Comment by ichiwells
20 days ago
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.
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.
Or, say, a number one search provider ;)
and search provider! Of all the companies in the world, why is Gmail search just not better?
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.