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Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

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Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#161

Post by swyx »

tuesdaynight wrote: post #62
jaffathecake wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aww thanks! To be fair I didn't toe the party line when I was at Google (imo). Although, that caused me increasing amount of grief internally, until I left. From what I hear, things have gotten exponentially worse in that regard for folks still on the team.

Hey, Jake, not related with your post, but I just want to say that HTTP203 were one of the best web dev content that I've ever consumed. Amazing mix between humour and tech discussion. Thank you!

co sign, tuning in to you and Das riffing was one of the highlights of my webdev career. bring it back!!

(lmk if you'd like an ai.engineer stage to do it on)

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#162

Post by dabockster »

codedokode wrote: post #134

I am against this. 1) This will be a new source of fingerprinting information and this is difficult to fake to fool fingerprinting scripts, so it can be abused for "device verification". There should be no ability to "verify" a browser, and anyone should be able to emulate any browser. This is the most important point, I thought Google people are smart enough to see it. 2) LLMs use lot of memory and CPU time, for man…

> There should be no ability to "verify" a browser, and anyone should be able to emulate any browser.

Hard disagree. The AI industry has absolutely shredded the various anti-scraping and anti-botting social contracts that were in place prior to the covid pandemic. Like it's now common knowledge that robots.txt isn't a hard requirement and can be avoided entirely, for example. They have absolutely turned the open web into a dark forest.

Having a browser session able to be verified as untampered and/or "trusted" is probably going to be a thing going forward. Sucks a ton, but we all did this to ourselves.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#163

Post by austin-cheney »

tokai wrote: post #76
austin-cheney wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds hypocritical.

I hate knives cause they kill people, but I love my kitchen knife when I make dinner.

That is a bad counter-example, because its just a poorly conceived statement. You apparently don't hate knives. You hate killing people, which isn't remotely similar.

Using AI to cheat at academics and then hating on people who use AI to cheat on media creation is absolutely hypocritical. Its qualifying hypocritical stupidity like this results in shoving a single vendor's LLM into the browser.

If that's still too complicated then just call it complexity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_complexity

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#164

Post by pessimizer »

john_strinlai wrote: post #154
MisterTea wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the most important point, I thought Google people are smart enough to see it. Google just points towards the money like other bacterium and beats its flagella until it gets there. I don't know why or how anyone would EVER think Google is going to do something good for the web or humanity.

> I don't know why or how anyone would EVER think Google is going to do something good for the web or humanity. i dislike google as much as the next guy, but sometimes it can be good to remember that actual humans work at google. some of them want to improve things for people. some of them even have a conscience. one immediate "good" that comes to mind, from google, is the project zero team.

Maybe it's also helpful to point out that all evil is done by actual humans, and that google will actually fire humans who don't do what google wants them to do.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#165

Post by austin-cheney »

codedokode wrote: post #134

I am against this. 1) This will be a new source of fingerprinting information and this is difficult to fake to fool fingerprinting scripts, so it can be abused for "device verification". There should be no ability to "verify" a browser, and anyone should be able to emulate any browser. This is the most important point, I thought Google people are smart enough to see it. 2) LLMs use lot of memory and CPU time, for man…

[flagged]

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#166

Post by isodev »

Google on their proposal:

> Browsers and operating systems are increasingly expected to gain access to language models.

I think this is only true amongst “AI all the things” folks. Both tech and non-tech people around me are more focused on turning these features off. Some even avoid sensitive actions like banking from LLM infused browsers.

So I think Mozilla is right to object. This API is not in the interest of the user/agent.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#167

Post by herf »

Chrome seems to use a custom inference runtime also (in addition to Gemini Nano). It would be better if this were all interoperable. The WebGPU alternatives like WebLLM do not have the same access.

I've been trying these models out for the last year, and it seems to me that we want them to work in a 5-10W "laptop" power envelope, but they really work best with a 50-500W GPU instead - i.e. they eat batteries. This means things work better in a "plugged in" gaming laptop/desktop rather than a typical web client. At least for now.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#168

Post by anthonyrstevens »

eocjeockoefj wrote: post #160
john_strinlai wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why or how anyone would EVER think Google is going to do something good for the web or humanity. i dislike google as much as the next guy, but sometimes it can be good to remember that actual humans work at google. some of them want to improve things for people. some of them even have a conscience. one immediate "good" that comes to mind, from google, is the project zero team.

It doesn’t really matter what the people working there want. It matters what the higher ups say, as they control the cash flow and consequently where resources are spent. And, surprise surprise, the higher ups are generally the ones fucking things up because they also need to see those numbers and lines go up, regardless of actual impact on people’s lives. So yeah, there surely are good people working for Google, but…

So is it reasonable and helpful to see the same comments over and over again any time Google/Microsoft/OpenAI/Meta is mentioned in a comment - "X is bad, money drives all their decisions, they are anti-user, etc. etc." or should we actually expect to see relevant comments discussing the topic at hand?

It's inane and annoying to have to wade through the same, predictable, might-as-well-be-copy-and-paste comments on every post.

What do you have to say about the Prompt API specifically?

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#169

Post by doctorpangloss »

dabockster wrote: post #162
codedokode wrote: post #134

I am against this. 1) This will be a new source of fingerprinting information and this is difficult to fake to fool fingerprinting scripts, so it can be abused for "device verification". There should be no ability to "verify" a browser, and anyone should be able to emulate any browser. This is the most important point, I thought Google people are smart enough to see it. 2) LLMs use lot of memory and CPU time, for man…

> There should be no ability to "verify" a browser, and anyone should be able to emulate any browser. Hard disagree. The AI industry has absolutely shredded the various anti-scraping and anti-botting social contracts that were in place prior to the covid pandemic. Like it's now common knowledge that robots.txt isn't a hard requirement and can be avoided entirely, for example. They have absolutely turned the open web…

we already live in that world, Google and Apple cooperates with vendors like Cloudflare to make, essentially, the PAT / WEI implementation that they wanted.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#170

Post by anthonyrstevens »

austin-cheney wrote: post #165
codedokode wrote: post #134

I am against this. 1) This will be a new source of fingerprinting information and this is difficult to fake to fool fingerprinting scripts, so it can be abused for "device verification". There should be no ability to "verify" a browser, and anyone should be able to emulate any browser. This is the most important point, I thought Google people are smart enough to see it. 2) LLMs use lot of memory and CPU time, for man…

[flagged]

>> least capable people

>> lack the ability to reason

Oh, COME ON. What do you have to say about the Prompt API specifically?

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