No AI* Here – A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter

Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Many of Firefox's LLM features like summarization afaik are powered by local models (hell even Chrome has local model options). It's weird to say neural translation is not a black box but LLMs are somehow black boxes that we cannot hope to understand what they do with the data, especially when viewed a bit fuzzily LLMs are scaled up versions of an architecture that was originally used for neural translation. Neural translation also has unverifiable behavior in the same sense.

I could interpret some of the data talk as talking about non local models but this very much seems like a more general criticism of LLMs as a whole when talking about Firefox features. Moreover, some of the critiques like verifiability of outputs and unlimited scope still don't make sense in this context. Browser LLM features except for explicitly AI browsers like Comet have so far had some scoping to their behavior, either in very narrow scopes like translation or summarization. The broadest scope I can think of is the side panels that show up which allow you to ask about a web page with context. Even then, I do not see what is inherently problematic about such scoping since the output behavior is confined to the side panel.

And now we have:

- A extra toolbar nobody asked for at the side. And while it contains some extra features now, I'm pretty much sure they added it just to have some prominent space to add a "Open AI Chatbot" button to the UI. And it is irritating as fuck because it remembers its state per window. So if you have one window open with the sidebar open, and you close it on another, then move to the other again and open a new window it thinks "hey, I need to show a sidebar which my user never asked for!". Also I believe it is also opening itselves sometimes when previously closed. I don't like it at all.

- A "Ask an AI Chatbot" option which used to be dynamically added and caused hundreds of clicks on wrong items on the context menu (due to muscle memory), because when it got added the context menu resizes. Which was also a source of a lot of irritation. Luckily it seems they finally managed to fix this after 5 releases or so.

Oh, and at the start of this year they experimented with their own LLM a bit in the form of Orbit, but apparently that project has been shitcanned and memoryholed, and all current efforts seem to be based on interfacing with popular cloud based AIs like ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Mistral. (likely for some $$$ in return, like the search engine deal with Google)

I have no opinion on not wanting to converse with a machine, that is a perfectly valid preference. I am referring more to the blog post's position where it seems to advocate against itself.

> Large language models are something else entirely. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn’t sit well.

Like I said, I'm all for local models for the exact reasons you mentioned. I also love the auditability. It strikes me as strange that the blog post would write off the architecture as the problem instead of the fact that it's not local.

The part that doesn't sit well to me is that Mozilla wants to egress data. It being an LLM I really don't care.

Meanwhile, Mozilla canned the servo and mdn projects which really did provide value for their user base.