[ichiwells]

One of apple’s biggest missed with “AI” in my opinion, is not building a universal search.

For all the hype LLM generation gets, I think the rise of LLM-backed “semantic” embedding search does not get enough attention. It’s used in RAG (which inherits the hallucinatory problems), but seems underutilized elsewhere.

The worst (and coincidentally/paradoxically I use the most) searches I’ve seen is Gmail and Dropbox, both of which cannot find emails or files that I know exist, even if using the exact email subject and file name keywords.

Apple could arguably solve this with a universal search SDK, and I’d value this far more than yet-another-summarize-this-paragraph tool.

[brulard]

I have this same issue with gmail. I can not find e-mails by an exact word from text or subject. It is there, but search would not show it. I don't understand how a number one email provider can fail at that.

[squid_ca]

Or, say, a number one search provider ;)

[fragmede]

and search provider! Of all the companies in the world, why is Gmail search just not better?

[krackers]

For this to happen they'd have to actually pay attention to spotlight and the quicklook/spotlight plugin ecosystem they abandoned. There's lots of obvious ways to combine LLMs with macOS' unique software advantages (applescript, bundle extensibility) but they have spent years systematically burning those bridges. I don't think they'll be able to swallow their pride and walk everything back.