It did read the email's content, using it to support its conclusion, and it frames its answer as "strongly suggests"/"likely" opposed to assuming it for certain:

> > This email discusses the reading preferences of “he” and mentions “Monty” in the subject line. This strongly suggests that Monty is Donovan’s son.

Within the given domain (access to emails only - can't also view the author's Facebook connections or reach out to ask people) that seems to be the best answer possible, unless there was another email mentioning the name more directly that was missed.

> This email discusses the reading preferences of “he” and mentions “Monty” in the subject line. This strongly suggests that Monty is Donovan’s son.

I too would do it manually and begin by trawling through emails from my brother's address. Obviously just the word "Monty" means the brother probably mentioned the name somewhere else (e.g. in real life) and then just used that reference key assuming OP knows what/whom it is referred to.

It's somewhat impressive that an AI can infer that "this email's subject is a male name, and the email discusses his reading preferences, it's possible the email sender is talking about his son." (I wonder if AI would "understand" (whatever "understanding" means for AIs) that the email sender is not talking about a cat named Monty, because cats can't read).

As these models are trained on every piece of content ever written online, there are going to be a whole bunch of identity cracks, the equivalent of brute forcing a password.

AIs are going to make judgments about your character and personality based on everything you've ever written.

Guesses are going to come out about which burner accounts you've used, because the same password was used on otherwise unrelated accounts.

Essays you wrote in high school are going to resurface and be connected to your adult persona.

There was a time when an 8 character password was the state of the art, and now it can be cracked instantly. In the same way, sleuthing that would have been an impractical amount of work until recently is going to pierce the privacy veil of the internet in ways that could be really uncomfortable for people who have spent 3 decades assuming the internet is an anonymous place.

A decent sized Qwen 3 or Gemma 3 might well do the job. Mistral 3.1 Small is great too.

(Personally I'd be happy to pipe my email through an LLM from a respectable vendor that promises not to train on my inputs - Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini all promise that for paid API usage.)

(Clearly not a FE developer).

Indeed, but then I'd have to manually read those emails :-)

It's nice to offload that burden to an assistant. In the old days, if you were busy and had a secretary, that's precisely what you would do. This is no different.

I didn't point it out there, but I tried the same query with other people's kids, and it generally figured it out. The interesting thing is that its search strategy was different in each case.

(Clearly not a FE developer).

Enforcing in the client is nontrivial, though.

1. This is via Gemini, and I had been using Gemini for only a few days prior to this experiment. I assure you I never mentioned anyone's name to it before this.

2. This was via API. Whether Gemini or OpenAI, they do not train/retain this kind of memory if accessed via API. 99% of my interaction with LLMs is via APIs. I don't think I've ever used the ChatGPT interface.

(Clearly not a FE developer).

(Clearly not a FE developer).

If you're on Chrome, go into desktop view and zoom out

I've had to find emails about a particular thing in my girlfriend's mailbox with tens of thousands of spam emails and it takes just a few minutes.

It's not like search doesn't already exist. OP evens lays out the exact methodology to follow in the prompt itself...