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Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

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Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#141

Post by glenstein »

fn-mote wrote: post #22
karussell wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is comparable. Nowhere in the news they say it is offline but IMO Gemini Nano is offline (?) I'm not a Google fan but I never understood the outrage as it is a local model ... sure, you have to trust them, but if you use their browser you already do.

> 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.

I mean encryption is a real thing (Edward Snowden sometimes would simply say "Encryption works" in online Q and As) and there are ways to do zero knowledge data crunching Eleven while interacting with servers. Kim DotCom famously launched Mega as a zero knowledge file host after his legal issues with with megaupload, and lots of apps and services across the internet have been doing the version of this even with online services in the ensuing decade and a half. For instance I use StandardNotes which is online but encrypted.

I have no idea the extent to which any of that speaks to the Mozilla thing in this context, and local is preferable if that's achievable. And of course you should always do due diligence on what exactly is and isn't being promised when it comes to sending your data to the cloud, it certainly is possible to do that in privacy preserving ways. It's not a doubt about the technology so much as a question of institutional credibility.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#142

Post by redox99 »

walrus01 wrote: post #47
peri-cl wrote: 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…

> 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.

Then just allow it to be enabled on high end devices? But it must be local only. As hardware advances and people upgrade, more people will be able to turn on the feature.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#143

Post by masfuerte »

eipi10_hn wrote: post #140
nosioptar wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This has always been the case for years, for every browser. No idea why you say "now". Any browser providing extensions, not just Firefox, will at least won't allow extensions to modify their own extensions providing page. Otherwise, any malicious extension can infiltrate and trick users to download modified extensions from the browser's own extension page. Comically ignorant.

support.mozilla.org and addons.mozilla.org are distinct sites.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#144

Post by mrguyorama »

erikwiffin wrote: post #70
peri-cl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more un-fathomable if you recall Mozilla were the people who *pioneered* local browser ML as a privacy feature. Back in 2022—when Chrome was doing language translation by uploading to Google servers, and Mozilla introduced the (actually innovative!) idea of baking small ML models into the browser, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792447 ( "Firefox Translations: Translate websites in your browser without us…

Even more un-fathomable, Mozilla's CTO has been writing a substack with the underlying theme of "if the AI isn't running on your hardware, you don't own it" https://newsletter.ownersnotrenters.com/ They're still 100% cognizant! And yet.

You cannot ship on device inference with a real LLM still. Average people freak the hell out if it's even 10% slower than whatever google ships. At least thats the claim for how Firefox lost all their marketshare in the first place (Which was not the case. When everyone was claiming firefox was "slow", it simply was not, as long as you used an ad blocker. Normal people like my dad didn't switch to Chrome. It was installed through a sketchy mechanism and they never noticed)

Meanwhile, if you CAN run these models locally, using your own hardware for inference is supported. It's a setting option.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#146

Post by glenstein »

sehw wrote: post #129

Nobody asked. Give me back my RAM.

I remember the days when people justified Google Chrome's maximalist RAM usage by saying it was a good thing because it was allocating what the program actually needed to run quickly and efficiently, and it was better to grab what it actually needed then to operate inefficiently while using fewer system resources.

For a while that was even the majority view, but it never quite made sense to me.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#148

Post by petra »

peri-cl wrote: post #101
walrus01 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well, it depends on the task, doesn't it? "running shoes I looked at last week" / "Here's what I found in your browsing history:" doesn't need a 119 billion parameter frontier model; it's a RAG problem for the 0.6 B embedding models. That's an example Mozilla offers. Presumably to explain to their users why it's essential they hand over their last week's browsing history for this convenience (but it isn't! Hardly for…

Let's say the goal is doing something for work, so accuracy is important, and you prefer for it to be a nice reading experience, like a good translation.

As long as cloud model are somewhat better in these things, it's good that users would have the option to use cloud models.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#149

Post by peri-cl »

glenstein wrote: post #130
peri-cl wrote: 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 suppose some clarity would have been nice but I try to err on the side of charitable interpretation with these things, especially with how much MDS there tends to be in the hn comment sections. This does just seem to be like a high level announcement of the overall partnership, though some clarity over local versus cloud would have been nice. But they do link to a page describing the "smart window" which goes into…

Yes, that's one of the pages I wrote my comment about. I did try to interpret it charitably, but there's nothing on that page (everyone read it! It's short!) that simply communicates to users, "we're uploading your browsing history to the cloud".

It has a number of words circling around the topic, words relating to privacy and local storage; and all of them avoid communicating the main point. Some seem to mislead about it. How, for example, can you say

> "They’re stored on your device, not on Mozilla’s servers,"

And never explain in plain English "...but also we need to upload them to Mozilla's (& Mistral's) servers" at any point in the advert?

The first time I read this page, I myself couldn't figure out if it was about local inference or not; and I was actively looking for the answer. That's how opaque this is.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#150

Post by [deleted] »

redox99 wrote: post #142
walrus01 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Then just allow it to be enabled on high end devices? But it must be local only. As hardware advances and people upgrade, more people will be able to turn on the feature.

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