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Comment by tartrate | Hacker News Reader

> Full Text Search. Blazingly fast search over thousands of messages.

Natural language processing has come full circle and just reinvented Ctrl+F.

I had to double check that a regular '90s search function was actually the thing being advertised here, and sure enough, there is a gif demonstrating exactly that.

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Ctrl+F only gets you so far. It doesn't allow you to perform semantic searches, for example. If you don't happen to know a unique word (or set of words) to search for, you're out of luck.

Just the other day, I was able to find a song by typing the phonetic pronunciation (well, as best I could) into ChatGPT, and it knew which song I was talking about right away. No way a regular search engine would've helped me there.

No. Your own data only gets you so far. And this is exactly the issue. No local model will make sense because the dataset its given is so small compared to what you are referring to - chatgpt.

It's useless locally.

I’ve been using 7b models to work with large text volumes (like entire books) with nothing short of phenomenal results. It has cut the time I need to accomplish many tasks by >90% and often offers insights I might easily have missed. My methodology requires a bit of time and compute to prepare a new subject matter expert system, but the results are absolutely worth it.

Would you care to share how you technically are doing this ? Please

If you only need to query your own data, and can't upload that data to ChatGPT for compliance/security reasons, I think local LLMs are far from useless.

I have been downvoted here which is fine. But no one took the time to elaborate on where i am wrong ? Tell me where i am wrong please.

Yes but this is missing from most chatbot UIs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc. ) so is therefore very useful. Machato has it but it is very laggy.

I'm a big fan of ctrl+f, but semantic search is a life saver that conventional search simply cannot compare to.

Yeah, I think the call out here is specifically because you the ChatGPT interface doesn't have a search feature (on web). Interestingly, on their iOS app, you can search.

I often find myself opening the app on my phone if I want to find a previous conversation, even if I'm at my desk.

The search feature on ChatGPT for Android only works for a tiny number of recent chats.

i'm more interested how to perform semantic search over messages efficiently. Like to receive the reference to the og message. Is it creating an llm response with the potential content and how does it find the og message? is it performing tf/idf+cosine search after that or how?

and yet ChatGPT doesn't support it.

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