Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models • Hacker News Board

Re: Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models

#111

Post by 29athrowaway » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:28 PM UTC

robin_reala wrote: post #17

29athrowaway wrote: post #10

Opera was the reason CSS exists.

That’s fairly revisionist. Bert Bos was never involved with Opera to the best of my knowledge, and Håkon Wium Lie only joined Opera later. The initial drafts of the CSS1 spec were done in 1994 well before Opera even existed, and the W3C’s history of CSS lists Opera as the third browser to implement at least part of the spec.[1] [1] https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS20/history.html

Viola had stylesheets I think.

Re: Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models

#112

Post by jtietema » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

Hasn't Firefox been doing this for a while already with their local translate feature?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/translate/

Maybe they mean LLM, instead of AI (not sure if Firefox translate models are LLM ir not)

Re: Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models

#113

Post by vengefulduck » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:32 PM UTC

amlib wrote: post #21

nerdponx wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we consume and interact with so much of our information via browser that it's a natural pairing? Why does my browser have a PDF reader and print manager built in?

The very things that should ideally be part of an operating system and be called/embedded by the browser as need be?

Browsers are just mini OSs at this point. It’s probably best just to accept it. Honestly in some respects (security, isolation, resource management) they do a better job than the operating system they run on top of.

Re: Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models

#114

Post by beefnugs » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:43 PM UTC

nerdjon wrote: post #38

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that there is at least some effort to bring these models local instead of shoving even more personal data into servers and who knows where it is going. But I am really frustrated by LLM's being installed into nearly everything with no real value. We still have fundemtal issues with the tech like it hallucinating and giving straight up bad information. The idea that it is being shoved…

Its the perfect back door to get more data. "It could be useful someday! just keep giving us all the training data until it does something useful" It captures the cypto suckers, it traps smart software people with "unlimited potential!", it traps every single company management because they can fire everyone, it traps government in endless new reasons to authoritarian-smackdown.

There is no stopping it, there is only people who stop trusting most technology

Re: Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models

#115

Post by abdullahkhalids » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 5:44 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #80

jabroni_salad wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opera has been bundling in a mail client, rss reader, calendar app etc for ages now. I also always thought it was weird but Opera people seem to like it, to the point that inspired browsers like Vivaldi also do that.

Didn't Netscape bundle in a mail client before Opera did?

Something like that. Mozilla used the Netscape code to first create Mozilla Application Suite and then SeaMonkey[1]. It had Mail, IRC chat and a composer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey

Re: Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models

#116

Post by saurik » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 6:04 PM UTC

So while I am usually the person who would much rather the browser do almost nothing that isn't a hardware interface, requiring all software (including rendering) to be distributed as code by the website via the end-to-end principal--making the browser easy to implement and easy to secure / sandbox, as it is simply too important of an attack surface to have a billion file format parsing algorithms embedded within it--I actually would love (and I realize this isn't what Opera is doing, at least yet) to have the browser provide a way to get access to a user-selected LLM: the API surface for them--opaque text streaming in both directions--is sufficiently universal that I don't feel bad about the semantic lock-in and I just don't see any reasonable way to do this via the end-to-end principal that preserves user control over tradeoffs in privacy, functionality, and cost... if I go to a website that uses an LLM I should be the one choosing which LLM it is using, NOT the website!!, and if I want it to use some local model or the world's most powerful cloud model, I 1) should be in control of that selection and 2) pretty much have to be for local models to be feasible at all as I can't sit around downloading and caching gigabytes of data, separately, from every service that might make use of an LLM. (edit: Ok, in thinking about it a lot more maybe it makes more sense for this to be a separate daemon run next to the web browser--even if it comes with the web browser--which merely provides a localhost HTTP interface to the LLM, so it can also be shared by native apps... though, I am then unsure how web applications would be able to access them securely due to all of the security restrictions on cross-origin insecure port access.)

Re: Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models

#117

Post by aragonite » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 7:12 PM UTC

wumeow wrote: post #77

Spivak wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which like yeah, but the US doesn't exactly come out smelling like a rose here. The whole EU-US transatlantic data transfer spat surrounding Facebook was because of PRISM which EU courts ruled gave the US the same level of access. The US even went so far to demand that US intelligence has domain over data no matter where it's stored, and supremacy when it conflicts with local laws https://www.theguardian.com/technolo…

Appealed and overturned: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0ZU1RI/ > which I don't really buy because China can't arrest you over here Not entirely true: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/19/china-police-state-...

> Appealed and overturned

Look up the CLOUD act passed in response to that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

Re: Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models

#118

Post by mrb » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 7:27 PM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #43

mrb wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposite viewpoint: browsers are for much more than "browsing". It's been 10-20 years that browsers have become the only app many people ever use, on a computer. So they already almost do everything: video conferencing, instant messaging, editing documents, sending emails, image editors, video games, calendar management, etc So at this point, frankly, "running a local LLM" is a pretty minor feature compared to the en…

The video conferencing, messaging, document editing, and games are things browsers can load from an external source. That’s different than running it locally.

You forget the web browser standards had to be extended to add support for a lot of that stuff I mentioned:

- built-in support of USB webcam (for video conferencing)

- WebGL for video games

- XMLHTTPRequest to support active pages (email, calendar, etc)

- for arbitrary 2D image (image editors, etc)

My point is that this stuff was not necessary either to simply "browse the internet". Browsers constantly evolve to provide more and more complex features beyond browsing.

Re: Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models

#119

Post by wumeow » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 7:53 PM UTC

aragonite wrote: post #117

wumeow wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Appealed and overturned: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN0ZU1RI/ > which I don't really buy because China can't arrest you over here Not entirely true: https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/19/china-police-state-...

> Appealed and overturned Look up the CLOUD act passed in response to that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

The CLOUD act has provisions that allow a company to challenge a warrant if the target is not a US person and obtaining the data would violate local laws.

Re: Opera becomes the first major browser with built-in access to local AI models

#120

Post by SushiHippie » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 9:15 PM UTC

jtietema wrote: post #112

Hasn't Firefox been doing this for a while already with their local translate feature? https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/features/translate/ Maybe they mean LLM, instead of AI (not sure if Firefox translate models are LLM ir not)

They use neural machine translation [0] models, they are artificial neural networks, but I don't think that you can really call them "AI".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_machine_translation