nowfound

AI · May 14, 2023

WhyBot, making GPT-4 question itself

Hi HN — we’re John and Vish! We built WhyBot, a tool to help you deeply explore a question or topic. You ask a question, and WhyBot responds by building an ever-expanding knowledge graph. It does this by recursively generating answers and follow-up questions. You can change its persona to change the flavor of the generations (try toddler mode!). We originally built this for the AngelList Agent Hackathon (https://twitter.com/AqeelMeetsWorld/status/16502799744050421...) and got a lot of interest from folks asking to play around with it. So we thought it’d be fun to…

WhyBot, making GPT-4 question itself launched on May 14, 2023 with 77 votes, #1,018 of 4,910 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.

In plain words

WhyBot is a tool for exploring questions and topics in depth by generating expanding knowledge graphs. Users input a question, and the tool recursively produces answers and follow-up questions to build comprehensive understanding. The tool allows users to adjust its persona, including a toddler mode, to vary the style of responses. It is intended for anyone seeking deeper exploration of subjects through interactive questioning and is currently a work in progress with planned features including saving, sharing, and code execution capabilities.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN — we’re John and Vish! We built WhyBot, a tool to help you deeply explore a question or topic. You ask a question, and WhyBot responds by building an ever-expanding knowledge graph. It does this by recursively generating answers and follow-up questions. You can change its persona to change the flavor of the…

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