Apple's AI isn't a letdown. AI is the letdown

Re:Apple's AI isn't a letdown. AI is the letdown by ichiwells on Saturday March 29, 2025 @06:00PM (#43519111)

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.

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Re:Apple's AI isn't a letdown. AI is the letdown by brulard on Saturday March 29, 2025 @06:27PM (#43519278)

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.

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Re:Apple's AI isn't a letdown. AI is the letdown by squid_ca on Saturday March 29, 2025 @06:49PM (#43519437)

Or, say, a number one search provider ;)

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Re:Apple's AI isn't a letdown. AI is the letdown by fragmede on Saturday March 29, 2025 @06:53PM (#43519464)

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

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Re:Apple's AI isn't a letdown. AI is the letdown by krackers on Saturday March 29, 2025 @07:01PM (#43519523)

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.

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