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Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

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Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#241

Post by bsenftner »

arjie wrote: post #239
bsenftner wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a member of a political action committee, where I was brought in as an expert in professional media applications of AI. I've got extensive experience using AI tools in the production of well known entertainment properties (think VFX for film and animation.) Anyway, within the political action committee where is a diverse mixture of people, with about 1/5th of them under age 30. The entire under age 30 set are so…

Are you able to share whether the PAC was Democratic Party or Republican Party aligned? When I first came to America, the headlines were about how Obama’s campaign embraced tech successfully. By now, tech is considered right-wing. If the young ‘uns who burst into tears were on a Republican aligned PAC that would be interesting. It would mean cross-political tech angst.

Democratic Party.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#242

Post by sfink »

8organicbits wrote: post #64
bakugo wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they really? Hating on AI slop is a common sentiment on social media, but remember that the opinions you see on social media are often not representative of what the general population thinks at all. I keep hearing stories about how homework is now useless because every student just gets ChatGPT to do it for them, and from personal experience, I'm inclined to believe them.

> every student just gets ChatGPT to do it I don't believe every student uses a calculator to solve their math homework, so what makes ChatGPT unique here? For certain subjects the ability to cheat has been trivial for a long time, yet there was no crisis.

The children have long had sticks and stones, so why is everyone so freaked out now that they're all carrying around grenade launchers?

What kind of math homework has been trivial to solve with a calculator? I guess you're referring to elementary school arithmetic?

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#243

Post by stuaxo »

stronglikedan wrote: post #120
heresie-dabord wrote: post #84

The objections seem clear: tight-coupling of prompts to models, and model neutrality in the TOU. From https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/1213 : "A personal example: I created a system prompt for creating announcements for a home automation system. The Gemini model I was using initially responded in a very US-American way, which didn't fit the British voice of my speaker. I told the model, via the s…

> but the result was a bad US-American impersonation of British ("a'waight guv'nor apples and pears" etc etc) sounds like adversarial mode mocking

I've got this result pretty consistently from different models.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#244

Post by 8organicbits »

sfink wrote: post #242
8organicbits wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> every student just gets ChatGPT to do it I don't believe every student uses a calculator to solve their math homework, so what makes ChatGPT unique here? For certain subjects the ability to cheat has been trivial for a long time, yet there was no crisis.

The children have long had sticks and stones, so why is everyone so freaked out now that they're all carrying around grenade launchers? What kind of math homework has been trivial to solve with a calculator? I guess you're referring to elementary school arithmetic?

I don't follow the analogy.

When I was in high school a classmate did their chemistry homework by buying the teachers edition of the textbook, which had the answer key. The whole class knew this trick existed, but most of us slogged through the work manually. I knew another group who divided up the homework problems and then combined. Students have always known how to cheat on homework, but enough students actually do it anyway.

What makes ChatGPT unique here?

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#245

Post by jauntywundrkind »

jaffathecake wrote: post #238
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a joke of an objection. This API is a neutral party and can be iterated on. These objections are particular objections, to an implementation detail. One that can be swapped out, iterated on, improved on, changed, tailored to the user, by the user working with their user-agent and the LLM choice. One whose failure seems in the realm of personal preference rather than fundamental or harmful or damaging. So what…

> The user agent is the proper channel for the agency Jake is seeking here. Theres nothing preventing the user & their user agent from negotiating what model they use. This isn't how it works. As the developer, you use the system prompt to set a particular personality for the chat bot. Eg, when you use an LLM in VSCode, it comes with a system prompt to make it an effective code assistant. Now, in VSCode, you can sele…

I guess some people don't have access to their system prompt, but that's never been the case for me?

I believe at $LASTJOB even Azure's web GUI let you meddle with that. This isn't cast quite so deeply in stone.

That said I do think it's ok that the app developer ask for British English. My overall concern is more that concern about model behavior & expectations feel very tight & narrow across this, and I don't think the typical well defined rigor and expectations if applied will ever ever ever let LLMs on the web. I think sites see that, I think users see that. Making perfect the enemy of the good is going to doom any attempt, forever, and no progress is possible, if these are the demands. We have to be willing to accept that models are limited, especially small local ones. That's ok.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#246

Post by throwawa14223 »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #226
throwawa14223 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is non-obvious that adding an LLM to a web browser makes anything better for the web browser user.

I think you have to work real hard to cover your eyes to there being 100% no use, to regarding it as having no potential. Shame on anyone who is able to fool themselves into being so completely convinced. If you are 99% against, that's at least some ability to judge reality. To have some ability to investigate & think. But you should be able to talk at least like you have some moorings, some connection with both side…

The goal should not be to include something because there is a use case but because the use case so stunningly obvious that this should become part of what every browser must implement.

It is clear this can be done without being part of the standard as is shown by the fact that it is already done. So it has no place in the standard.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#247

Post by throwawa14223 »

dabockster wrote: post #162
codedokode wrote: post #134

I am against this. 1) This will be a new source of fingerprinting information and this is difficult to fake to fool fingerprinting scripts, so it can be abused for "device verification". There should be no ability to "verify" a browser, and anyone should be able to emulate any browser. This is the most important point, I thought Google people are smart enough to see it. 2) LLMs use lot of memory and CPU time, for man…

> There should be no ability to "verify" a browser, and anyone should be able to emulate any browser. Hard disagree. The AI industry has absolutely shredded the various anti-scraping and anti-botting social contracts that were in place prior to the covid pandemic. Like it's now common knowledge that robots.txt isn't a hard requirement and can be avoided entirely, for example. They have absolutely turned the open web…

Another reason to criminally prosecute the AI industry.

Re: Mozilla's opposition to Chrome's Prompt API

#248

Post by jauntywundrkind »

throwawa14223 wrote: post #246
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you have to work real hard to cover your eyes to there being 100% no use, to regarding it as having no potential. Shame on anyone who is able to fool themselves into being so completely convinced. If you are 99% against, that's at least some ability to judge reality. To have some ability to investigate & think. But you should be able to talk at least like you have some moorings, some connection with both side…

The goal should not be to include something because there is a use case but because the use case so stunningly obvious that this should become part of what every browser must implement. It is clear this can be done without being part of the standard as is shown by the fact that it is already done. So it has no place in the standard.

How can this be done without a standard? By having a user download a couple GB model for every site they visit, and using webgpu (until/if web-nn ships)?

This doesn't make any sense. And it's far less ideal than using already on device models, that are better tailored to the device's hardware, and that may be already resident.

Good things should be made broadly available. We didn't need jquery before it came along, we could just do the things. But jQuery set a standard. And in turn much of what it did got sent into improvements to query selector. Your model of standardize only the minimum sounds like suicide for the web and I think it's dreadful, and I'm glad such dour sad views have no standing.

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