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I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

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Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#371

Post by rkomorn »

markbao wrote: post #366
rkomorn wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't read comments about Dropbox and products/features until maybe a week or two ago and somehow don't know the reference despite having spent most of the last 20 years in tech. I presume the story is along the lines of "someone declined to invest in Dropbox and lost out" but what do I need to google to get the actual context? I don't need a full rehash here. Edit: or is it "Dropbox is adding features nobody want…

The Dropbox thing is exactly what I was thinking of when I was writing my original comment. Here is the reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 The basic summary is that a HN commenter suggested Dropbox was redundant because you could do some convoluted setup that 0.1% of the world would understand and 0.001% would actually want to use (and yes, that’s still a few hundred thousand people) and overall tha…

Much appreciated. :)

Edit: shame it wasn't about the band and the song though.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#372

Post by big_toast »

uoaei wrote: post #325
big_toast wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an encoder-decoder transformer trained on audio (language?) and transcription. Seems kinda weird for it not to meet the definition in a tautological way even if it’s not the typical sense or doesn’t tend to be used for autoregressive token generation?

Is it Transformer-based? If not then it's a different beast architecturally. Audio models tend to be based more on convolutional layers than Transformers in my experience.

The openai/whisper repo and paper referenced by the model card seem to be saying it's transformer based.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#373

Post by orbital-decay »

isodev wrote: post #324
orbital-decay wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a ridiculous hyperbole. Translation and search alone are examples of wildly successful applications of generative AI that a lot of people actually want because it makes the experience qualitatively better. This is pretty evident if you look at normal people shifting to ChatGPT and other AI-powered search from the engines like Google. Recent AI mode in Google is a desperate attempt to stay relevant.

No, they’re examples of misuse of LLMs - “sometimes correct” is not a replacement for a search engine or a translator. Remember, Google search used to actually find you things before they shifted to replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries.

Are we even living in the same universe?? In mine, Claude and Gemini Pro outperform classic machine translators by orders of magnitude, that's not an exaggeration. I can finally rely on correct machine translation when reading articles in languages I don't speak and when talking to people in their native language. They still miss some nuance in the informal talk, but I can be reasonably sure it adapts the cultural context pretty well, and tolerate the rest.

>replacing results with “somewhat random but reads plausible” AI summaries

I'm talking about actual deep (re)search that cites the sources, not simple summaries. For example I'm considering a KTM 890 Adventure R as my next motorcycle but the reliability and TCO are worrying. I've prompted and launched an agent to recursively scan YouTube travel videos, or rather the transcriptions, to look for actual issues with this bike, without all that KTM marketing bullshit and paid reviews, and provide me with timecodes. And it did, finding a ton of extremely non-obvious non-English channels in the process (Russian, Afrikaans, Spanish etc), scanning dozens of hours of videos, and providing timecodes for me to verify. That saved me insane amount of time.

Normal people actually pay money for this, I'm pretty surprised to see this in the wild but it's true. Reducing this to "techbros and influencers" is pure wishful thinking.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#374

Post by Sharlin »

everdrive wrote: post #4

Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.

What I want is a thesaurus, dictionary and translator easily available anywhere (eg. in Spotlight on Mac – but Apple has of course stubbornly refused to make Spotlight more useful for some unfathomable reason). Those tools don't need an LLM, though, just calls to good old human-curated databases. Currently I make do with Firefox search keywords, but the workflow could be smoother.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#375

Post by squarefoot »

For what is worth the opinion of one user, I want AI to be available when I need it as external loadable module (extension? plugin?), not bundled in everything no matter if I use it or not because I know it will eventually get in the way. If Mozilla is being offered money by AI companies to bundle it (Google search agreement rings a bell?) then they'll likely adopt it regardless of users opinion, but hopefully Firefox derivatives such as LibreWolf and others will remove that.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#377

Post by clueless »

rs186 wrote: post #86

Unless I am horribly mistaken, using Firefox is an intentional choice by a vanishing group of people. If you are just a little bit less careful or determined, you would likely be using chrome or a chrome variant, definitely not Firefox. These users are choosing a browser that has slightly worse performance, has fewer features (e.g. WebUSB) and is seeing more problems with Cloudflare/Google captcha every day. All of t…

World class open source browser, A+ ad blocker, better tab-style tree extension, more free/open extension store, no corporate overload, on and on....

Who the f needs/uses WebUSB? :D

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#378

Post by insane_dreamer »

Google has an "AI Overview" whenever you search for something, and this is probably what Mozilla wants to enable. I think your average person will find it useful.

Whether it's a good thing or not is hard to say. It's great when it's a simple question and not critical ("what is a hybrid golf club?") -- much faster than getting links and scanning the pages of wherever you are linked to. It's not great in that it 1) reduces traffic to websites producing the content that the LLMs depend on; 2) LLM hallucinates; 3) the information is actually critical and you should be researching it more in depth.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#379

Post by Lord-Jobo »

kburman wrote: post #172

Mozilla has lost the plot. People support Mozilla because they want a strong, independent browser, not so staff can siphon money into side projects that exist mainly to look good on someone’s resume. Things like Transformer Lab have nothing to do with Firefox and nothing to do with the mission Mozilla claims to care about. This isn’t innovation. Leadership keeps green-lighting trendy distractions while the browser th…

I don’t understand how so many gigantic corporations can focus on cutting costs over and over, firing people until every team is anemic.

Then there’s Firefox, who very clearly just need a slim team focused on performance and maintaining standards.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#380

Post by moffkalast »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #110

I think "nobody i know" and nobody are different things. Mozilla wants more firefox users. there are "AI browsers" and ai integrated browsing is becoming more and more the norm. Mozilla is doing the right thing here, the features are there but unobtrusive. But down the road, I fully expect Mozilla to do whatever they have to do to remain in the game. Their small market share is hurting the entire internet, they can't…

Mozilla really just needs to do three things: allow adblocking, have feature parity with Chrome, and render HTML correctly.

Currently they've at least got one of the three.

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