Imagine for a second that you're absolutely starving.
You've got two options for dinner. Option A is
this trendy five -star restaurant. You walk in.
The service is instant. The food appears like
magic. It's delicious. How good so far? But you
have to admit, the kitchen is a total black box.
You have no idea what's in the sauce. Right.
And if you asked to see the recipe, they'd probably
kick you out. Exactly. That's most AI tools today,
like notebook LM, fast, polished. but opaque.
Now option B, you're in your own kitchen, it's
hot, it's messy, maybe you burn the toast, but
you bought every single ingredient yourself.
You know exactly what's going into that meal.
And that, right there, is the trade -off Surf
Sense is asking us to make. Welcome back to the
Deep Dive. Today, we aren't just looking at another
productivity app. We're looking at a tool that
is trying to fundamentally shift the power dynamic
between you and your data. We're talking about
SurfSense. And this is so much bigger than just
organizing files. The core theme here is really
digital sovereignty. That's a heavy term. It
is. But it boils down to a simple question. Do
you own your thoughts? Or are you just renting
them from a server somewhere in California? SurfSense
is making a very bold pitch that you should be
the chef in your own kitchen. even if that means
you have to do the dishes. Even if it means doing
the dishes yourself. I love that framing. So
here's the roadmap. We're going to break down
how this whole local AI thing works in practice.
We'll look at the setup, the ability to actually
edit your source documents, which is a feature
I didn't know I needed, and the reality of running
this offline. And we have to be honest about
the fiction points because, you know, spoiler
alert. Cooking at home takes longer than ordering
takeout. It really does. We're going to get into
the slow processing, the loud laptop fans, and
why the audio features might be a total letdown.
But let's start at the beginning. When you first
open SurfSense, it feels different. It's dark.
I mean, you open ChatGPT, and the UI is trying
to be your best friend immediately. How can I
help you today? Right. It's very eager. SurfSense
just opens and it's quiet. It's empty. It felt
a little like moving into a new house before
you've unpacked any boxes. Just... white walls.
That emptiness is intentional, though. It forces
a mental shift. Most of us treat AI like a junk
drawer. We just dump everything in and hope for
the best. And SurfSense says no. SurfSense says
no, you need to curate this. The whole interface
is built on two concepts, spaces and sources.
OK, let's talk about spaces. To me, that just
sounds like a fancy word for folders. Is there
a real difference? There is. And it's actually
crucial. A space isn't just a folder. It's a
A context container. A context container. Yeah.
And your normal cloud drive, you might have a
folder called work stuff with random PDFs. Do
that in Surf sense. And the AI is going to get
confused. It might hallucinate. Because it doesn't
know what lens to look through. Exactly. It needs
boundaries. The source we look at had this great
example about naming. You can't just call a space
test. Right. If you do that, the AI has no semantic
anchor. It doesn't know if bank means a river
bank or a financial institution. The example
in the guide was Remote work tips, productivity,
and health, which is a mouthful. It is, but look
what it does. You're basically prompt engineering
before you even ask a question. You're telling
the system, hey, limit your scope to just this.
You're priming the engine. So you're whispering
the intent to the AI before you even upload a
file. That's interesting. It makes you be more
organized. It does. It's not for the lazy. It
asks you to think about why you're saving something.
So we have our box. We've named it with intention.
Now we have to fill it. And this is where I think
a lot of people are going to hit their first
speed bump. Yeah, you're going to hit the processing
wall. The dreaded progress bar. When you upload
a PDF, it's not just storing it. It's indexing
it locally on your machine. It's turning every
word into vectors, which is just math the AI
can read. And that takes horsepower. And there's
a file limit, right? Something like 300 pages?
Right. So you can't just upload a massive textbook
in one go. The system will choke. You've got
to split it up. But once that file is in there,
something happens that I have not seen in other
tools. And I think this is the aha moment. On
the Editor feature. The document isn't static.
No, it's a game changer for anyone who deals
with messy data. You can actually type inside
the source document. You can. Think about why
that matters. A PDF is usually locked, right?
It's like a photograph of text. But say you upload
a scan from 1990. the OCR might mistake an S
for a five. So you get FIFE offense instead of
SurfSense. Exactly. And if you feed that garbage
into a normal AI, it might get confused. It's
just noise. In SurfSense, you can literally open
the text layer, see that error, and just fix
it. So you are scrubbing the data clean before
the AI even touches it. It's the garbage in garbage
out principle. You're cleaning the vegetables
before you cook. You're ensuring the answer is
actually accurate. I can see that being huge
for researchers. But, you know, we don't just
live in a world of PDFs. Half my reading is just
watching YouTube videos. And SurfSense knows
that. It calls itself a digital binder. It's
trying to flatten the information hierarchy.
It doesn't care if the data came from a hardcover
book or a YouTuber. It's all just data. Tell
me about the video workflow. Because my watch
later playlist is basically a graveyard where
content goes to die. We all have that graveyard.
Yeah. SurfSense changes that. You take the URL
for, say, a 45 -minute video on home office economics,
and you just paste it in. And it doesn't just
save a link. No. It rips out the transcript.
It pulls all the spoken words and turns them
into text. So now, in your remote workspace,
you've got a PDF guys, a blog post, and the full
text from that video. And the AI sees them all
as equal. That's the moment of wonder. You can
ask a question, and it can pull a quote from
page 10 of a PDF and combine it with a tip from
the 20 -minute mark of a YouTube video. It synthesizes
across formats. That is powerful. It's like having
a research assistant who watches the videos for
you. But, okay, having the data is one thing.
Getting good answers out, that's where I usually
struggle. I'll admit it, I'm a lazy prompter.
To summarize this prompt, we all are. But with
a tool like this, Precision really pays off.
It has this mentions feature, kind of like on
social media. It's critical for local AI. You
have to remember this is running on your laptop,
not a supercomputer. If you ask a generic question,
it has to scan everything. It's inefficient.
Very. But with mentions, you point the flashlight.
You type the at at symbol. And I can say, at
YouTube video, what did it say about chair height?
Exactly. You're telling the AI, ignore the PDFs,
focus only on this. It's constraints -based prompting.
It gets you bitter answers faster. The guide
had some great examples. One was asking for a
comparison table. Yes. Create a table comparing
the advice at PDF and at video. And the result,
was it good? The content was accurate, but visually
it was a little rough. Squished was the word
I saw. Very squished, yeah. You had to scroll
sideways to read it. It doesn't have that polished
design you'd get from Google. But the information
was spot on. It correctly identified that the
PDF focused on time blocking while the video
was all about disk ergonomics. That's a high
level synthesis that would take me 20 minutes
to do by hand. And it did it in seconds. Another
great one was the quiz generation. Oh, for students
this must be gold. It is. Create 10 multiple
choice questions based on at textbook. and it
generates a test with an answer key. That's amazing
for active recall. But the thing that really
builds trust for me is the citations. The little
numbers. The little numbers. When it gives you
an answer, there's a little number at the end
of the sentence. And when you click it, it doesn't
just take you to the document. It highlights
the exact sentence in the source text where it
got that information. That's the accountability.
That's checking the chef's work. Precisely. It
makes it really easy to spot hallucinations.
If the AI says the moon is made of cheese, and
cites page four, you can click and immediately
see it actually says the moon is made of rock.
Okay, so we've got our spaces, our data is clean,
we're prompting with the at symbol, but does
this tool live on an island? Or does it connect
to anything else? It's surprisingly social for
a privacy tool. It integrates with Gmail, Google
Drive, Discord, and This is the big one, Notion.
Notion users are a passionate bunch. I say that
as one of them. It's a whole lifestyle. Yeah.
And SurfSense taps right into it. The guide detailed
a use case with messy meeting notes that I think
will resonate. Walk us through that because getting
notes out of Notion is usually a pain. Well,
normally you'd have to export to PDF. download
it, re -upload it, it's friction. With SurfSense,
you just connect it directly to a specific Notion
page. And then you can prompt it, like, look
at meeting notes and list my to -dos. And it
spits out a clean list with due dates. It turns
that mess into an action plan. Yeah. And it's
a live connection, so if you update Notion, SurfSense
sees the changes. That is incredibly useful.
But now we have to talk about the elephant in
the room. or the server in the room. The local
mode. This is what separates SurfSense from everything
else, isn't it? It's the whole point. It is.
I mean, with chat GPT, your data gets sent to
a massive server farm. Your tax returns, your
diary, it all leaves your house. Which creates
a vulnerability, even if you trust the company.
Exactly. SurfSense says you don't need to trust
them. You can download the brain, the actual
AI model, like Llama 3, directly onto your laptop.
So I can literally just turn off my Wi -Fi. You
can pull the ethernet cable. Be on a plane. It
will still work. Total privacy. The data never
leaves your hard drive. That sounds like magic.
But there has to be a catch. You can't run a
supercomputer on a MacBook without some consequence.
And the catch is your hardware. These brains
are heavy. They need a lot of RAM, a lot of GPU
power. So if I'm on a five -year -old laptop...
It's gonna struggle. The fans will spin up like
a jet engine. Your battery will drain. And it's
going to be slow. How slow are we talking? Instead
of an instant answer, you might wait 30 seconds.
The interface itself might lag. Your computer
is doing the work a data center normally does.
You can feel the weight of it. So that's the
trade -off, privacy for performance. And patience,
which brings us to the rough edges. We promised
we'd be honest about this. Yes. And the source
material was pretty brutal about some of the
failings. The biggest ones seemed to be audio.
Yeah. We talked about Notebook LM and its audio
overview feature, which is amazing. It generates
a podcast on the fly. SurfSense claims to do
it, too. But in testing? It failed. Repeatedly.
Just error messages. The author tried to generate
a summary of that remote workspace, and it just
wouldn't compile. And when it finally did work?
The reports say it sounded robotic, like an old
GPS voice. It sounded like a computer reading
a text file. So if you want a smooth audio summary
for your jog, This is not the tool. No, stick
to Notebook LM for that. This is for reading
and analyzing, not listening. In the general
performance, you mentioned that heaviness. The
word used was clunky, like buttons taking five
or six seconds to respond. That doesn't sound
like much, but in 2024, six seconds is an eternity.
It breaks your flow. You click save and you have
to wait. It's a constant reminder that this is
complex software running locally, not some slick
web app. Functional, not beautiful. A tool for
a workbench. Not a toy. Exactly. And for some
people, that's a deal breaker. If you want that
seamless, Apple -like experience, you will be
frustrated. So let's bring this all together.
We have a tool that gives you total data ownership,
but it's slow, a bit clunky, and some features
are half -baked. Who is this actually for? I
think it's for two very specific groups. First,
the privacy absolutists. Lawyers, researchers
with sensitive IP, or just anyone who hates the
idea of big tech scanning their data. For them,
this is the only game in town. Right. And the
second group is the organizers. The people who
want to curate a library, who want to fix the
typos, who want to build a second brain that
is actually theirs, they'll put up with the friction
for the control. It really does come back to
that cooking analogy we started with. It does.
SurfSense is home cooking. It's messy. You have
to chop the onions yourself. The fans will spin.
But you made the meal. You know what's in it.
And the cloud tools are fast food. Convenient,
tasty, but you're eating what they serve you.
And look, sometimes you just want a burger. There's
nothing wrong with that. I use cloud AI every
day for quick things, but for the important stuff.
You might want a home -cooked meal. I think that's
the perfect way to fame it. It's not about one
being better. It's about the right tool for the
job. Exactly. So here's our challenge to you,
the listener. Don't try to switch your whole
life over to SurfSense today. Just try one small
project. Just one. Maybe it's your tax prep or
planning a vacation. Create a space. Upload three
or four documents, try fixing a typo in the editor,
and just see how it feels. See if the friction
is worth that feeling of ownership. You might
find you actually like being the chef. And if
your laptop fan starts sounding like a helicopter.
That's the sound of privacy. Thanks for diving
in with us. We'll see you in the next one. Take
care.