171–180 of 248 posts
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…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I wrote those words originally.) Wow. I had no idea that people would misinterpret what I was saying in this way. I was not meaning to imply it was an expectation of users or developers. I was meaning it as a statement of what was currently a growing industry trend by OS and browser vendors, of shipping or preparing to ship LMs. By now the statement could probably be amended from "expected to gain access to" to "shi…
I thought it was clear and am also surprised by the reaction (en-US speaker). "Is/are expected" is generally used as a passive-voiced form of "we/they predict" (obviously without having to specify a specific pronoun). E.g. "It's expected to rain tomorrow" means a weather forecast says it will rain tomorrow and usually not that people want it to rain tomorrow. I wonder if this phrase has different connotations among o…
"It's expected to rain tomorrow" is a prediction, whereas "students are expected to behave themselves" is an expectation (with consequences, presumably).
In the former case we clearly aren't saying we want it to rain, just that we believe it's likely, whereas in the latter example we are clearly expressing that we do want students to behave.
It's ambiguous because "expect" has two different meanings:
> to consider probable or certain
> to consider reasonable, due, or necessary
> Browsers and operating systems are increasingly expected to gain access to language models.[0] Are they? [0] https://github.com/webmachinelearning/prompt-api/blob/main/R...
AI massively empowers people who are incapable of anything except bikeshedding. It itself is very likely to be a bikeshed (but there are legitimate uses), and it also gives them to power to drone on until they overpower any opposition to their useless ideas. Everything is increasingly expected to gain bikesheds. Can't wait for the CVEs.
The amount of insulting language directed at people who actually have an open mind about AI and AI tooling is frustrating. Can you all just please address the merits of the topic of the post instead of making every AI-related post on HN an excuse to vent about your own particular worldview and insult people who don't necessarily agree?
The nice thing about open protocols is that we don't have to endorse or use one implementation over another, yet, somehow, the browser monopoly continues to be a standing dilemma. There are nice projects, like ungoogled chromium, tor, and many more, but I find the biggest issue is that there isn't a voice out there for the average person and a project that connects with the masses. I think another issue is that a lot…
If you were some paragon of integrity with a ton of money, developed everything yourself, and refused all corruption, you would be called the Russian Chinese terrorist child-porn browser, denounced in Congress, and eventually arrested (then released) during a layover in Germany.
Google would send an opinion to the court vaguely supporting the prosecution but disguised as technical advice; Firefox would pretend they never heard of you or what is happening, and delete all mention of you when posted in comments or on their social media. Ubuntu and Fedora would remove you from their repositories, Apple and Android never allowed you in their stores in the first place. The NYT would do a story about your "shadowy origins" and ask whether a reasonable country should allow a company so unwilling to work with the government or selected nonprofits to be an intermediary between their children and a dangerous internet. Fox would call you an Islamo-Communist anti-Semite, and somehow also associate you with the "alt-right," Dr. Fauci, and "environmental whackos."
After two years, and the banning of your project by most companies and websites, and the contrived failure of other companies simply associated with you but unrelated to the browser, the charges will be dropped. The bans will still be there, and where they are gone, people will informally stick to them. People will not feel like they can put your company on their resume. Any casual mention of you on the social internet will inspire at least a half-dozen hate comments, and FOSS projects will be attacked for ever having mentioned you positively.
If you aren't a paragon, you sell out after the NYT story.
The reason there are monopolies is because they are enforced.
My experience with running LLMs locally is spinnnig up llama-server (possibly on a separate machine) and then configuring other applications to point to that OpenAI compatible web server instead of OpenAI or similar.
I don't want a web browser creating/running an LLM instance as that machine may not have the capability or capacity to run an LLM instance.
> According to Chrome's documentation, to use the prompt API you must 'acknowledge' Google's Generative AI Prohibited Uses Policy. Elements of this policy go beyond law. For example: >> Do not engage … generating or distributing content that facilitates … Sexually explicit content Do not engage in misinformation, misrepresentation, or misleading activities. This includes … Facilitating misleading claims related to go…
The nice thing about open protocols is that we don't have to endorse or use one implementation over another, yet, somehow, the browser monopoly continues to be a standing dilemma. There are nice projects, like ungoogled chromium, tor, and many more, but I find the biggest issue is that there isn't a voice out there for the average person and a project that connects with the masses. I think another issue is that a lot…
It's somehow even worse when you compile your own browser. Want Spotify or Netflix? You need Widevine with attestation. Go pay Google. Your Browser Agent string isn't Chrome or Firefox? Enjoy endless Cloudflare captchas or just a 403 error.
nowadays, you could update this to just "your browser agent string isn't Chrome"
I feel that a LLM that runs locally has its place in a modern browser. The alternative is sending your page contents to a server in the cloud with the associated loss of privacy. Of course issues like fingerprintability and vendor model lockin have to be taken into account. It seems to be too early to carve things in stone, so I agree with Brian Grinstead and the others.
Either way, if this does happen I definitely hope it gets put behind a brower permission.
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's a broader class of concern here that reduces to the form: "The web platform should not be able to do this." For people who believe this, I think they'll invent any reason they can to push this narrative. E.g.: Well, sure, the user could turn it off, but then websites would say 'your browser isn't supported because it has no LLM' and now the web just got worse for me because I wanted to turn off LLMs.
But this reduces to "the web platform should not be able to do this" because at the end of the day it was the website operator's decision to turn off their website if an LLM is unavailable. Its not really the platform's fault, or the fault of its maintainers, that they built this capability and JP Morgan or whoever decided to screw over people who don't want to enable this feature. Similar to turning off Firefox support even though it would work fine, because they can't be assed to test their site in Firefox.
I don't know how to counter that take tbh. The web is the world's most successful application platform. It is not competing with PDF; it competes with SwiftUI. Of the options presented in front of you, you are hallucinating an option that reads like "we'll just keep the web nice and static and the way it is and nothing will ever change about it, the web is done". In reality your two options are: "We adapt the web to the evolving needs of its users" or "The web fails to serve the evolving needs of its users, and SwiftUI or WinUI steps in to fill that gap". This second option is far worse!
The nice thing about open protocols is that we don't have to endorse or use one implementation over another, yet, somehow, the browser monopoly continues to be a standing dilemma. There are nice projects, like ungoogled chromium, tor, and many more, but I find the biggest issue is that there isn't a voice out there for the average person and a project that connects with the masses. I think another issue is that a lot…
The problem is that if there were one, it would be subverted by powerful people with enormous amounts of cash to throw around. Firefox was the people's browser, then it suddenly wasn't. If you were some paragon of integrity with a ton of money, developed everything yourself, and refused all corruption, you would be called the Russian Chinese terrorist child-porn browser, denounced in Congress, and eventually arrested…