Improving recommendation systems and search in the age of LLMs

Post by mjlee » Sun, Mar 23, 2025, 11:28 AM UTC

dmbche wrote: post #27

nine_k wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can just search your files using your prefered file explorer This only work if you remember specific substrings. An LLM (or some other language model) can summarize and interpolate. It can be asked to find that file that mentions a transaction for buying candy, and it has a fair chance to find it, even if none of the words "transaction", "buying" or "candy" are present in the file, e.g. it says "shelled out $17…

But isn't that candy example non-sensical? In what situation do you need some information without any of the context(or without knowing any of the context)? i really believe that this is not an actual problem in need of solving, but instead creating a tool (personal ai assistant) and trying to find a usecase Edit0: note to self, rambling - assuming there exist valuable information that one needa to access in their fi…

Post by dmbche » Sun, Mar 23, 2025, 12:27 PM UTC

mjlee wrote: post #41

dmbche wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't that candy example non-sensical? In what situation do you need some information without any of the context(or without knowing any of the context)? i really believe that this is not an actual problem in need of solving, but instead creating a tool (personal ai assistant) and trying to find a usecase Edit0: note to self, rambling - assuming there exist valuable information that one needa to access in their fi…

I think your brain may just work differently to mine, and I don't think I'm unique. > "get me that picture of unle tony in Florida" might save you 10 seconds instead of going into your files and thinking about when you got that picture I don't have a memory for time, and I can't picture things in my mind. Thinking about when I took a picture does nothing for me, I could be out by years. Having some unified natural la…

Post by RicoElectrico » Sun, Mar 23, 2025, 1:08 PM UTC

x1xx wrote: post #34

> Spotify saw a 9% increase in exploratory intent queries, a 30% rise in maximum query length per user, and a 10% increase in average query length—this suggests the query recommendation updates helped users express more complex intents To me it's not clear that it should be interpreted as an improvement: what I read in this summary is that users had to search more and to enter longer queries to get to what they neede…

Post by amelius » Sun, Mar 23, 2025, 1:54 PM UTC

osmarks wrote: post #22

thorum wrote: post #16

In the age of local LLMs I’d like to see a personal recommendation system that doesn’t care about being scalable and efficient. Why can’t I write a prompt that describes exactly what I’m looking for in detail and then let my GPU run for a week until it finds something that matches?

You could just run a local LLM over every document and ask it "is this related to this query". I don't think you actually want to wait a week (and holding all the documents you might ever want to search would run to petabytes). (the reasonable way is embedding search, which runs much faster with some precomputation, but you still have to store things)

Post by UrineSqueegee » Sun, Mar 23, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

thaumiel wrote: post #42

ah this explains why my spotify experience has gotten worse over time.