« BackShow HN: Map with an LLMgodview.aiSubmitted by ata_aman a day ago
  • CTDOCodebases 20 hours ago

    Not that good IMHO.

    I asked it:

    "Show me all the train yards in New York."

    It only identified seven of them when there are many more:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Subway_y...

    Then when I tried to copy and past my prompt from the history it did not display the full prompt and had no option to copy it to the clipboard.

    • Sparkyte 19 hours ago

      I think it is the novelty of the idea of what an LLM can do that is important. I suppose accuracy can be improved over time. Compared to using gmaps to search places, it seems to be a bit better.

      • shadowerm 15 hours ago

        Sounds like the current zeitgeist.

        Seems like it should be useful beyond demos but we aren't sure what those use cases would be. Just need to wait for AGI and then..

        I have actually spent about 20 minutes now and I can't think anything worth asking the model in this context.

    • faebi 18 hours ago

      Awesome, I really like it, but you must add the "© OpenStreetMap Contributors" Trademark somewhere on the map. It's usually on the bottom right.

      • hyperknot 16 hours ago

        Absolutely! It's actually shown by default, OP shouldn't be turning it off.

        Also, if you run out of free Mapbox credits, feel free to change the basemap to openfreemap.org (I'm the creator).

        • ata_aman 15 hours ago

          Totally, it was old internal code so I think I had it removed then. I have updated it. Changing to openfreemap.org this weekend, I love your work.

      • onebitwise 17 hours ago

        Really nice idea!

        Sadly in my prompt it replies with absolutely invented data. Same prompt, three times gives 3-4 different results, that era simply not true.

        Prompt: show me the best glass factories in valsassina, italy. (there are no glass factories, so it suggest glass worker that contains wrong coordinates and invented names)

        • bloomingkales 20 hours ago

          What are your api costs from publicly serving this if you don’t mind sharing (especially from HN traffic)?

          I have some ideas I’d like to release, but LLM api pricing and sudden traffic from sites like this one seem scary.

          • codetrotter 20 hours ago

            Prerecord video demos of it, and have your site swap out the live demo with the pre-recorded videos after $x amount of money has been spent by visitors.

            • ata_aman 15 hours ago

              Not too bad, I had some gas in the tank from an old project sitting on my API account so it used up all of it. Expect in the few hundred dollars.

              I'm considering switching to DeepSeek since it's way cheaper. I'll swap once I'm done testing out the API. You can use your own hosted LLM but it's not worth it at this moment.

              • bloomingkales 12 hours ago

                Woah, a few hundred just to demo the thing. How could you keep this afloat?

                That’s the tricky part about building LLM apps. I’d love to hear more from Indie devs because money is absolutely a bottle neck here.

                For fun:

                You don’t need an LLM for some of your calls I think. “Where is the Eiffel Tower”, Eiffel Tower is a NER that small NLP libraries can extract. Then it’s a simple long/lat lookup. You might be able to re-route 20% of your calls to a no-cost backend call.

                • ata_aman 12 hours ago

                  never had any thought on monetizing this at all so maybe offer pro features down the line? idk I'm used to just putting stuff out there for people to try out. Could be spent on worse things all things considered haha

              • jll29 17 hours ago

                You could use CPU inference on a smaller local model (either always or after a demo budget is spent).

                Don't forget to put up a "donate" button.

                • Jabrov 17 hours ago

                  That sounds like a bad idea to me.

                  CPU inference for LLMs takes forever (you'll get like 1tk/s on CPU) and limits you significantly in terms of model size/quality. You'll lock up all of your cores to provide service for a single user at a snail's pace.

                  I don't think it should even be considered as an option

                  • underlines 17 hours ago

                    llama 3.2 3b, qwen2.5 3B quantized to 4bit runs CPU inference quite fast. You can get a beefier VM and still save a ton of money. Depending on the context token length of this soluion, it's either fast or slow. If it's below 1024 tokens per request, you get around 10 sec delay, if you are at around 128 tokens I guess you would be somewhere at 1 sec for time to first token...

              • dr_dshiv 19 hours ago

                LLMs are notoriously terrible at spatial thinking — if you can solve that with RAG and a database of actual locations, that’s promising. Or was there another approach?

                • ata_aman 15 hours ago

                  Easiest might be to cross check with some location APIs but it might get expensive. RAG can be a better long term solution though.

                • gunalx 19 hours ago

                  I asked it "show me cityname" and it did not find it. First asking for country did not help at all either.

                  • throwaway_ocr 16 hours ago

                    I tried "show me Portugal" and it showed me Madeira, which is an island that is indeed part of Portugal, but I was expecting it to go for the mainland.

                    Repeating the prompt alternates between Madeira and Açores which is again, technically correct, but in this case not the best kind of correct.

                    • a10c 20 hours ago

                      I asked it to find me soccer fields in <insert my suburb> and it showed me results but all 5 of them were misplaced. One of the fields was shown where a train station is, there are no parks nearby.

                      • stavros 17 hours ago

                        Same for my question of bars in Thessaloniki, it found 5 in the whole city and the locations were off by km. I fear that we're missing the point, though, because the good bit here isn't "it can do what Google Maps can do", but we aren't asking the right questions to show that off.

                      • devbrianwhite 9 hours ago

                        Really cool idea and fast response times, nice job! I noticed after a few searches the results seem to get less accurate, however. Pins dropping in the ocean, etc.

                        • ata_aman 8 hours ago

                          Thanks! I might have to hard reset the context on each request. Noticed it too.

                        • kgeist 21 hours ago

                          It seems you can make it hang if you input something that triggers the LLM's guardrails. For example, I entered 'where they sell drugs,' and the API endpoint hung every time I submitted it. However, on a few occasions, it returned a response immediately (with an error in the API response). I suspect there are too many retries if the structured JSON output is not formatted correctly when the guardrails are activated

                          • kiddz 17 hours ago

                            Nice job. . . I looked for kite boarding spots in Puerto Rico and everything showed up. I really like the clean UI too.

                            • Sparkyte 19 hours ago

                              This is kinda neat and far more intuitive than using google maps search. Although I wonder how accurate it is with the data points.

                              • Sparkyte 19 hours ago

                                aaaand I broke it. It is now hallucinating phantom locations.

                                • als0 17 hours ago

                                  After two queries it became completely dysfunctional.

                              • KTibow 8 hours ago

                                This has some meme potential, it succeeded at "show me the OpenAI data centers"

                                • ata_aman 7 hours ago

                                  No way haha I was actually slightly concerned when I published it might have some OPSEC issues for some categories.

                                • sberens 21 hours ago

                                  This is really cool! Though for some reason the lat/long coordinates of places are completely off, despite the addresses being correct.

                                  I searched "show me 5 parks in SF", and all 5 were in the wrong spot. For example:

                                  Lafayette Park Lafayette & Gough St, San Francisco, CA 94109 Latitude: 37.7955 Longitutde: -122.4668

                                  • themanmaran a day ago

                                    This is a really great interface! Tried "wooded hiking trails near [my address]" and got exactly what I was looking for.

                                    Then threw in some common google maps searches and got fun results.

                                    "airport" => LAX

                                    "restaurant" => The Clove Club in London

                                    "coffee shop" => Philz in SF

                                    It doesn't seem to take into account the current map location, so I wonder how the randomness works.

                                    • ata_aman a day ago

                                      That's awesome! I didn't even think about current location, I'll add it to the roadmap.

                                      I did notice randomness too, going on a limb to say it's standard LLM randomness.

                                    • 01jonny01 15 hours ago

                                      This is cool. Few suggestions:

                                      Use local storage to save the search history.

                                      The i icon does nothing.

                                      Have a open external window icon next to location/landmark title that searches Google for that location

                                      • kiney 16 hours ago

                                        nice idea, but it fails completely for me.

                                        e.g. "show me all IT companies in <suburb where I live>" should show my company (and only my company) - but it shows two other companies that aren't actually in the same city and draws the POI on a sugar beet field near <suburb>

                                        Is the LLM perhaps only trained on english language geo data?

                                        • ata_aman a day ago

                                          Not sure why this got nuked from the front-page all of a sudden but thanks everyone for checking it out. I'll be sure to incorporate the features mentioned here.

                                        • sr-latch a day ago

                                          Does it have internet access? Looks like a very convenient interface for looking for hotels, planning travels

                                          • ata_aman a day ago

                                            It does, I can certainly add it. I made it because I'm looking to open a new location for a brick and mortar business so I needed a way to look at the competitive landscape, high-level demographics etc...

                                            It would be cool for planning travels! I'll look into it.

                                          • koopuluri 18 hours ago

                                            awesome. i can see future iterations of this becoming really useful.

                                            e.g. "i'm traveling to Tokyo this summer, show me good areas to live in if i want to run 10k every day through nature, as well as work out of highly rated cafes.".

                                            i want to see good areas highlighted on the map. and even better would be integrating with Airbnb / Yelp / Google business ratings, etc. to show places i can rent in those areas.

                                            another e.g. "best times to land in XYZ city if i want to avoid traffic getting to ABC". - to check this now i have to toggle some dropdowns in Google maps. natural language is a much better "interface" for most of what i want to do with maps.

                                            • koopuluri 18 hours ago

                                              also, "Godview" reminds me of that internal map that Uber had with realtime activity. inspiration?

                                              • ata_aman 15 hours ago

                                                Just re-used a domain name, fyi "godview" is not exclusive to Uber, it's used mostly for internal tools with super-admin privileges. I'm not 100% certain if it comes from Uber originally because I remember using it internally in early 2010s before the Uber incident.

                                                • koopuluri 11 hours ago

                                                  gotcha. regardless, awesome project. all the best!

                                            • purple-leafy 19 hours ago

                                              doesn't work, as in, no response at all and full of console errors

                                              • zknowledge a day ago

                                                This is so well done. Very interested in new UIs with LLMs. Great work.

                                                How's it work under the hood?

                                                • ata_aman a day ago

                                                  thanks! very simple map + llm structured output

                                                  • bhl 20 hours ago

                                                    Any grounding with google maps or mapbox, etc?

                                                • sztanko a day ago

                                                  How does it work? Translating free text to overpass? Looks very promising!

                                                  • notmysql_ a day ago

                                                    Thats a good project idea(automatic overpass query generation), I might make it over the weekend

                                                    • ata_aman a day ago

                                                      JSON structured output lat/long pretty much. Then just plot the coordinates.

                                                    • faebi 18 hours ago

                                                      Are you on X? Would love to give a follow. I love OSM projects.

                                                    • Quizzical4230 20 hours ago

                                                      Really cool project!

                                                      • Krasnol 19 hours ago

                                                        It seems you are using OSM data, could you please add the proper attribution to it?

                                                        Here is a guide: https://osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Attribution_Guideline...

                                                        • 3willows a day ago

                                                          "home of the pope" and "home of mozart" returned good results, but not "home of kant" or "home of newton".