Limitless: Personalized AI powered by what you've seen, said, and heard
limitless.ai
limitless.ai
The ugly thing is that this vast privacy invasion and resell has become so pervasively normalized that even the fucking services which you pay for almost universally sell off to others ad nauseam anything about you that isn't nailed down.
Since this thing offers to give you personalized AI based on everything you see and do in your day, that's some very private, juicy info to resell.
If these guys have accomplished homomorphic encryption they shouldn’t be building a wearable, they should be licensing their IP to Apple.
1. The data is encrypted and they can’t operate on it in the cloud. 2. The data is not encrypted. 3. The data is encrypted and they have built a state of the art homomorphic encryption algorithm for their AI to operate on.
I’m going to guess it’s #1, not #3.
So I think a monthly subscription is the business model, not ads.
NB. Data/information can be transferred to other entities in ways that not meet the definition of "resell".1
In addition to transfer, there must be limits on _use_. Obviously a "restriction" like, "The company shall be limited to using the data to improve the service" is meaningless. Defeating privacy improves the service.
1. Years ago, when Facebook was responding to the media with the line, "We do not sell your data", they were sharing it for free. Not to mention leaking it. https://themarkup.org/the-breakdown/2021/09/02/what-does-it-...
Recording and processing audio locally is something I already do. But there's absolutely no way I'm EVER going to trust a startup with this sort of data, any anyone in any serious job would almost certainly be unable to use it for work.
I guess the risk is that someone would sell a crappy pendant that uses the same software, but I still think there's a potential niche here for people who want something that just works.
I'd also purchase the software from the App Store if it was otherwise only available as a non-signed binary.
It doesn't seem like this should actually be that difficult to build an open-source version of, modulo battery-life concerns.
That's exactly what this was (Rewind) before they renamed the company and pivoted to AI.
I sure as hell am NOT subjecting friends and family to being recorded and having those recordings going to some cloud I don't control.
Just this morning I got an email from AT&T about how they regret that my data was leaked but it's not so bad, sign up for this monitoring service. I have no choice but to use certain services. I can choose not to engage with this beautiful product.
Yeah, nah.
MKBHD asked his pin what he was looking at, and in the time humane’s pin to take a pic, send it up to the cloud, decide what model is most appropriate, and narrate a really long (possibly hallucinatory) answer; he simply took his phone out and google lens answered correctly with a lot of time to spare.
I know these are first-gen products and the fact that this one would presumably have a much higher degree of context on my personal life might make this better (without speaking to privacy implications). Still, over-reliance on the cloud and the fact that this doesn’t interface with my phone (where most reminders, alarms, messages, etc, happen) is going to make these devices a tough sell.
We are so honored this hit the front page of HN!
Here's the video announcement: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1779857843895599383
And timestamps to moments in the video you might be interested in:
0:06 Reveal
0:48 Why Limitless?
1:39 Demo
3:05 Pendant
4:27 Privacy
5:23 Confidential Cloud
6:36 Rewind
7:12 Roadmap
9:25 Vision
Also, I do notice that the free version has 10 free hours a month of AI features.
How easy would it be for me to export the recordings, and use it with say Google Gemini Pro for transcribing?
If Limitless gets PMF, anyone who puts Whisper into an iPhone app will do what you’re doing basically for free.
Consent Mode makes it possible for the first time ever to only capture the voice of people who have given consent to be recorded.
It uses voice identification to determine who is speaking and verbal opt-in to make it frictionless to ask for consent.
Here's a direct link to the timestamp of the announcement where we show how Consent Mode works: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1779857843895599383?t=26...
I'm reminded of how I felt it was unfair that the hotword detector for assistants was discussed as "recording", but it's really just parsing a byte stream, never storing it.
Voice ID systems I'm familiar with work on a similar premise.
I might be jaded from years of bigco, and I'm rooting for you, hopefully you're already set enough financially you can ignore this, innovate, and already have teams of people demo'ing a solution internally:
As a company, you can't get trust back. Fudging a bit and projecting what you'll have when you ship is very tempting when the competition is this thick. Having this much competition also implies there will be choice, and given the use case, it's likely people will always opt for choices that appear more trustworthy.
On a completely separate note, I've seen many, many, teams of extremely bright people be funded for 2-4 years on things that you'd think "it can't be that hard..." and it turns out it's impossible. Not this specifically, but voice adjacent stuff.
Again, rooting for you, but a forthright version of me would have just said it'll never work as demo'd, and it's worth considering what impact it'll have long-term on your success if even just 20% of whats on the roadmap doesn't work out, you're already talking about it in present tense, and it's absolutely key to your user trust story. 20% is conservative in my experience.
For context, this is BIPA: https://law.justia.com/codes/illinois/chapter-740/act-740-il... and it's why Facebook, Google, and others have sent fairly large settlement checks to Illinois residents over the last few years.
The company formerly known as rewind ai (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33421751) is going all-in on wearable devices up-to and including a label mic/pendant that will plug into a ton of AI services (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37744213).
As a result, they're changing their name to limitless and also moving a ton of stuff off device and into the cloud.
Would you rather have someone who when asked a question can answer it on demand or someone who has to go searching for a needle in their haystack of voice / text / LLM summarized notes?
That’s why people take notes. Not to produce text. It seems like every few years a new crop of dictation as a service companies crop up and learn this lesson all over again. Users who can’t be bothered to take their own notes never go back searching through them.
[1]: https://help.limitless.ai/en/articles/9130680-privacy-with-l...
Edit: I just tried it. They don't give you encryption keys you need to enter when signing in and the server literally sends you your transcripts with no encryption. Maybe they're including a key somehow derived when signing in with Google/a magic link in the request, but I don't think anything would stop them from just logging API responses even if that was the case. They're definitely not using E2EE. They might just be encrypting at rest and storing their keys in AWS KMS which sounds like false advertising.
Even with that, you will only access the transcript and still need an AI model to get meaningful info.
This device wouldn't be suitable for anyone with little privacy concerns.
You control who can decrypt your data
Your employer, we as software providers, and the government cannot decrypt your data without your permission, even with a subpoena to do so.
Your data is anonymized
There is an initial mapping from your application request to an anonymous ID, but after that, even we don't know whose encrypted data is whose.
Your data will never be sold
Not only do we pledge never to sell your data, but we couldn't even if we wanted to because we can't decrypt it without your permission.
Envelope encryption with unique secret keys
Data keys are used to encrypt your data and are themselves encrypted under a secret key. No one, including us, can export the secret keys.
Tamperproof hardware
Decrypted data is only ever stored in memory (source: <https://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/cryptographic-details...>), which is protected from tampering by a multi-chip standalone hardware cryptographic appliance (source: <https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/cryptographic-module-validati...>).
Protected from 3rd party AI providers
Data sent to 3rd party AI providers for transcription and summarization is anonymized, not used for training, and deleted after 30 days.
Protected from cloud provider and subpoena
AWS KMS (source: <https://aws.amazon.com/kms/>) uses FIPS 140-2 (source: <https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/projects/cryptographic-modu...>) validated hardware security modules (HSMs) to ensure no one, including AWS employees, can retrieve your plaintext KMS keys.
Your "anonymization" does nothing. You have major egg on your face right now.
The only remotely anonymous version of a service like this involves a private LLM endpoint.
I have Mixtral 8x22B and CommandR+ running on my home LLM sever. How can I use Limitless without handing my "anonymized" (but NOT actually anonymized in any way shape or form) PII over to a third party who retains it for at least 30 days (or longer if someone with a badge or gavel asks)?
E2EE suggests that only the user (or at least only people the user knows about in the case of e.g. group chats) is able to see/access the decrypted data, which is false. Limitless does not decrypt data on the client using a key only the user has access to, it decrypts the data on the server (in this case using AWS KMS) and sends it to the client. Even if we remove just decrypting everyone’s data out of the equation using AWS KMS (since the user does not control the key), you could trivially write a Cloudflare Worker (since you use Cloudflare on your API subdomain) that simply sends the (unencrypted) API response along with the email from the Supabase JWT used in the header to a server that accumulates everyone’s recording names, transcripts, generated notes and generated summaries. If someone gained access to your Cloudflare account they could also do this. You’re advertising Limitless as if you aren’t able to see people’s transcripts even if you wanted to, which is false. Even your employer can if they TLS MitM you with their own TLS certificates, which is not rare. On the other hand, Signal cannot see your data unless they modify client code, nor can your employer unless they install a modified Signal client on your device or install spyware on your device, which is reading decrypted data from memory. This is what separates encrypting at rest and E2EE (which you say your solution is just as secure as and is better than) for the end user and it feels like false advertising. Limitless, your employer and a potential hacker can all read your data, at the minimum while you’re using Limitless.
It is not at all "similar to end-to-end encryption".
For any designers / front-end folks here, I wrote a thread going over some of the design details on our new homepage: https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/1779860940541808935
Dear god, just watching some of those videos is painful. Like when trying to scroll literally two lines of text on the screen instead highlights them word by word and pops up icons to "illustrate" each word: https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/1779867509388165203. I don't think I've seen a website condescendingly "speaking slow" to a user before...
Hard pass on Limitless. I don't care how good the encryption is, sending this kind of thing to anyone's cloud is a nope for me.
It's not. If you use the meeting summarization or querying features, the text transcripts are sent to OpenAI for LLM processing.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230426201730if_/http://limitle...
We are shifting our focus to Limitless because we think it’s a better approach to solving the same problems. In fact, we plan to implement many of your favorite Rewind features directly in Limitless.
We are so bullish on Limitless that we decided to change our company name from Rewind to Limitless.
That said, we have no plans to stop supporting Rewind.
You can even use both products side-by-side and decide for yourself which one you like better.
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