8 ms·

Limitless: Personalized AI powered by what you've seen, said, and heard

102 points by nihaals 2y ago

singleshot_ 2y ago
This sounds like a great way to collect all my information and then create an endless stream of bullshit out of it. The enshittification continues.
georgehill 2y ago
Any data privacy experts here? Could someone explain how data encryption and decryption work here? https://www.limitless.ai/#privacy https://www.limitless.ai/#privacy
- nihaals 2y ago
  They don't really give any specifics and I'm not sure if they give you the keys or explain how the keys are derived (which I assume must be based on your login if they don't make you enter it otherwise they must be able to decrypt it whenever they want) but they mention they worked with Latacora[1]. Also curious if anyone else has any ideas on how they prevent themselves from being able to decrypt user data while implying they're not using E2EE[1]. [1]: https://help.limitless.ai/en/articles/9130680-privacy-with-limitless 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.
  - georgehill 2y ago
    I was going to buy it, but this lack of privacy explanation scares me.
    - nihaals 2y ago
      Just added some additional context from trying it which might make you glad you checked.
      - georgehill 2y ago
        Thanks!
  - Oras 2y ago
    It would be impossible to do E2E encryption unless the transcription happens on the device (I assume you mean the wearable). 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.
- dsiroker 2y ago
  Confidential Cloud is similar to end-to-end encryption, but with the added benefit of letting your personalized AI work for you even when you aren’t using the app. 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/intro.html 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-validation-program/certificate/4523 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/ https://aws.amazon.com/kms/>) uses FIPS 140-2 (source: <https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/projects/cryptographic-module-validation-program/documents/security-policies/140sp4523.pdf 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.
  - ooterness 2y ago
    Sorry, but what? How do you do any of the AI training or inference without decrypting the data in the cloud? I seriously doubt it's all running locally on the pendant.
  - MacsHeadroom 2y ago
    There is no way to anonymize transcripts where I and others refer to me by name and reference uniquely identifiable information. What happens when the AI provider is served with a warrant or subpoena for transcripts mentioning MacsHeadroom in the 30 day window? 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)?
bigfudge 2y ago
I really wish someone would make a pendant like this which is focussed on local-only use. It could connect to a mobile app or computer for transcription and summarisation, but using local models or an API key that the use chooses. I would pay serious money for a device high quality that did this (>$500) if it was backed by open-source platform/infrastructure for processing the managing the audio. Even better if it was written as an extension or fork of something like obsidian, or if the data structures were fairly open and there was an API for querying the data in interesting ways. 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.
- flax 2y ago
  Yes, a local-only always-on recorder/transcriber would be a killer product. Combine with a local LLM for summarization, and a simple search engine. But there's no way in hell I'm paying a subscription for this, or letting some 3rd party have this data. It doesn't seem like this should actually be that difficult to build an open-source version of, modulo battery-life concerns.
  - beaugunderson 2y ago
    > Yes, a local-only always-on recorder/transcriber would be a killer product. That's exactly what this was (Rewind) before they renamed the company and pivoted to AI.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ametrau 2y ago
  I have been wanting this since I first used whisper and saw it’s capability. Nothing you can buy off the shelf is sufficient at the moment and if you diy it’ll be too big.
eikowagenknecht 2y ago
Seems to be hugged to death currently: „Sorry! Our app is melting due to overwhelming load Error fetching: TypeError: Load failed“
- PStamatiou 2y ago
  Thanks - we've resolved this. There was a small window where we were auto-scaling up.
Rebelgecko 2y ago
It sounds like this is killing/replacing Rewind
- Jonovono 2y ago
  He said it's what they will be focusing on, but that they will continue to support Rewind
  - nihaals 2y ago
    Since the start of February, Rewind seems to have had 3 PRs merged for macOS (they auto deploy on new commits to main for both iOS TestFlight and macOS) and it’s had known bugs that have been around for months so I’m not holding my breath. Hopefully it’s at least updated for new macOS releases but I’m expecting an announcement in the future saying it won’t be supported anymore or it just not getting any updates for a year.
    - chandlertsien 2y ago
      Just out of curiosity, how do you find out "they auto deploy on new commits to main for both iOS TestFlight and macOS"?
- dsiroker 2y ago
  We wouldn’t be where we are today without our existing customers, so all Rewind Pro subscribers get Limitless Pro for free. 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.
  - aw123 2y ago
    So Rewind will be the local version and Limitless will be the cloud version? Will Rewind still be coming to windows?
htrp 2y ago
TLDR: The company formerly known as rewind ai (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33421751 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 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.
- NetOpWibby 2y ago
  Oh! Thanks for the info. This felt like the same people.
cududa 2y ago
Device design reminds me of the Misfit Wearables health tracker. Loved that little thing.
eh9 2y ago
i haven’t personally used the AI pin, but based on reviews, it doesn’t feel like these devices are going to feel productive until a much higher % of queries is answered on-device (without going to the cloud). 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.
- silverlake 2y ago
  You’re talking about the humane ai pin. That’s different.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    It's the same in a sense that both are cloud-based, so the same set of problems applies.
southernplaces7 2y ago
As is the case with just about all tech service offerings these days, whether they charge you or not, my first question is: How much of the info it extracts from me to provide me with this service is it going to hoard and then resell to others for the sake of "improving user experience" or some other bullshit justification for extracting more money. 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.
- primitivesuave 2y ago
  They do make some effort to push the “confidential cloud” aspect of their product, where the AI is supposed to somehow operate on your encrypted data, but these days I only believe it when I see the white paper. It is unfortunately quite common in our industry is to posture as more security-conscious and privacy-focused than you actually are.
  - delusional 2y ago
    And for some reason that's not illegal
  - janalsncm 2y ago
    I’m gonna doubt they’re operating AI on encrypted cloud data. In other words, there’s no technical reason they couldn’t be listening to your conversations. If these guys have accomplished homomorphic encryption they shouldn’t be building a wearable, they should be licensing their IP to Apple.
    - mattsan 2y ago
      They're definitely marketing this as if they were Apple. If this takes off I'm betting on Apple buying them out.
dsiroker 2y ago
(I'm the co-founder & CEO of Limitless) We are so honored this hit the front page of HN! Here's the video announcement: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1779857843895599383 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
- Delumine 2y ago
  I pre-ordered the rewind, and noticed that I'll be upgraded for free! But my question is for the subscription, will there be any discounts for the pro plan? 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?
- janalsncm 2y ago
  What is the purpose of an additional device with a microphone? Presumably all of your users already own a smartphone, which already has a microphone. If Limitless gets PMF, anyone who puts Whisper into an iPhone app will do what you’re doing basically for free.
  - dsiroker 2y ago
    Hardware is hard. We would have happily done this as a native iPhone or Watch app if it were possible. We explored that first. But, unfortunately both iOS and watchOS don't support it. In particular, anytime you listen to audio (a YouTube video, phone call, etc) it turns off the microphone and you have to remember to turn it back on.
- pmx 2y ago
  Do you plan to add support for microsoft calendars and email? I have gmail but none of my work stuff is in there so I can't really make great use of this :(
  - kiliankoe 2y ago
matzf 2y ago
Sounds just like an episode of Black Mirror. About as creepy as it gets these days.
- ravetcofx 2y ago
  A few more years and there will be an always recording pin on camera too! Who needs privacy
vezycash 2y ago
A pro feature - uploading your own audio
PStamatiou 2y ago
(Co-founder of Limitless here) 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 https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/1779860940541808935
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  You should consider a blog post on your website, in addition to a post on a closed social media where most people can't read threads anymore.
  - PStamatiou 2y ago
    Yea definitely, have been thinking about something more in-depth where i dive into how i created them too.
- int_19h 2y ago
  I'm speechless, honestly. Are you seriously bragging about the sheer amount of scrolling animations and other useless but highly annoying bling that you've managed to spring onto the poor visitors of the website? Because, yes, that is a truly impressive amount of it, but the only thing I can take away from it all is that you don't care about usability. 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 https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/1779867509388165203. I don't think I've seen a website condescendingly "speaking slow" to a user before...
cakeface 2y ago
Aren't there wiretapping laws that make recording conversations in certain situations illegal? I love the idea of this type of technology but it seems tricky to deploy from a moral and legal perspective.
- dsiroker 2y ago
  That's why we are going to offer Consent Mode. 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=267 https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1779857843895599383?t=26...
  - corytheboyd 2y ago
    So you record people without consent and pinky swear that your software will “unrecord” after the fact? I don’t know if you can just hand wave that away… ship has probably sailed on anyone enforcing these kinds of laws I guess, good luck
    - crooked-v 2y ago
      Yeah, that seems like exactly the sort of shenanigans that would get certain kinds of judges extremely unhappy.
      - refulgentis 2y ago
        It's likely more nuanced than that. 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.
  - refulgentis 2y ago
    I've previously worked on the Google Assistant from several angles, and this demo'd awesome, and I was very surprised. Then I saw it is listed as "soon" on the roadmap. Then I remembered the demo was very much a video, not a demo. 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.
bsenftner 2y ago
Google Glass for Audio. Nope.
FL410 2y ago
Big fan of Rewind (despite the impact on battery life!). My favorite part of it is that everything is verifiably local. I'll take an inferior AI model to shipping recordings of everything I see/hear to someone else. 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.
- crooked-v 2y ago
  > everything is verifiably local It's not. If you use the meeting summarization or querying features, the text transcripts are sent to OpenAI for LLM processing.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
NetOpWibby 2y ago
This looks incredible. Site looks fantastic. In a perfect world, I'd pre-order immediately. 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.
- NetOpWibby 2y ago
  Oh, looks like Consent Mode is turned OFF by default. Yeah, nah. https://xoxo.zone/@andybaio/112276682288723340 https://xoxo.zone/@andybaio/112276682288723340
janice1999 2y ago
It's not clear from your website who you are and where you are based. Given that you want so much personal data, it might be better to put that up front and center to gain some trust.
pebblesun 2y ago
Given how new this product is, shouldn't trailer focus on what it does and how to use it in daily lives, rather than showing off different colors and finish of the product? With iPhones, Pixels, I can understand this focus. No one needs to explain what they do. Not this one. This the first time I am hearing/seeingyou. So, show me what you can do. Not what colors or material you're made with.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
Here is where they bought the domain name: https://web.archive.org/web/20230426201730if_/http://limitless.ai/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230426201730if_/http://limitle...
Imnimo 2y ago
I watched the demo video, and I'm not sure I understand what "seen" means in the title. Is there a camera on this?
throwaway888abc 2y ago
1984 by accidental convenience
dedalus 2y ago
This is Vannevar Bush's Memex in action using the cloud
iamleppert 2y ago
The value of taking notes isn’t in the text content that is produced. It’s in the actual act of taking the notes, that’s what actually creates meaningful connections in your brain and leads to greater insight and on demand memory later. 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.

102 points by nihaals 2y ago

This sounds like a great way to collect all my information and then create an endless stream of bullshit out of it. The enshittification continues.

georgehill 2y ago

Any data privacy experts here? Could someone explain how data encryption and decryption work here? https://www.limitless.ai/#privacy https://www.limitless.ai/#privacy

nihaals 2y ago
They don't really give any specifics and I'm not sure if they give you the keys or explain how the keys are derived (which I assume must be based on your login if they don't make you enter it otherwise they must be able to decrypt it whenever they want) but they mention they worked with Latacora[1]. Also curious if anyone else has any ideas on how they prevent themselves from being able to decrypt user data while implying they're not using E2EE[1]. [1]: https://help.limitless.ai/en/articles/9130680-privacy-with-limitless 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.
- georgehill 2y ago
  I was going to buy it, but this lack of privacy explanation scares me.
  - nihaals 2y ago
    Just added some additional context from trying it which might make you glad you checked.
    - georgehill 2y ago
      Thanks!
- Oras 2y ago
  It would be impossible to do E2E encryption unless the transcription happens on the device (I assume you mean the wearable). 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.
dsiroker 2y ago
Confidential Cloud is similar to end-to-end encryption, but with the added benefit of letting your personalized AI work for you even when you aren’t using the app. 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/intro.html 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-validation-program/certificate/4523 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/ https://aws.amazon.com/kms/>) uses FIPS 140-2 (source: <https://csrc.nist.gov/CSRC/media/projects/cryptographic-module-validation-program/documents/security-policies/140sp4523.pdf 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.
- ooterness 2y ago
  Sorry, but what? How do you do any of the AI training or inference without decrypting the data in the cloud? I seriously doubt it's all running locally on the pendant.
- MacsHeadroom 2y ago
  There is no way to anonymize transcripts where I and others refer to me by name and reference uniquely identifiable information. What happens when the AI provider is served with a warrant or subpoena for transcripts mentioning MacsHeadroom in the 30 day window? 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)?

bigfudge 2y ago

I really wish someone would make a pendant like this which is focussed on local-only use. It could connect to a mobile app or computer for transcription and summarisation, but using local models or an API key that the use chooses. I would pay serious money for a device high quality that did this (>$500) if it was backed by open-source platform/infrastructure for processing the managing the audio. Even better if it was written as an extension or fork of something like obsidian, or if the data structures were fairly open and there was an API for querying the data in interesting ways. 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.

flax 2y ago
Yes, a local-only always-on recorder/transcriber would be a killer product. Combine with a local LLM for summarization, and a simple search engine. But there's no way in hell I'm paying a subscription for this, or letting some 3rd party have this data. It doesn't seem like this should actually be that difficult to build an open-source version of, modulo battery-life concerns.
- beaugunderson 2y ago
  > Yes, a local-only always-on recorder/transcriber would be a killer product. That's exactly what this was (Rewind) before they renamed the company and pivoted to AI.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ametrau 2y ago
I have been wanting this since I first used whisper and saw it’s capability. Nothing you can buy off the shelf is sufficient at the moment and if you diy it’ll be too big.

eikowagenknecht 2y ago

Seems to be hugged to death currently: „Sorry! Our app is melting due to overwhelming load Error fetching: TypeError: Load failed“

PStamatiou 2y ago
Thanks - we've resolved this. There was a small window where we were auto-scaling up.

Rebelgecko 2y ago

It sounds like this is killing/replacing Rewind

Jonovono 2y ago
He said it's what they will be focusing on, but that they will continue to support Rewind
- nihaals 2y ago
  Since the start of February, Rewind seems to have had 3 PRs merged for macOS (they auto deploy on new commits to main for both iOS TestFlight and macOS) and it’s had known bugs that have been around for months so I’m not holding my breath. Hopefully it’s at least updated for new macOS releases but I’m expecting an announcement in the future saying it won’t be supported anymore or it just not getting any updates for a year.
  - chandlertsien 2y ago
    Just out of curiosity, how do you find out "they auto deploy on new commits to main for both iOS TestFlight and macOS"?
dsiroker 2y ago
We wouldn’t be where we are today without our existing customers, so all Rewind Pro subscribers get Limitless Pro for free. 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.
- aw123 2y ago
  So Rewind will be the local version and Limitless will be the cloud version? Will Rewind still be coming to windows?

htrp 2y ago

TLDR: The company formerly known as rewind ai (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33421751 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 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.

NetOpWibby 2y ago
Oh! Thanks for the info. This felt like the same people.

cududa 2y ago

Device design reminds me of the Misfit Wearables health tracker. Loved that little thing.

eh9 2y ago

i haven’t personally used the AI pin, but based on reviews, it doesn’t feel like these devices are going to feel productive until a much higher % of queries is answered on-device (without going to the cloud). 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.

silverlake 2y ago
You’re talking about the humane ai pin. That’s different.
- int_19h 2y ago
  It's the same in a sense that both are cloud-based, so the same set of problems applies.

southernplaces7 2y ago

As is the case with just about all tech service offerings these days, whether they charge you or not, my first question is: How much of the info it extracts from me to provide me with this service is it going to hoard and then resell to others for the sake of "improving user experience" or some other bullshit justification for extracting more money. 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.

primitivesuave 2y ago
They do make some effort to push the “confidential cloud” aspect of their product, where the AI is supposed to somehow operate on your encrypted data, but these days I only believe it when I see the white paper. It is unfortunately quite common in our industry is to posture as more security-conscious and privacy-focused than you actually are.
- delusional 2y ago
  And for some reason that's not illegal
- janalsncm 2y ago
  I’m gonna doubt they’re operating AI on encrypted cloud data. In other words, there’s no technical reason they couldn’t be listening to your conversations. If these guys have accomplished homomorphic encryption they shouldn’t be building a wearable, they should be licensing their IP to Apple.
  - mattsan 2y ago
    They're definitely marketing this as if they were Apple. If this takes off I'm betting on Apple buying them out.

dsiroker 2y ago

(I'm the co-founder & CEO of Limitless) We are so honored this hit the front page of HN! Here's the video announcement: https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1779857843895599383 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

Delumine 2y ago
I pre-ordered the rewind, and noticed that I'll be upgraded for free! But my question is for the subscription, will there be any discounts for the pro plan? 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?
janalsncm 2y ago
What is the purpose of an additional device with a microphone? Presumably all of your users already own a smartphone, which already has a microphone. If Limitless gets PMF, anyone who puts Whisper into an iPhone app will do what you’re doing basically for free.
- dsiroker 2y ago
  Hardware is hard. We would have happily done this as a native iPhone or Watch app if it were possible. We explored that first. But, unfortunately both iOS and watchOS don't support it. In particular, anytime you listen to audio (a YouTube video, phone call, etc) it turns off the microphone and you have to remember to turn it back on.
pmx 2y ago
Do you plan to add support for microsoft calendars and email? I have gmail but none of my work stuff is in there so I can't really make great use of this :(
- kiliankoe 2y ago

matzf 2y ago

Sounds just like an episode of Black Mirror. About as creepy as it gets these days.

ravetcofx 2y ago
A few more years and there will be an always recording pin on camera too! Who needs privacy

vezycash 2y ago

A pro feature - uploading your own audio

PStamatiou 2y ago

(Co-founder of Limitless here) 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 https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/1779860940541808935

littlestymaar 2y ago
You should consider a blog post on your website, in addition to a post on a closed social media where most people can't read threads anymore.
- PStamatiou 2y ago
  Yea definitely, have been thinking about something more in-depth where i dive into how i created them too.
int_19h 2y ago
I'm speechless, honestly. Are you seriously bragging about the sheer amount of scrolling animations and other useless but highly annoying bling that you've managed to spring onto the poor visitors of the website? Because, yes, that is a truly impressive amount of it, but the only thing I can take away from it all is that you don't care about usability. 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 https://twitter.com/Stammy/status/1779867509388165203. I don't think I've seen a website condescendingly "speaking slow" to a user before...

cakeface 2y ago

Aren't there wiretapping laws that make recording conversations in certain situations illegal? I love the idea of this type of technology but it seems tricky to deploy from a moral and legal perspective.

dsiroker 2y ago
That's why we are going to offer Consent Mode. 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=267 https://twitter.com/dsiroker/status/1779857843895599383?t=26...
- corytheboyd 2y ago
  So you record people without consent and pinky swear that your software will “unrecord” after the fact? I don’t know if you can just hand wave that away… ship has probably sailed on anyone enforcing these kinds of laws I guess, good luck
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    Yeah, that seems like exactly the sort of shenanigans that would get certain kinds of judges extremely unhappy.
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      It's likely more nuanced than that. 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.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  I've previously worked on the Google Assistant from several angles, and this demo'd awesome, and I was very surprised. Then I saw it is listed as "soon" on the roadmap. Then I remembered the demo was very much a video, not a demo. 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.

bsenftner 2y ago

Google Glass for Audio. Nope.

FL410 2y ago

Big fan of Rewind (despite the impact on battery life!). My favorite part of it is that everything is verifiably local. I'll take an inferior AI model to shipping recordings of everything I see/hear to someone else. 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.

crooked-v 2y ago
> everything is verifiably local It's not. If you use the meeting summarization or querying features, the text transcripts are sent to OpenAI for LLM processing.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

NetOpWibby 2y ago

This looks incredible. Site looks fantastic. In a perfect world, I'd pre-order immediately. 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.

NetOpWibby 2y ago
Oh, looks like Consent Mode is turned OFF by default. Yeah, nah. https://xoxo.zone/@andybaio/112276682288723340 https://xoxo.zone/@andybaio/112276682288723340

janice1999 2y ago

It's not clear from your website who you are and where you are based. Given that you want so much personal data, it might be better to put that up front and center to gain some trust.

pebblesun 2y ago

Given how new this product is, shouldn't trailer focus on what it does and how to use it in daily lives, rather than showing off different colors and finish of the product? With iPhones, Pixels, I can understand this focus. No one needs to explain what they do. Not this one. This the first time I am hearing/seeingyou. So, show me what you can do. Not what colors or material you're made with.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

Here is where they bought the domain name: https://web.archive.org/web/20230426201730if_/http://limitless.ai/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230426201730if_/http://limitle...

Imnimo 2y ago

I watched the demo video, and I'm not sure I understand what "seen" means in the title. Is there a camera on this?

throwaway888abc 2y ago

1984 by accidental convenience

dedalus 2y ago

This is Vannevar Bush's Memex in action using the cloud

iamleppert 2y ago

The value of taking notes isn’t in the text content that is produced. It’s in the actual act of taking the notes, that’s what actually creates meaningful connections in your brain and leads to greater insight and on demand memory later. 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.