It's not perfect/ideal, but you can basically accomplish keyword filtering using a shortcut powered by a message automation. I've done something similar where during the political season I would have all incoming texts (from unknown numbers) run through an LLM to determine if it was a political message. If so, it'd get deleted immediately.

But that is unfortunately a nuclear option that should not need to be taken to perform such a thing. Like the op, I have no interest in Shorts, especially considering the type of content that seems to proliferate that format.

However, I feel like YouTube does a genuinely good job — at least for me personally — of curating my feed with videos I have genuine interest in; mostly being tech talks and home DIY.

I'd hate to lose the discoverability I currently have for the sake of having to disable a feature like Shorts.

I use youtube without an account, only a cookie which I can nuke anytime. My experience with this is as you describe; it does a great job of giving me videos relevant to my interests. If it ever goes off the rails, I nuke the cookie and start over; reseeding the recommendations by watching a few videos from high-brow channels like Applied Science. It recommends no shorts to me.

This is available in iOS 26 to all applications; it's available directly to the user through shortcuts.

I'm currently on the beta, and I have a shortcut that pulls in various bits of context and feeds that directly to the on-device model.

Is there another model you’d say it’s roughly on a par with ?

That’s essentially what app intents are.

Thank you. I didn't know this had a name.

Yup, but limited in scope. And occasionally fails spectacularly.

Perplexity is great. I’ve been a happy paying customer for a while.

To allow users to query for anything? The index isn't to train and build a model, it's to behave as a search engine for their users. It would (or could) effectively replace Google for Apple users.

Imagine an updated Spotlight that would allow the user to enter any query, obtaining information from the internet, enriched with their local context/data.

LLM Siri is an entirely different concern than Apple potentially acquiring Perplexity. I view them as two wildly different initiatives.

I treat them kind of like icons/emoji, which often don't have a lot of fidelity due to size constraints.

I've been downloading them to my iPhone and converting a number of them to stickers, which can be used identically to emoji in iMessage.

Prompting is still work; it requires thought and oftentimes iteration.