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Comment by xyc | Hacker News Reader

Yes it would be the next big focus on this. Personal data connectivity is what I see where local AI would excel - despite model power differences.

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I have doubts about that. Most personal data actually lives in the cloud these days. If you need your Gmail emails, you'll need to use their API which is guarded behind $50k certification fee or so. I think there is a simpler version for personal use, but you still need to get the API key. Who's going to teach their mom about API keys? So I think for a lot of these data sources you'll end up with enterprise AIs integrating them first for a seamless experience.

Why wouldn't you be able to use IMAP over the gmail api? IMAP returns the text and headers of all your emails, which is what you'd want the LLM to ingest anyway.

Seconding a sibling question: What $50k API fee? To access your gmail? I've been using gmail since 2008 or so without ever touching their web/app interface or getting an API key. You just use it as an IMAP server.

To use Google's sensitive APIs in production you have to certify your product and that costs tens of thousands. To be honest, didn't think about imap at first, but it looks like that could be getting tougher soon too https://support.google.com/a/answer/14114704?hl=en. Soon they will require oAuth for imap and with oAuth you'll need the certification: https://developers.google.com/gmail/imap/xoauth2-protocol. If it's for personal use, you might be able to get by with just with some warnings in the login flow but it won't be easy to get oAuth flow setup in the first place.

Yeah, Thunderbird integrated oAuth in the last few releases, mainly to keep up with the Gmail and Hotmail requirements. Made it very user-friendly to set up in the GUI right within T-bird. I don't see this being a major obstacle.

I'm not sure I can imagine a scenario in production where Google would, or should, allow API access to individual gmail accounts. What's that for? So you can read all your employees' mail without running your own email server?

I'm not sure what you mean.

> You will no longer use a password for access (with the exception of app passwords)

I'm not seeing anywhere that I'd need to pay money to use OAuth via an app like Thunderbird or another email client. That app would either need to support using OAuth to let the user auth and get credentials, or use an app password.

Right, but Thunderbird had to pay up and set themselves as a middleman to allow this. My point is that local LLMs might not have that many advantages for personal data because most of that data doesn't live locally on your computer, to begin with. I guess an argument could be made that running them locally prevents an AI provider from gobbling up ALL of your data. On the other hand, Google already has most of our my data: emails, youtube, gmail, etc.

I think this is a good take. While there's big enough niche for personal data locally, I'd love if there's a way to solve for email/cloud data requiring API keys.

Ideally, though, a sufficiently smart LLM shouldn't need API access. It could navigate to your social media login page, supply your credentials, and scrape what it sees. Better yet, it should just reverse-engineer the API ;)

What?

I manage both gmail and protonmail via thunderbird - where I have better search and sort using IMAP.

Good to know there's a market for that. Currently building out something. Integrating from numerous sources, processing and then utilizing those.

nice.

Yeah, we’re getting closer to “Her”

I would even let it have longer processing times for queries to apply against each document in my system, allow it to specialize/train itself on a daily basis…

Use all the resources you want if you save me brainpower

Agree, there's a non real-time angle to this.

"give me a summary of the news around this topic each morning for my daily read"

Help me plan for upcoming meetings whereby if I put something in calendar, it will build a little dossier for the event, and include relevant info based on the type of event or meeting, mostly scheduling reminders or prompting you with updates or changes to the event etc.

“filter out baby pictures from my family text threads”

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