241–250 of 344 posts
99.9% of people haven’t ever had one single thought about how their software works. I don’t think they will be overwhelmed with cognitive load. Quite the opposite.
> Large language models are something else entirely*. They are black boxes. You cannot audit them. You cannot truly understand what they do with your data. You cannot verify their behaviour. And Mozilla wants to put them at the heart of the browser and that doesn't sit well. Am I being overly critical here or is this kind of a silly position to have right after talking about how neural machine translation is okay? Ma…
Aside: Does anyone actually use summarization features? I've never once been tempted to "summarize" because when I read something I either want to read the entire thing, or look for something specific. Things I want summarized, like academic papers, already have an abstract or a synopsis.
Most recently, a new ISP contract: because it's both low stakes enough where I don't care much about inaccuracies (it's a bog standard contract from a run of the mill ISP), there's basically no information in there that the cloud vendor doesn't already have (if they have my billing details) but also where I'm curious about whether anything might jump out, all while not really wanting to read the 5 pages of the thing.
Just went back to that, it got both all of the main items (pricing, contract terms, my details) correctly, but also the annoying fine print (that I referenced, just in case). Also works pretty well across languages, though that depends on the model in question a bunch.
I feel like if browsers or whatever get the UX of this down, people will upload all sorts of data into those vendors that they normally shouldn't. I also think that with nuanced enough data, we'll eventually have the LLM equivalent of Excel messing up data due to some formatting BS.
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I still don’t understand what you mean by “what they do with your data” - because it sounds like exfiltration fear mongering, whereas LLMs are a static series of weights. If you don’t explicitly call your “send_data_to_bad_actor” function with the user’s I/O, nothing can happen.
I disagree that it’s fear mongering. Have we not had numerous articles on HN about data exfiltration in recent memory? Why would an LLM that is in the drivers seat of a browser (not talking about current feature status in Firefox wrt to sanitised data being interacted with) not have the same pitfalls? Seems as if we’d be 3 for 3 in the “agents rule of 2” in the context of the web and a browser? > [A] An agent can pro…
there’s also an article on the front page of HN right now claiming LLMs are black boxes and we don’t know how they work, which is plainly false. this point is hardly evidence of anything and equivalent to “people are saying”
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> There is almost no harm in a local, open model. Depends what the side-effects can possibly be. A local+open model could still disregard-all-previous-instructions and erase your hard drive.
How, literally how? The LLM is provided a list of tab titles, and returns a classification/grouping. There is no reason nor design where you also provide it with full disk access or terminal rights. This is one of the most ignorant posts and comment sections I’ve seen on HN in a while.
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To be more charitable to TFA, machine translation is a field where there aren't great alternatives and the downside is pretty limited. If something is in another language you don't read it at all. You can translate a bunch of documents and benchmark the result and demonstrate that the model doesn't completely change simple sentences. Another related area is OCR - there are sometimes mistakes, but it's tractable to cr…
There's an older tradition of rule-based machine translation. In these methods, someone really does understand exactly what the program does, in a detailed way; it's designed like other programs, according to someone's explicit understanding. There's still active research in this field; I have a friend who's very deep into it. The trouble is that statistical MT (the things that became neural net MT) started achieving…
I would softly disagree with this. Technically, we also understand exactly what a LLM does, we can analyze every instruction that is executed. Nothing is hidden from us. We don't always know what the outcome will be; but, we also don't always know what the outcome will be in rule-based models, if we make the chain of logic too deep to reliably predict. There is a difference, but it is on a spectrum. In other words, explicit code may help but it does not guarantee understanding, because nothing does and nothing can.
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I disagree that it’s fear mongering. Have we not had numerous articles on HN about data exfiltration in recent memory? Why would an LLM that is in the drivers seat of a browser (not talking about current feature status in Firefox wrt to sanitised data being interacted with) not have the same pitfalls? Seems as if we’d be 3 for 3 in the “agents rule of 2” in the context of the web and a browser? > [A] An agent can pro…
> Have we not had numerous articles on HN about data exfiltration in recent memory? there’s also an article on the front page of HN right now claiming LLMs are black boxes and we don’t know how they work, which is plainly false. this point is hardly evidence of anything and equivalent to “people are saying”
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I believe you are conflating multiple concepts to prove a flaky point. Again, unless your agent has access to a function that exfiltrates data, it is impossible for it to do so. Literally! You do not need to provide any tools to an LLM that summarizes or translates websites, manages your open tabs, etc. This can be done fully locally in a sandbox. Linking to simonw does not make your argument valid. He makes some gre…
Thinking aloud, but couldn't someone create a website with some malicious text that, when quoted in a prompt, convinces the LLM to expose certain private data to the web page, and couldn't the webpage send that data to a third party, without the need for the LLM to do so? This is probably possible to mitigate, but I fear what people more creative, motivated and technically adept could come up with.
It's unclear if this technique could also work with in-prompt data.
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> Have we not had numerous articles on HN about data exfiltration in recent memory? there’s also an article on the front page of HN right now claiming LLMs are black boxes and we don’t know how they work, which is plainly false. this point is hardly evidence of anything and equivalent to “people are saying”
This is true though. While we know what they do on a mechanistic level, we cannot reliably analyze why the model outputs any particular answer in functional terms without a heroic effort at the "arxiv paper" level.
also this went from “we can’t analyze” to “we can’t analyze reliably [without a lot of effort]” quite quickly
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Do they have any users, though?
Would you like to research this and tell us?
I didn't even know that AI browsers were even a thing until I read this article. And I work on AI.
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The difference is that on Windows all unwanted features eventually become mandatory, with no way of switching them off. With Firefox, it never happens.
If you listen to the doomers in this thread, it will. They "will" remove the option from settings, hide it in about:config, then later on remove it from there! Of course none of that is true...
Right click anywhere, (ask an AI chatbot) right there. Go to settings, search AI or search Chatbot, nothing.