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

#121

Post by asadotzler » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 9:17 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?

Yes. 3 years before Opera. Netscape shipped Communicator in June of '97, the suite that added email and calendaring to browsing, based in part on their Collabra groupware acquisition in '96. Opera released v4 in June of 2000, three years later, with its email client.

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

#122

Post by asadotzler » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 9:19 PM UTC

noufalibrahim wrote: post #79

PurpleRamen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opera is an anything-Internet-suite. It's not just a browser, but aims to deliver interfaces for anything else people are doing with browsers. So anything for which most people would use a website or web-extensions, they deliver out of the box. And AI seems to be something that should be integrated deep into such an environment.

Mozilla (the browser) was like that wasn't it? Email, browser etc. and FF was the stripped down version.

Mozilla was like that because Mozilla was a clone of Netscape Communicator that had been like that since 1997 when Netscape acquired Collabra and turned the standalone browser into a groupware suite with email, calendaring, directory services, and more.

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

#123

Post by asadotzler » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 9:24 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)

Yes. I was responsible for kicking off that project. At Mozilla we'd been working with Europe on the Bergamot LLM translation tech and in 2022 we started work integrating it into Firefox. It began shipping last year. New language models are added regularly, all pivoting off English so French to German would actually be French -> English -> German and so you'd need two models for that. Each model was a few megabytes when I was starting on this but I've been away for a bit now so maybe they've improved on that but it did mean that we had to pull models down on demand because doubling the binary size for an initial Firefox download wasn't an option. (BTW, I was the guy that shipped Firefox v1 and my target for its download size back then was 3.5 MB or "about the size of an mp3". We made it down to about 4.5 MB which was close enough. It's over 10 times that size today.)

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

#124

Post by al_borland » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 9:30 PM UTC

mrb wrote: post #118

al_borland wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prov…

My thinking is that those are additions developers can use to enable better experiences with a service hosted remotely. The local LLM seems like an end-user feature.

The local LLM feels like it could/should be its own app, separate from the browser. If the point of the local AI is not keep the users data local, it seems confusing to have it in the browser at all.

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

#125

Post by asadotzler » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 9:39 PM UTC

SushiHippie wrote: post #120

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 See also: https://browser.mt/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/local-translation-add-on...

Firefox's translation feature was built on Mozilla's Bergamot collab with Europe. It's an NMT as you note but it's also a set of language models trained on large language corpora using, among other techniques, the transformer architecture, so people calling it LLM translation don't bother me at all, and I'm the guy that brought it to Firefox (with my architect partner Andre Natal). The best article is probably https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/06/training-efficient-neural-... though that was before we started integrating it into Firefox proper.

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

#126

Post by asadotzler » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 9:47 PM UTC

bootlooped wrote: post #107

FredPret wrote: post #91

Playing fast and loose with "major"

Very unfortunate, but true. Opera was the first browser I remember using besides Internet Explorer, and the amount of features it had compared to IE was a total game changer. I want to say Firefox was just called "Mozilla" back then and used a dinosaur logo. Eventually I switched to Firefox for quite a long time, but I'll always remember Opera fondly.

I was an Opera user in the second half of the '90s when Netscape and IE were battling it out. When Netscape launched Mozilla in '98 I moved to that because it was the first open source browser and I had to be a part of that. I was for 25 years and during that time Opera went from good to bad to awful. In the 90s, Opera was a leader in CSS and had MDI. In the 2000s as we at Mozilla realized the groupware suite was a bad fit for most folks and leaned down from Seamonkey to Firefox, Opera went in the opposite direction, adding more and more features until it was almost unusable. Then they eventually kicked out their founder and his top lieutenant (CSS inventor) and finally sold to the Chinese. Tetzchner now leads Vivaldi and Håkon now does woodworking and occasionally runs for office as the founding member of the Pirate Party in Oslo, Norway.

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

#127

Post by asadotzler » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 9:51 PM UTC

ivanjermakov wrote: post #88

I want my user agent to have nothing to do with LLMs. Last time I checked, the browser's purpose was to serve web applications.

Incorrect. It's the web server's purpose to serve web applications. The browser's purpose is to act as the client, the user's agent, in rendering those web applications. If you're using Firefox, you've probably already got LLMs (well, NMT models which are built using large language corpora, and among other things, a transformer architecture, so close enough) and they're a good thing because they allow you to translate websites without sending that site and its address and content to a third party for remote translation and surveillance.

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

#128

Post by asadotzler » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 9:56 PM UTC

al_borland wrote: post #39

Eriks wrote: post #13

Browsers are for browsing internet. So many of them are now turning into bloatware..

Opera has leaned into this for decades. They have a long history of innovating in the browser space. I suppose that doesn’t happen without some bloat along the way. Not every idea is going to be a winner. 20 years ago, Opera had an email client built into the browser, for example. I used Opera for quite a while back then, but eventually it became too much bloat, and I ended up switching to Phoenix (now Firefox) when…

Opera copied Netscape which had email three years earlier (June '97 compared to Opera's June 2000) when groupware was still a thing in the 90s. Everyone except Opera realized the bundling of email and calendar and chat and more was wrong for most folks by around 2003 and pared back following Firefox and Safari to streamlined interfaces with only the most important features and leaving everything else to extensions. Opera (and MyIE/Maxthon) doubled down on bundling features until it was an unsustainable monstrosity and when that became clear the board kicked out the founder and not long after the CTO and inventor of CSS left and the Chinese now own it so it's just another Chromium skin.

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

#129

Post by asadotzler » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 10:07 PM UTC

irobeth wrote: post #32

Eriks wrote: post #13

Browsers are for browsing internet. So many of them are now turning into bloatware..

I think it's better to look at it like the old AOL client? I've used Opera on and off for ~20 years, and in that time I've seen it strive to be more like a "Web OS"

I first used Opera in December of '96 and it's never tried to be an OS, not once. Mozilla tried it with FirefoxOS based on Gecko and Palm tried it with WebOS, heck even Microsoft tried with Trident somewhat, but no, Opera never tried with the Presto engine or Electra before that. What Opera did was bundle lots of features and offer a nice MDI interface before anyone had the superior tabbed browsing that Mozilla and Firefox popularized.

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

#130

Post by asadotzler » Wed, Apr 03, 2024, 10:11 PM UTC

jasonlotito wrote: post #78

Eriks wrote: post #13

Browsers are for browsing internet. So many of them are now turning into bloatware..

You are confusing the Internet with the web. You do not "browse" the Internet. Browser suites are for using the Internet, and the Netscape Suite provided numerous tools to use various protocols on the Internet. One of those happened to be a browser for browsing the web. I say this to make it clear that the "now" in your comment ignores past and present browsers across all platforms.

FTP wasn't the web and browsers did that right in the main browser window using the primary addressing interface. RSS wasn't the web and web browsers rendered RSS in the main window and using the main addressing interface as well. Email isn't the web but Gmail is and browsers can seamlessly hand off several non-web formats to web clients where needed. Your distinction is real but also meaningless. If a user can do it in a browser, it's a part of the web. If a user cannot do it in a browser and requires a dedicated client, then it's not a part of the web.