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Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

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Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#161

Post by PunchyHamster »

Iolaum wrote: post #44
julenx wrote: 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 With news like this I m really wondering if my views are outdated and I need to to some good researching on maintaining some privacy in what I m browsing.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 are and Mozilla is basically malicious org

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#162

Post by IndySun »

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…

> "...the bare minimum of ethics..."

That is a great phrase.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#163

Post by flatline »

smsm42 wrote: post #138
graemep wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "running shoes I looked at last week" / "Here's what I found in your browsing history:" Does that need an LLM at all?

Not really, but it's probably easier to make it on top of LLM than to make specially-purposed tool for it, if we talking in terms of time-to-market effort.

SQLite FTS could have done this a decade ago. We've had good local search capabilities for two decades and they either been underused or abandoned (e.g. Google Desktop, Yahoo! Search). This may be a reasonable projection of where AI is headed. You can do a lot locally but there is too much incentive to centralize around cloud infrastructure, then the privacy concerns make that prohibitive and we end up with what feels like a false choice of cloud or bust.

Maybe it's LLM hype that will bring more powerful capabilities to the desktop?

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#164

Post by nullc »

nullc wrote: post #94

Cloud inferrance is not private: These providers, even if they don't get hacked, have bribed employees, or outright lie, cannot and will not resist a subpoena or similar. Mozilla is acting unethically by obfuscating what's on offer here and overstating the privacy and security properties that can be achieved. It's doubly unfortunate because simple translations are completely reasonable to do with cpu inference.

Late thought: consider what telegram went through over just end to end encryption...

And practically every country has lower privacy standards for data that crosses borders.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#165

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

tyre wrote: post #157
smsm42 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize that people that don't care won't even know what Firefox is? Being a niche player and scaring away niche people is the most stupid strategy possible.

Being a small player and throwing away any hope of expanding your user base by building for people who will complain no matter what you do is, well, something!

neglecting existing customers in an attempt to gain larger market share is certainly a play

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#166

Post by berkes »

dwedge wrote: 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

I get that for Mozilla. But what has Mistral done?

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#167

Post by Fnoord »

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…

> small LLM

Read this again, slowly.

> You don't want a browser that takes 10GB of extra RAM (on top of the memory hog that is having just 3 or 4 complex tabs open on its own already) and pegs your CPU at 99% usage for minutes at a time.

But I do, especially when the choice is either having it locally, remotely, or not at all. I also indeed do nit my CPU used for such, but GPU. I could even run a 8 GB model on a remote (but still local network, on-prem) NPU.

There's one caveat though: if you are gaming and browsing.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#168

Post by JumpCrisscross »

well_ackshually wrote: post #88
Barbing wrote: 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…

> 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

This is an untested assumption in Silicon Valley. I suspect Apple is going to eat a lot of folks’ lunches.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#169

Post by prng2021 »

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…

You’re taking their shoe example way too literally. It’s just showing they’re catering to the average user, not an engineer. And tons of average Joe users now have very high expectations of how intelligent a LLM is because they’ve interacted with ChatGPT and the like. If there’s a super tiny model that is too dumb to do anything beyond shoe searching and they have to switch to Gemini and google AI search for anything more complex, this whole launch would be an immediate failure.

Re: Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing

#170

Post by athrowaway3z »

What the fuck is the point of this?

What is Mistral bringing to the table for Firefox? There is nothing "open" about this in any way.

FF needs to either profile itself as the no-ai-by-default browser, or it needs to just have OpenAI/Anthropic/Mistral/DeepSeek bid for the default spot - like they do with Google search.

I'm happy Mistral exists. I'm happy Firefox exists.

None of this shows any synergy i'm excited about.

Maybe FF believes there is a group of users who are still on the fence about using FF - until they can pitch them a first-class build-in AI story that goes with the anti-establishment vibe?

I somehow doubt that's the pitch & potential userbase they should be focussing on.

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