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Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

mistral.ai

111–120 of 211 posts

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#111
post #44
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The privacy policy for Smart Window[1] indicates that prompts are not only sent to an LLM provider (Mistral in this case), but also to Mozilla servers first. > The assistant sends the full prompt (including your query, any relevant Memories, and any additional relevant browsing context) to a Mozilla server. > > Upon receipt, Mozilla forwards the request to a third-party large language model (LLM) on your behalf. The…

Some years ago Firefox was the go to browser if you wanted to have "some" privacy in your browsing (together with uBlock origin). With news like this I m really wondering if my views are outdated and I need to to some good researching on maintaining some privacy in what I m browsing.

They have twice (that I'm aware of) tried rebranding as an advertising company. They are funded by Google (though not _necessarily_ influenced by them). There was an article in LWN by them about (in part) how they can't get enough information about users of Thunderbird so they were suggesting telemetry should be enabled by default and opt out instead of opt in because most people won't opt out.

I think they get a lot of credit because they aren't Google and not enough push back

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#112
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone else's extensions not work on support.mozilla.org?

[flagged]

You are choosing a really bad example to make your point. Not letting extensions operate on the actual site where you install the extensions isn't being "comically evil" by any means.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#113
post #108
post #104

These are two companies that seem to be slipping in ethics recently. I'd prefer this over a chrome and openai offering, but I no longer trust these two to necessarily do the right thing regarding privacy

> These are two companies that seem to be slipping in ethics recently What makes you say that?

This comment thread is one example and not out of recent character

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You are choosing a really bad example to make your point. Not letting extensions operate on the actual site where you install the extensions isn't being "comically evil" by any means.

[flagged]

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#115
post #5

This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud. These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimu…

I am not trying to defend Mozilla doing this, and I don't support sending data to cloud based services like this in a way that users won't understand. But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM as a prepackaged thing in a mass market distributed browser. You don't want a browser that takes 10GB of ex…

I'm worried that the middle could fall out of the computing market across the board. If you can afford to keep up with the upgrade treadmill, you'll get private, local inference capabilities. If you can't afford to stay on the treadmill, you'll be stuck with whatever cloudshit malware Silicon Valley wants to foist on you.

I acknowledge that this is already the case, to some extent. The cheapest laptops at Best Buy are crammed with the most preinstalled malware. That's been the case for, what, 25 years? But you've always been able to wipe that cheap laptop and make it into a much more capable, trustworthy machine.

Well, assuming LLMs do become a pervasive part of the computing experience, what happens to the cheap laptops? Do all computers get more expensive to accommodate local inference? Does the rift between the everyday user's experience and the savvy user's experience grow even wider than it already is? Neither outcome seems good for the average joe who just needs to check his email.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#116
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>advocating for Firefox developing features only for rich hobbyists ?: >marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain

The only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model. Every single normal person, when presented with a "translate" button either know it's going online, or don't care about it. Begging the purists to run away from Firefox at this point so they can stop wasting everyone's time. Your demands for examplarity and whining about m…

You're talking out of your ass.

It is so ironic that "normal people don't care about privacy, just you nerds" is an HN meme. Everybody I know cares, often in an extreme way, and I barely hang out with technical people in real life. I've met people so irrational and nontechnical about modern invasions of privacy that they think that it is being driven by demons.

The reason this is a meme on HN is because tons of HN posters are people who spend a lot of effort trying to invade people's privacy and to come up with new ways of concealing that fact.

Virtually every sleazebag trying to hide things in ToSes, updates, and telemetry has been an HN poster. And they're pretending that they speak for normal people, because they are scumbags, think normal people are animals that will do anything that they can get away with and don't care about any boundary, and that therefore 1) they themselves are normal, and 2) normal people deserve whatever happens to them.

This is what comes from making know-nothing Libertarianism/Objectivism a mainstream ideology, ironically at the same moment that Alan Greenspan, a direct Rand acolyte, was admitting that it had failed while the world economy was sliding into the toilet. Intellectual Libertarianism/Objectivism had failed, but the dumb kind had yet to properly rise. I don't know anything except you nerds are worried about nothing, I'm going to do it because I can and nobody is going to tell me what to do, nobody normal cares about this, and if they do let them try and stop me, why do you care anyway...

Please just do it and stop talking, you don't have anything to say. I hope all of you end up in cells next to SBF.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#117
post #29
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nowhere in the news they say it is offline Reading HN, I 100% understood “private” to be marketing copy for “local inference”. How else could the information be kept private? I begrudgingly suppose that there is precedent for the usage, like Apple’s Private Relay, but I really don’t think they are comparable.

> conversations aren’t saved on Mozilla’s servers by default, and partners like Mistral agree to zero data retention. I don't read this as offline ...

People only read the headline, and the headline lies.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#118
post #5

This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud. These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimu…

> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference

I remember using a small model for autocomplete, I think it was Qwen 2.5 Coder 3B way back, on a laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a 13th Gen Intel i7 CPU. It made the fans spin up and loaded things so much (Ollama back then) that it was largely unusable for doing software development at the same time. I don't want inference anywhere near my personal computing devices (same in regards to phones, really, I don't want the power usage that'll just help degrade the battery faster). Also most small models just really suck, unless you have trained them on a very specific task, but then they suck at everything that is not that task.

Then again sending browser history online also sucks, unless you're into that kind of thing.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only people having an expectation of translations being done locally is exactly the nerds that keep whining that it's not using a local model. Every single normal person, when presented with a "translate" button either know it's going online, or don't care about it. Begging the purists to run away from Firefox at this point so they can stop wasting everyone's time. Your demands for examplarity and whining about m…

You're talking out of your ass. It is so ironic that "normal people don't care about privacy, just you nerds" is an HN meme. Everybody I know cares, often in an extreme way, and I barely hang out with technical people in real life. I've met people so irrational and nontechnical about modern invasions of privacy that they think that it is being driven by demons. The reason this is a meme on HN is because tons of HN po…

I do not fundamentally disagree with you but it's also an extremely well known phenomenon that average non tech users, in the aggregate of millions of people, will click almost any "yes/I agree/continue/Next" step on a software installer or new user sign up workflow for anything, without reading the ToS. People blithly sign up for all sorts of cloud based things and services without understanding their full ramifications all the time.

I also wonder at the specific level of aggression and the tone of your comment which does not seem to be an appropriate response to that person's specific comment.

People such as you are describing and rightfully criticizing are knowingly taking advantage of that. Indeed it's how a lot of malware gets installed too.

The person you're responding to is pointing out that a lot of people at the surface level do only appear to care about the results. They put something into google translate, it works, they gets results they are pleased with, they don't put a lot of thought into the fact that the data is going to an external service. That's not an inaccurate description of how a lot of people use their computers these days. Look at how many people signed up for ChatGPT accounts and put the chatgpt app on their phones and talk to it all the time. That's the level of critical thinking a lot of non tech users have about their personal data.

The fact that people will click yes/agree/OK on almost anything is how Windows computers got Bonzi Buddy installed on them back in the day, and now it's continued into the cloud-everything era.

https://geekhack.org/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=21140.0...

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#120

Would be very cool if you could type a long query and the model would just build an advanced google search query using what you typed. You could even ship a tiny model in the browser itself that does that. Something like: "blog posts which talk about using sending emails to yourself as a notes taking mechanism". The output could look like: "note taking" OR "notes" ("emailing yourself" OR "email to myself" OR "email y…

There's no such thing as an advanced google search query anymore. The second will give you worse results than the first (without quotes.)
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