Any Users of Dropbox Dash? Beginning of Personal LLMs? (opens in new tab)

(dropbox.com)

12 pointsckl18102y ago6 comments

6 comments

This is a total non-starter from a privacy perspective. Not only is it pulling in everything from all the cloud apps you connect to it, but also the contents of any devices you enable it on, everything within every browser tab, and god knows what else.

It also seems to solve a problem for Dropbox (they aren't on the AI train) but not for the user. How many people don't know their upcoming meeting is on their calendar, or that the spreadsheet they created is in Excel/Sheets? All of which have excellent search experiences already.

https://aem.dropbox.com/cms/content/dam/dropbox/warp/en-us/d...

threeseed2y ago

From their documentation Dash uses Spotlight for local files.

So it's not moving your file data up to the cloud just the connector data.

ckl1810OP2y ago

I loved, loved Google Desktop when it had launched, but alas it was deprecated. I have even paid for Neeva, a hot flash in the pan to see if it could provide personal search.

Dropbox has gotten progressively worse to no fault of its own. Instead of allowing Dropbox to run on a kernel like the good old days, Apple forces all sync providers (iCloud, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox) to use its macOS File Provider API going forward, which is terrible.

Apple Spotlight now doesn't index my Dropbox files, and I have to revert to using Dropbox.com to search for my files.

I'm a big believer in Personal LLMs, so the more data I have on myself the better.

Glean is the closest Enterprise focused solution of what I am looking for, and a few reddit subredits mention Personal LLMs, but I think we are still at the frontier.

threeseed2y ago

I am actually building something in this space right now.

Basically Spotlight but searches in < 10ms, half a dozen ML models used for indexing and a UI optimised for finding and opening your file as quickly as possible. All local.

And so I added a ChatGPT screen just to see if it was a good fit and what I found was that with LLMs it's more exploratory i.e. lots more back/forth and the latency is so much higher.

So not sure if the future is some hybrid like Dash or more like Spotlight/Glean where you have two separate apps.

ckl1810OP2y ago

This is great! Hope you ship.

from-nibly2y ago

Anything with this amount of information needs to be 100% self hosted.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

6 comments

mike_d2y ago

https://aem.dropbox.com/cms/content/dam/dropbox/warp/en-us/d...

threeseed2y ago

From their documentation Dash uses Spotlight for local files.

So it's not moving your file data up to the cloud just the connector data.

ckl1810OP2y ago

I loved, loved Google Desktop when it had launched, but alas it was deprecated. I have even paid for Neeva, a hot flash in the pan to see if it could provide personal search.

Apple Spotlight now doesn't index my Dropbox files, and I have to revert to using Dropbox.com to search for my files.

I'm a big believer in Personal LLMs, so the more data I have on myself the better.

Glean is the closest Enterprise focused solution of what I am looking for, and a few reddit subredits mention Personal LLMs, but I think we are still at the frontier.

threeseed2y ago

I am actually building something in this space right now.

Basically Spotlight but searches in < 10ms, half a dozen ML models used for indexing and a UI optimised for finding and opening your file as quickly as possible. All local.

And so I added a ChatGPT screen just to see if it was a good fit and what I found was that with LLMs it's more exploratory i.e. lots more back/forth and the latency is so much higher.

So not sure if the future is some hybrid like Dash or more like Spotlight/Glean where you have two separate apps.

ckl1810OP2y ago

This is great! Hope you ship.

from-nibly2y ago

Anything with this amount of information needs to be 100% self hosted.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse