[lolinder]

Security aside, I'm genuinely unsure what problem Recall is even meant to solve.

Like most AI products and features announced over the past 18 months, it feels like a bunch of product people got into a meeting where they looked at the capabilities of the latest OpenAI model and then started spitballing feature ideas based not on user needs but on what GPTs can do. "Oh, these models can do OCR... why don't we screenshot everything that a user has ever done, OCR it, and make it searchable!"

I'm genuinely interested to know if there are use cases that people see for this beyond the obvious retroactive infostealing on a grand scale. What would you do with this feature if you had it?

[poisonborz]

I think this is the feature everybody wants. Not in Windows, not from Microsoft, probably not yet, but it is so obvious and useful that I'm sure this will be a default thing for a future human.

Imagine never forgetting anything. That tune, what your spouse told you to get, a meeting summary, recall or replay a dear memory. People _without_ this ability would be outliers and strangely left behind. I know there was a Black Mirror on this, but imagine this to be safe, private, local, toggleable even. Life becomes a book you can flip back.

Humanity longed for this for ages. From written diaries to personal data exports of social networks... for better or worse, it's a natural causation of our life becoming digital.

[soganess]

I agree that it will super useful and can't wait for the OSS version of it on Linux that respects my privacy but only kinda does the same thing with a less useful LLM at its core.

That said, I wonder if general folks will see the toggling of this is the same way they initially did for incognito mode? Namely, that you would only use it to watch porn or do something nefarious. The classic "If you don't have anything to hide, why hide?" History has obviously proven that first impression as a rather reductive and silly one. Plus cultural norms/opinions around incognito mode are very neutral now.

Or if this will be like turning a bodycam off for cops? Imagine the distopia of a boss asking why you turned recall off for 30 minutes while you were on your lunchbreak...

I guess it is good that we have pocket supercomputers.

[rbits]

I mean, there's already software to record your screen for companies. Getting access to recall would be the same as installing tracking software, which they can and do already use

[pseudalopex]

> I know there was a Black Mirror on this, but imagine this to be safe, private, local, toggleable even.

Wasn't it private by default, local, and erasable in Black Mirror? And what does safe mean?

[hagbard_c]

> Imagine never forgetting anything

You mean imagine forgetting everything because you don't need to remember anything since that is done by your personal agent - until the battery is dead, the model crashes, your neurocannula gets clogged, an EMP takes out your memory module or an update accidentally wipes your life.

Dear Mr. Poisonborz,

During a routine update of your MegaMind Ti666GX module a mishap occurred which wiped the module and its cloud backup clean. Since you did not purchase the optional MindCare insurance and there does not seem to be a recent off-line backup we are sad to inform you that your life's experiences have been lost for good. To make up for this inconvenience we can offer you a 1 year free MyStorey subscription which will help you fill in the blanks using our state of the art Experiencer technology - just tell it what you want to remember and it will create the memory for you.

[poisonborz]

You assume this has to be some convoluted black box, a proprietary service on some corporate servers, but people are not stupid, not after what happened in the last decade - look how even leading LLMs become local-first and offline already. The stored data should also remain simple - images, text files, video.

[metalspoon]

Have you ever heard about notes...

[fancy_pantser]

Limitless aka Rewind has been doing it for a while, starting on macOS and expanding: https://www.rewind.ai

I gave it a shot for a few months and it was useful to go back to catch things that I couldn't quite recall. It was handy to ask it things instead of doing direct search sometimes. It was helpful for work, where I tend to take notes on things but never review them because of their volume (and SNR). I wound up uninstalling it because it was not the 'superpower' they alluded to in the marketing material, but it was interesting nonetheless. I also whipped up my own version using Ollama to provide access to a decent LLM (Command-R) on my LAN, recording screenshots, text, and transcripts to LanceDB so I could do combined search by vector and keyword and then re-rank. Also a fun project to learn from, but not that useful in the end.

[rebolek]

> What would you do with this feature if you had it?

I would disable it.

[zdragnar]

I trust that disabling it will disable interacting with it. I'm less convinced that it will disable the collection of the data, especially given the occasional stories of updates changing people's settings.

Instead, I'm going back to Linux for everything but gaming. Nothing of any actual import will happen in Windows. My most recent purchase i left as a plain, single boot windows setup to see if WSL was all that it was cracked up to be.

I thought I'd finally accepted that it wasn't as unpleasant as I anticipated, but there's gotta be a line in the sand somewhere.

[nycdatasci]

If the goal was to train a large model to interact with the OS, this data would be extremely useful. But that can't possibly be their ultimate goal, because they've assured us that the data remains local. I do wonder if there's a gray area where verbatim data remains local, but maybe a substantially transformed version like a UI state-transition diagram is shared with MSFT to "enable product improvements".

[hypeatei]

This is completely my opinion, but this data is definitely going to be accessible to law enforcement/intelligence agencies when it's more widely used and running by default. All the compute and AI work is done locally and a simple database is given on request.

[mvdtnz]

I agree completely. The AI rush feels exactly identical to the cryptocurrency rush where people saw a novel technology and started trying to find a problem to solve with it. It feels like it's going nowhere fast, at least to me. The overlap between tasks that are important, time-consuming, amenable to AI and also non-critical enough that I can tolerate serious errors in the output seems very small.

[exhaze]

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/24/greywing-seagpt/

This helps container ships operate. Errors matter here. They solved them. Please show me where the scam is here?

[gmuslera]

You are pointing to the wrong set of users there. It is not that PC user the one that will use that information, but something somewhere upwards in the "security" food chain. Those are the users for which that feature is intended to.

[tsukikage]

> Security aside, I'm genuinely unsure what problem Recall is even meant to solve.

The same problem as https://atuin.sh/ but for everything rather than just shell command history.

[Dylan16807]

I would like to have full text search of websites I've been to, since I often don't remember enough exact details to re-find something. That doesn't need the AI model or screenshots though.

A retroactive ability to screenshot recent things would also be nice to have.

[cbsmith]

Emacs' BBDB had similar functionality (without the AI): https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/bbdb.html

[wvenable]

"Summarize what I worked on last week"