4 ms·

Such a huge influx of capital with no mention of Generative AI features reading & writing emails for you. Impressive!

JohnFen 3y ago
Heh, that didn't occur to me. Indeed, that's a cause for celebration! If they had included such goals, though, I'd be likely to stop donating money to them.
- flangola7 3y ago
  I'd be kind of okay with it if the code all ran locally.
  - darkwater 3y ago
    Exactly. Actually it would be a giant differentiator to everything else.
- sankhao 3y ago
  I wouldn't mind if the mail client stored local embeddings of my email contents to enable a good search function.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    What practical benefit does that offer over existing (synonym-aware) keyword and phrase search approaches? The corpus of one’s mailbox is too small a dataset to draw conclusion from, surely? Not to mention being far slower to query.
    - yazaddaruvala 3y ago
      The really difficult parts about keyword search are tokenization, normalization, and synonym selection. Especially keeping them up to date. The uses of search never know about any of this, but as the developer these things need to be top of mind. Using embeddings basically lets the AI configure those things for you and auto updates when the AI updates. You could also use the embeddings for far more advanced things like in LLMs, but the basic version that is just “better keyword search” is also valuable. > Not to mention being far slower to query. KNN on the embeddings is not obviously slower to query. In production using AWS ElasticSearch, for a very large search index, my team saw no meaningful change to latency when using embeddings instead.
      - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
        > using AWS ElasticSearch If this is for my personal e-mail, then I'd only use it if it could run locally - which also means inobtrusively in the background, not slowing down my computer - is that feasible?
        yazaddaruvala 3y ago
        I was just giving an example, you could just as easily run a KNN implementation locally.
  - spopejoy 3y ago
    I wouldn't mind if they just fixed their global search, it's pretty terrible. I say this as a devoted longtime user who will never switch.
- hammyhavoc 3y ago
  They already peddle AI: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/08/we-asked-ai-to-create-these-beautiful-thunderbird-wallpapers/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/08/we-asked-ai-to-create-t...
  - devsda 3y ago
    Think peddle is a stronger word here. There is nothing in there that says they are planning to integrate any sorts of AI. It's just someone having fun with generative AI to create few unique wallpapers and sharing them with their community.
    - hammyhavoc 3y ago
      Backlinking to them, within a puff piece. It's an email client, mate. It doesn't need wallpapers. They hired someone specifically for this role too.
slyall 3y ago
I know you joke but the email client I use on my phone announced just such a feature a little while ago: https://bluemail.me/features-functions/generative-email/ https://bluemail.me/features-functions/generative-email/
- pluijzer 3y ago
  I'll metally prepare myself to getting a lot more emails starting with: 'I hope this email finds you well'.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Heh, that didn't occur to me. Indeed, that's a cause for celebration! If they had included such goals, though, I'd be likely to stop donating money to them.

flangola7 3y ago
I'd be kind of okay with it if the code all ran locally.
- darkwater 3y ago
  Exactly. Actually it would be a giant differentiator to everything else.
sankhao 3y ago
I wouldn't mind if the mail client stored local embeddings of my email contents to enable a good search function.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  What practical benefit does that offer over existing (synonym-aware) keyword and phrase search approaches? The corpus of one’s mailbox is too small a dataset to draw conclusion from, surely? Not to mention being far slower to query.
  - yazaddaruvala 3y ago
    The really difficult parts about keyword search are tokenization, normalization, and synonym selection. Especially keeping them up to date. The uses of search never know about any of this, but as the developer these things need to be top of mind. Using embeddings basically lets the AI configure those things for you and auto updates when the AI updates. You could also use the embeddings for far more advanced things like in LLMs, but the basic version that is just “better keyword search” is also valuable. > Not to mention being far slower to query. KNN on the embeddings is not obviously slower to query. In production using AWS ElasticSearch, for a very large search index, my team saw no meaningful change to latency when using embeddings instead.
    - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
      > using AWS ElasticSearch If this is for my personal e-mail, then I'd only use it if it could run locally - which also means inobtrusively in the background, not slowing down my computer - is that feasible?
      - yazaddaruvala 3y ago
        I was just giving an example, you could just as easily run a KNN implementation locally.
- spopejoy 3y ago
  I wouldn't mind if they just fixed their global search, it's pretty terrible. I say this as a devoted longtime user who will never switch.
hammyhavoc 3y ago
They already peddle AI: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/08/we-asked-ai-to-create-these-beautiful-thunderbird-wallpapers/ https://blog.thunderbird.net/2022/08/we-asked-ai-to-create-t...
- devsda 3y ago
  Think peddle is a stronger word here. There is nothing in there that says they are planning to integrate any sorts of AI. It's just someone having fun with generative AI to create few unique wallpapers and sharing them with their community.
  - hammyhavoc 3y ago
    Backlinking to them, within a puff piece. It's an email client, mate. It doesn't need wallpapers. They hired someone specifically for this role too.

slyall 3y ago

I know you joke but the email client I use on my phone announced just such a feature a little while ago: https://bluemail.me/features-functions/generative-email/ https://bluemail.me/features-functions/generative-email/

pluijzer 3y ago
I'll metally prepare myself to getting a lot more emails starting with: 'I hope this email finds you well'.

deleted 3y ago

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