The idea of a personal search engine is powerful and attractive. What if there was an app that knew everything about my meetings, my tasks, my browser history, my email, and everything else and could help me dig through them to find the things I care about? Sounds super handy! And in an era of increasing surveillance and the constant cashing in of our every thought and action, it also sounds like a terrifying hellscape dystopia!
There’s probably a middle ground somewhere that works. That is what Rewind.ai trying to find with the feature launching today. It is called “ChatGPT for meand it’s a GPT-4 chatbot that you can use to interact with whatever information the Rewind app collects about you.
(Rewind, if you haven’t heard of it, is an app launched last year for Apple Silicon-powered Macs. It records everything you do on your computer, like, everything – and provides you with a timeline of every meeting you’ve attended, every website you’ve visited, and everything you’ve typed or clicked on your computer. For between zero and $30 per month, you get various features for searching, sorting, and interacting with all that history. How you react instinctively to that idea – handy tool or dystopian nightmare – probably says a lot about how you’ll feel about ChatGPT For Me.)
With ChatGPT For Me, you can test a chatbot on your computer’s data, however you want. What did I do last week? Who did I promise to call back today? What was that link about that thing I was reading about? Like anything with ChatGPT and other chatbots, it certainly won’t do that perfectly and will make some spectacular mistakes along the way. But it will get better soon.
As a matter of fact, this type of service is about to become a major industry. Besides Rewind there is also Lindy, an AI assistant that CEO Flo Crivello describes as “ChatGPT with access to all your apps.” Note apps like Mem and Notion and Reflect already integrate large language models or LLMs. Google and Microsoft, the two companies with arguably more access to our personal data than any other, are certainly exploring how LLMs can and should handle your private data. (Heck, Google has been talking about this since the days of Google Now.) Like it or not, the chatbots are coming for your stuff.
Dan Siroker, the CEO of Rewind.ai, gave me a demo of the new feature ahead of launch. He and I had never met before, but we had emailed a few times and he had looked me up prior to our meeting. So he opened the ChatGPT For Me window, a separate chat window in the Rewind app, and typed “how do I know David Pierce?” A few seconds later, it spat back a response: We had a recent interaction after I reached out to introduce myself. (Where and where.) We scheduled a 30-minute Zoom on March 22, 2023 (where), and discussed a major launch at Rewind (where). It also linked to the calendar event for our meeting, my LinkedIn page from his browser history, and more. In 10 seconds and one paragraph, Rewind detailed our entire relationship.
The specific way this works is very important. The whole promise of Rewind, the way it avoids falling into dystopia, is to make its pitch about privacy. The Rewind app itself never sends your data anywhere or stores it anywhere but your device, says Siroker, and Rewind’s help docs even direct you to tools like Little Snitch to figure it out for yourself.
However, when it comes to ChatGPT, Rewind needs to send some of your data to the cloud to process your question and get actionable answers. Siroker says the goal is to figure out how to do that in the least intrusive way. But what does that look like? “I’m obsessed with that question,” he says. “I don’t think anyone has figured out how to balance that balance between convenience and privacy in a way that generates enough value that people get excited about it, but doesn’t hinder their adoption in a way that feels creepy or scary.” He said privacy was the main constraint when developing ChatGPT For Me, and striking the right balance is actually “the key technology insight here that will allow this to be adopted not only by tech enthusiasts, but mainstream users as well.”
What the company settled on was to take your ChatGPT prompt – something like “what did I do last Friday” – and first search your Rewind database for a list of relevant information. That information is then sent as text to OpenAI’s ChatGPT servers; Siroker says no videos, screenshots or audio files are ever sent. “It then processes that query, sends the text back to Rewind, and we interpret those results and refer to your local data.”
Make no mistake, this is still a big trade-off. You may not be sending screenshots to OpenAI, but you are still sending the text they contain. That means you trust Rewind to choose the right things and ship them responsibly — and trust OpenAI to be a good steward and processor of that data. And it raises other, even more thorny questions: Should you be able to upload information about private conversations you’ve had with people without their consent? I won’t lie, it was a bit strange to see ChatGPT tell me about the email I sent Siroker. Rewind has actually been through this before: when it first launched it used a cloud service to transcribe the audio on your computer, which didn’t sit well with users. So Rewind disabled audio transcriptions until it could do them on your device. (What it does with OpenAI’s Whisper API.)
One day large language models such as GPT-4 will also be able to run locally on your device and there will be no need to send data anywhere
One day, Siroker thinks, large language models like GPT-4 will also be able to run locally on your device and there’s no need to send data anywhere. That day may even come soon. But for now, he thinks all he can do is be crystal clear about what’s happening and let users decide what they’re comfortable with. “I think many of our users don’t even realize the privacy risks,” he says. “So I feel like I have a higher obligation, as someone who deeply understands how it works…I have to be a good shepherd of it.”
Rewind’s “search engine for your life” has always been a bit of a controversial idea, though Siroker says more and more people are joining it. As the models get better and our digital lives become increasingly distributed and complicated, we need tools to make sense of it all. In fact, Siroker says Rewind users have been clamoring for ChatGPT integration for months. “We have the most valuable bits of data that can be used to answer questions,” he says. “They have a great model that will help you reason about them and answer them. As long as we can strike the right balance between privacy and convenience, I think we have a great product here.”
Whether Rewind or any other tool indeed strikes the right balance is up to you. And as long as you can choose, Siroker figures, we’re still doing it right.
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.