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The Prompt API

developer.chrome.com

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Re: The Prompt API

#91

Post by mplanchard »

jychang wrote: post #47
nsilvestri wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the Soylent of written communication. Full nutritional value with an unremarkable flavor.

Are humans supposed to enjoy the "flavor" of diarrhea, as the result of giving every village idiot a microphone so they can spew shit from their mouths? Sure, you might say this sort of thing is boiling flavor out of your food, but... boiling the bacteria out of what you consume isn't a bad thing.

Ironically, the proposed extension would likely have neutered this comment to a shell of itself.

Re: The Prompt API

#92

Post by whatarethembits »

haberman wrote: post #16

This API seems perfect for an idea I've had for a while: a de-snarkifier for social media. Social media can be intellectually stimulating and educational, but it's also easy to get sucked into ideological sniping and flamewars, even if you didn't go looking for it. The emotional and intellectual energy spent flaming strangers on the Internet is a complete waste of human capital. With an API like this, I assume you co…

Kinda looking forward to something like this, as it has the potential to remove empty junk calories from the internet, hopefully leading to SIGNIFICANTLY less use of today's popular platforms.

My wish list:

- Eliminate ALL clickbait titles and ads. I only want to see a dry factual title.

- For any given topic, I only care about the main article (with the option to only see a summary, unless its a high quality blog) and couple of substantive comments, rest is junk I don't want to see.

The current state of popular social media sites has meant that I don't use it at all (except HN, which is trending in the same direction due to saturation with AI), but every other week or so I end up wasting a few hours, which I'd like to avoid entirely.

Ideally this would lead to 98% of content filtered/summarised out, and over time only use the internet for looking things up with intention. I want this to remove majority of "entertainment" value from the internet (by default) so that time/energy can be refocused in real life and high quality sources (books) only.

Re: The Prompt API

#93

Post by seanhunter »

whatarethembits wrote: post #92
haberman wrote: post #16

This API seems perfect for an idea I've had for a while: a de-snarkifier for social media. Social media can be intellectually stimulating and educational, but it's also easy to get sucked into ideological sniping and flamewars, even if you didn't go looking for it. The emotional and intellectual energy spent flaming strangers on the Internet is a complete waste of human capital. With an API like this, I assume you co…

Kinda looking forward to something like this, as it has the potential to remove empty junk calories from the internet, hopefully leading to SIGNIFICANTLY less use of today's popular platforms. My wish list: - Eliminate ALL clickbait titles and ads. I only want to see a dry factual title. - For any given topic, I only care about the main article (with the option to only see a summary, unless its a high quality blog) a…

I actually have built myself a personal AI agent that does this for nthe main news headlines and for a summary of my personal email (sadly I can’t run it on work email yet). It can extract any actions required from a mail and make them into tasks, and also has a killer feature - a “sort out my email” button that archives all the emails it classifies as FYI, spam, mailing list or moot (it has classifiers for this), first producing a one-pager markdown summary of the whole lot in one shot, leaving all emails marked “action required” or “Urgent”. Email summaries are deliberately dry and factual with all advertising false urgency removed.

I can manually “hold” emails so they don’t go in the “sort out my email” woodchipper. It’s been life-changing.

Re: The Prompt API

#94

Post by whatarethembits »

netcan wrote: post #54
jychang wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I 100% agree with the caution in this comment. I see the merit in such a proposal. It's the linguistic equivalent to boiling the food you consume, instead of eating it raw with all the associated bad stuff. The problem is, as you said, that this plan is unlikely to be as rosy as it's portrayed and probably has a lot of drawbacks in real life. Interesting to think about and explore, though.

I wasn't even talking about drawbacks, though that applies too. I mean... you would be basically taking a complex thing, transforming and reconstructing it. What we want out of social media isn't a simple, legible function. The positives. You'd have to discover them. If someone starts building with the intitial idea above, my guess is that they'd end up with some sort of custom feed that draws inspiration and inputs…

That is exactly what I want. A boring but factual summary of useful nuggets from the mountain of shite that is ALL of social media. For example, on any given day, reddit/X/Bluesky/HN only has a couple of paragraphs worth of stuff that I care to know about. I want to train my brain to equate the internet with something boring that's only worth visiting when I need to look up information. I want this tech to reduce my (and hopefully others') use of internet to down by 98%.

I want to go to news.ycombinator.com/reddit.com/etc on any given day and just see a couple of paragraphs and maybe a few reference links to follow if I so choose. Spend a few minutes reading that and close it.

All of that in the hope of diverting my limited time/energy on Earth to endeavours in real life with real people.

Re: The Prompt API

#95

Post by whatarethembits »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #30
haberman wrote: post #16

This API seems perfect for an idea I've had for a while: a de-snarkifier for social media. Social media can be intellectually stimulating and educational, but it's also easy to get sucked into ideological sniping and flamewars, even if you didn't go looking for it. The emotional and intellectual energy spent flaming strangers on the Internet is a complete waste of human capital. With an API like this, I assume you co…

On the other hand it would make all comments sound the same and further dilute internet content into average slop.

I'm hoping that something like this can condense a 1000+ comments thread to couple of paragraphs at most.

Re: The Prompt API

#96

Post by michaelbuckbee »

Fwiw - I did a fairly large comparison of Gemini Nano (the in browser ai model) vs a comparable free hosted model of Gemma (from OpenRouter) and the hosted model absolutely trashed the local model on every aspect of speed, reliability, availability, etc. [1]

I'm not particularly happy about that outcome as I wish we had more locally run AI models for reasons of privacy and efficiency, so this is more just a warning that at present there are some severe tradeoffs.

1 - https://sendcheckit.com/blog/ai-powered-subject-line-alterna...

Re: The Prompt API

#97

Post by 2ndorderthought »

avaer wrote: post #4

It works, I've shipped this as a "local inference"/poor person's ollama for low-end llm tasks like search. The main win is that it's free and privacy preserving, and (mostly) transparent to users in that they don't have to do anything, which is great for giving non-technical users local inference without making them do scary native things. But keep in mind the actual experience for users is not great; the model downl…

Is it actually privacy preserving? Chrome mostly exists to extract all the information from a user it can without immediately getting a lawsuit of greater penalty than what is gained through ads, military contracts, etc. Android isn't too far off either. I would welcome any alternative to this. I can see applications for this being things like "while device is at rest and charging summarize all of the users recent text communications" or whatever else as a legal loop hole for wiretap laws

Re: The Prompt API

#99

Post by aembleton »

paganel wrote: post #67
avaer wrote: post #4

It works, I've shipped this as a "local inference"/poor person's ollama for low-end llm tasks like search. The main win is that it's free and privacy preserving, and (mostly) transparent to users in that they don't have to do anything, which is great for giving non-technical users local inference without making them do scary native things. But keep in mind the actual experience for users is not great; the model downl…

> operating systems start reliably shipping their own prebaked models Here's to hoping that that dystopia will never happen.

Would it be less dystopian for Operating Systems to ship with their own browser that ships with their own models? Or do you find the current situation where Operating Systems ship with browsers dystopian?

Re: The Prompt API

#100

Post by svieira »

domenicd wrote: post #62

I led the design effort on this API, before retiring. Here's my writeup on some of the considerations that went into it: https://domenic.me/builtin-ai-api-design/

Congratulations on retiring!
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