions off of a nearly mature technology.
In general, if you want guaranteed success this is the wrong industry for you. Sometimes you've just got to accept the risk.
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)