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I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

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Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#211

Post by cwillu »

thih9 wrote: post #186
cwillu wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And will that work permanently, or will I have to hunt down another setting in another month when they stuff it into another workflow I don't want it in?

Depends; in the EU and selected countries that setting was always opt-in (i.e. it was never enabled for you). Elsewhere I guess the user has to periodically check their settings, or privacy policies, etc, which in practice sounds impossible. > Important: By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom (same source as in grandparent comment).

Then no, I can't use a google product without being harassed, unless I live in a limited selection of blessed countries.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#212

Post by vharuck »

everdrive wrote: post #4

Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.

I'm not a big user of LLMs, but instead of AI in everything, I'd like to see more web services and local software offer APIs that LLMs (and my own code) can access. Hopefully, "embedded AIs" only become as prevalent and required as "embedded browsers."

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#213

Post by kemayo »

vidarh wrote: post #137
lotsofpulp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example? And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation?

> Can you give an example? Recipe pages full of fluff. Review pages full of fluff. Almost any web page full of fluff, which is a rapidly rising proportion. > And how would I know the LLM has error bounds appropriate for my situation? You consider whether you care if it is wrong, and then you try it a couple of times, and apply some common sense when reading the summaries, just the same as when considering if you trus…

"Get me the recipe from this page" feels like a place where I do really care that it gets it right, because in an unfamiliar recipe it doesn't take much hallucination around the ingredients to ruin the dish.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#214

Post by andrewmutz »

everdrive wrote: post #4

Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.

The web is extremely user-hostile. The necessity of ad blockers is just one example of this. Social Media feed algorithms that maximize engagement at the cost of mental health and political unrest are another

I think there is a ton of potential for having an LLM bundled with the browser and working on behalf of the user to make the web a better place. Imagine being able to use natural language to tell the browser to always do things like "don't show me search engine results that are corporate SEO blogspam" or "Don't show me any social media content if its about politics".

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#215

Post by catlifeonmars »

nerdjon wrote: post #56
everdrive wrote: post #4

Does anyone want AI in anything? I can see the value of navigating to an LLM and asking specific questions, but generally speaking I don't want that just running / waiting on my machine as I open a variety of applications. It's a huge waste of resources and for most normal people is an edge case.

Yes and no and this is the problem with the current marketing around AI. I very much do want what used to be just called ML that was invisible and actually beneficial. Autocorrect, smart touch screen keyboards, music recommendations, etc. But the problem is that all of that stuff is now also just being called "AI" left and right. That being said I think what most people think of when they say "AI" is really not as be…

I think companies should also advertise when they use JavaScript on the page. “Use this new feature —- why? Because it’s powered by JavaScript”

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#216

Post by DeusExMachina »

railka wrote: post #153
transcriptase wrote: post #10

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions. That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.

I am a regular Firefox user; it is literally the tool I use most often during my working hours. I like it more than Chrome. Firefox is steadily losing market share, and any attempts to do something about it are met with negativity. The 2-4% of users who use it care about their privacy. But they are not being deprived of it; the AI tab is optional, and no one is removing the regular tab. (Of course, it would be better…

I am not a Firefox user, but I am baffled by the fact that every time I see news about it is because its developers are trying to push something that users dislike. All the comments I read always highlight how they keep wasting time and money instead of working on more important things.

My impression is that this is the reason why they keep losing market share. I never see any positive news about Firefox or Mozilla, and the browser has nothing that would make me switch.

Firefox gained market share because people recommended it and installed it on the computers of friends and family. They seem to have stopped, and its developers don't seem, from the outside, to be interested in doing anything to bring that back.

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#217

Post by big_toast »

Sophira wrote: post #192
boplicity wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automatic captions has been transformative, in terms of accessibility, and seems to be something people universally want. Most people don't think of it as AI though, even when it is LLM software creating the captions. There are many more ways that AI tools could be embedded "invisibly" into our day-to-day lives, and I expect they will be.

To be clear, it's not LLMs creating the captions. Whisper[0], one of the best of its kind currently, is a speech recognition model, not a large language model. It's trained on audio , not text, and it can run on your mobile phone. It's still AI, of course. But there is distinction between it and an LLM. [0] https://github.com/openai/whisper/blob/main/model-card.md

It’s an encoder-decoder transformer trained on audio (language?) and transcription.

Seems kinda weird for it not to meet the definition in a tautological way even if it’s not the typical sense or doesn’t tend to be used for autoregressive token generation?

Re: I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

#218

Post by rollcat »

phantasmish wrote: post #37
transcriptase wrote: post #10

Nobody wants anything from Mozilla except Firefox/Thunderbird to be high-performance alternatives to Chrome/Outlook with fewer restrictions on extensions. That’s it. The rest is just activism and kids playing in a sandbox with non-profit money to pad out their resume with whatever topical keywords might land them their next gig.

I would have loved to see them leverage their browser to make a distributed social network, back when they had enough market share to attempt such a thing. An open slack-alike also seems like a good fit for them. Alas, they have tons of cash but little capacity to do anything useful.

Mozilla has started so many incredibly ambitious projects: Firefox OS, Rust, Servo/Stylo, Quantum... A slack-alike would at best give them a +1 against killedbygoogle.com.

Yep, a federated social network is indeed an ambitious problem, perhaps Mozilla would've been well-suited to tackle it. The problem is not the tech or scope, but timing. 15 years ago everyone was happy to be on FB / Twitter. 10 years ago, Microsoft just bought LinkedIn; Google tried, then killed off a network with 500k DAU; all of that time, there was little space for a new contender.

Mastodon only took off because Twitter went to shit real fast; still most people flocked to mastodon.social, because they heard Mastodon was good, but had no idea what federation is, or why it's important. MAYBE that would've been the perfect timing for Mozilla to launch their own ActivityPub platform.

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