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    You.com is an AI-powered productivity engine that is transforming the way people work thanks to advanced AI assistance. You.com features the latest large language models (LLMs), ensuring users always have access to the most up-to-date and powerful AI models. The partnership with Pinecone has been instrumental in building you.com's index of the web, combining vector-based methods with traditional search-based approaches for hybrid search.

    Industry

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    AI Assistant

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    GCP

    Hundreds of Millions

    Vectors

    ~9 engineering years

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    You.com is an AI-powered productivity engine that is transforming the way people work thanks to advanced AI assistance. Founded by AI research scientists Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, you.com has evolved from an AI search engine to a comprehensive AI productivity engine that helps millions of knowledge workers with fast and accurate research and analysis, complex problem-solving, content creation, and more.

    You.com features the latest large language models (LLMs), ensuring users always have access to the most up-to-date and powerful AI models. The you.com team quickly integrates new models, often on the same day they are released. You.com adds its live web access and other AI innovations to these models, allowing them to generate responses with up-to-date information and citations. You.com applies the best model to a user’s query.

    A standout feature of you.com is its Custom Assistants. Users can take one of the top AI models, give it specific instructions, and add an internet connection or personalization. This means users can create tailored AI experiences, such as an assistant to prepare for a specific job interview or to provide SEO content without repetitive prompting. What’s more, these Custom Assistants can be shared with others.

    Additionally, you.com offers its own specialized AI Assistants, such as the Research Assistant that generates comprehensive articles with inline images, and extensive citations that take users to the exact sentence it cites from the source. The Genius Assistant can solve multi-step complex problems with a conversational prompt. No need to put in the perfect equation or formula. Just explain what you want to accomplish in natural language, and it will use Python code and chain-of-thought reasoning to solve the problem precisely.

    Founding Story

    You.com was founded by AI research scientists, Richard Socher and Bryan McCann. Richard was previously the Chief Scientist at Salesforce and is the fourth most-cited researcher in Natural Language Processing (NLP) with over 185,000 citations. Bryan was a lead research scientist at Salesforce Research specializing in deep learning and NLP.

    Since first connecting in the summer of 2013, Richard and Bryan’s collaborative research over the years has had significant implications for the field of NLP. While at Salesforce, they invented contextualized word vectors, which led to the groundbreaking paradigm of transfer learning in NLP and some of the largest improvements in search since Google started. They also invented prompt engineering in their DecaNLP paper that “demonstrated it was possible to train a single model to infer and perform many different tasks," according to the creators of GPT at OpenAI.

    Richard and Bryan started you.com in 2020. Salesforce’s CEO Marc Benioff led their initial funding round and handed them the you.com domain that he had held on to for two decades. At the time, the pair saw an inflection point in AI and believed that the highest impact application of NLP was search. Billions of questions were being answered every day with a list of links, cluttered with ads and SEO content. They saw an opportunity to reinvent the gateway to everyone’s online journey. They built you.com to give useful, comprehensive responses to complex queries.

    From a AI-Powered Search to a ‘Productivity Engine’

    While you.com's journey began as a search engine, it was always about helping users achieve more by augmenting their abilities. In 2021, it was the first to integrate large language models (LLMs) into a search context, starting with code generation and soon after text and AI image generation. In December 2022, you.com achieved another milestone by becoming the first to connect an LLM to live web access, providing users with up-to-date and verifiable responses through citations. Today, you.com has evolved into a productivity engine. It assists users in solving complex problems, in-depth research, sparking creativity, and boosting daily productivity.

    One of the biggest challenges businesses face when deploying AI in the workplace and in their products is the risk of inaccuracy. It’s difficult to make LLMs accurate at scale. This is why you.com has focused on making LLMs more trustworthy. It’s even built an entire AI operating system that’s model agnostic that can make LLMs more accurate. It continually benchmarks for accuracy.

    You.com's innovative approach to search extends beyond its user-facing platform and into its APIs. Businesses and developers can incorporate the you.com’s real-time web access into their own projects. The API is powered by You.com's proprietary web index, which has been specifically designed for LLMs to consume. Unlike traditional search engines like Google or Bing that provide short snippets of information, you.com's web index offers extensive snippets that are too lengthy for humans to process effectively but are perfect for LLMs. This approach allows LLMs to identify the most relevant information and generate accurate, comprehensive answers to user queries.

    By rethinking search at every stage of its development—from the initial search engine to the productivity engine and even the API—You.com has consistently pushed the boundaries of what is possible with AI-powered information retrieval.

    From Retrieval to Action with Pinecone

    You.com needed a solution to enhance semantic search capabilities and power its ability to deliver tailored and meaningful results to its users. You.com selected Pinecone as its vector database solution to enable the most accurate and efficient retrieval augmented generation (RAG). The partnership with Pinecone has been instrumental in building you.com's index of the web, combining vector-based methods with traditional search-based approaches for hybrid search.

    The team stores hundreds of millions of vectors representing diverse domains in Pinecone. Using namespaces within an index allows the team to take a targeted approach, focusing on specific domains and delivering high-quality information to users. For example, you.com can craft specific namespaces for distinct verticals, such as news, e-commerce, or developer intents, tailoring the AI assistant's responses to the unique requirements of each domain. By filtering with metadata associated with vectors, the AI assistant can quickly narrow down relevant information, optimizing the search experience for users. This not only ensures faster response times but also allows you.com to deliver highly accurate and context-aware answers.

    "Pinecone serves as a key component in our workflow, allowing us to take a targeted approach and deliver high-quality information to users” - Saahil Jain, Engineering Manager and Head of AI, you.com

    Here is an example workflow for a given vertical domain search:

    • Query: A user wants to learn the recent advancements in e-commerce. Then, the user searches You.com about “advancements in e-commerce” and initiates a query.
    • Processing: You.com's AI assistant interprets the user's query. The AI assistant converts the user's query into a vector embedding, capturing the nuanced semantics of the query. The AI assistant also uses metadata filtering and namespace to refine the search within the specific domain of e-commerce, ensuring the results are precisely tailored to the user's interests.
    • Contextual Results: The user receives search results that not only include articles on e-commerce but also provide context, summaries, and potentially actionable insights.
    • Interactive User Experience: Beyond delivering results, the AI assistant engages in a conversational manner. It can offer additional information, answer follow-up questions, or even execute tasks based on the user's original intent.

    Expanding Information Access with AI innovation

    You.com is excelling in delivering more accurate, context-aware, and personalized results while offering users a richer and more interactive search experience compared to conventional search engines. Pinecone supports you.com with a solution that is:

    • Highly scalable: Pinecone enables you.com to handle hundreds of millions of vectors simultaneously, acting as a long-term memory needed for scalability and contextual enrichment to their dataset.
    • Easiest to use: Leveraging a fully-managed solution like Pinecone empowers you.com to focus on building the next generation of web search without the complexities of data infrastructure maintenance.
    • Optimizing resources: Pinecone not only helped streamline operations but has also saved valuable engineering resources, equivalent to ~9 engineering years, allowing the team to focus on pushing the boundaries of conversational AI and search technology.

    "If I wanted to build a vector technology in house, I probably would have hired 3 to 4 engineers and they would have been working on it for the last 3 years. Instead, I use Pinecone and I had roughly one engineer doing so." - Bryan McCann, CTO & Co-Founder, you.com

    You.com has developed an AI-powered productivity engine with search capabilities that has been well-received in the market. As they continue to push the boundaries of information access, the team plans to enhance the AI assistant's capabilities and extend their expertise to other companies through B2B offerings. Building upon the success with Pinecone in optimizing semantic search and providing context-aware results, the team sees opportunities to explore other use cases using vector technology.

    As Bryan shares, "our journey doesn't end with redefining information access; it's an ongoing commitment to providing users with ever-improving, personalized, and context-aware experiences."

    “No other vector database matches Pinecone's scalability and production readiness. We are excited to explore how Pinecone serverless will support the growth of our product capabilities.” - Bryan McCann, CTO & Co-Founder, you.com
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