aifs

AI Filesystem

Local semantic search over folders. Why didn't this exist?

pip install aifs
pip install "unstructured[all-docs]" # If you want to parse all doc types. Includes large packages!

from aifs import search

search("How does AI Filesystem work?", path="/path/to/folder")
search("It's not unlike how Spotlight works.") # Path defaults to CWD

How it works

Running aifs.search will chunk and embed all nested supported files (.txt, .py, .sh, .docx, .pptx, .jpg, .png, .eml, .html, and .pdf) in path. It will then store these embeddings into an _.aifs file in path.

By storing the index, you only have to chunk/embed once. This makes semantic search very fast after the first time you search a path.

If a file has changed or been added, aifs.search will update or add those chunks. We still need to handle file deletions (we welcome PRs).

In detail:

1. If a folder hasn't been indexed, we first use unstructured to parse and chunk every file in the path.
2. Then we use chroma to embed the chunks locally and save them to a _.aifs file in path.
3. Finally, chroma is used again to semantically search the embeddings.

If an _.aifs file is found in a directory, it uses that instead of indexing it again. If some files have been updated, it will re-index those.

Goals

• We should always have SOTA parsing and chunking. The logic for this should be swapped out as new methods arise.
  • Chunking should be semantic — as in, python and markdown files should have different chunking algorithms based on the expected content of those filetypes. Who has this solution?
  • For parsing, I think Unstructured is the best of the best. Is this true?
• We should always have SOTA embedding. If a better local embedding model is found, we should automatically download and use it.
  • I think Chroma will always do this (is this true?) so we depend on Chroma.
• This project should stay minimally scoped — we want aifs to be the best local semantic search in the universe.

Why?

We built this to let open-interpreter quickly semantically search files/folders.