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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

#51

Post by DaSHacka »

kilroy123 wrote: post #48
tomashubelbauer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME young people mostly hate AI.

The young kids I know who are into tech love AI. Albeit this is from a small sample size.

Funnily enough, most of the young people I know fall somewhere between those two sides of the spectrum.

I know some actual luddite-tier AI haters that believe it's ontologically evil, and another majoring in Data Science that went to the most recent career fair and told a recruiter "AI will replace you" (I uh don't think he's getting that internship)

And of course many, many, others that fall between the two extremes.

The one thing we can all agree on, is it makes homework a hell of a lot easier :) (well, except the luddite-types, they refuse to use it in any capacity)

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

#52

Post by dannyw »

austin-cheney wrote: post #40

I wonder if this is a generational thing of fresh young people that already cannot live without LLMs versus crusty old people that don’t want to require a super computer just to run a web browser that violates all their privacy. To me this sounds like the point where people start looking at and developing alternatives to the browser/web.

This isn’t Mozilla taking a stance against AI.

It’s them articulating clear and logical reasons why the proposed API, in its current state, is bad for web interoperability.

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

#53

Post by dannyw »

concinds wrote: post #46
benterix wrote: post #7

> Browsers and operating systems are increasingly expected to gain access to language models.[0] Are they? [0] https://github.com/webmachinelearning/prompt-api/blob/main/R...

Sure. macOS, iOS and Windows have local model APIs for third-party devs. Chrome is trialing it. Firefox uses models to generate alt-text, but no API. In theory it's useful. If devs can rely on local models, it's more private and decentralized, they don't need to funnel money to AWS or Anthropic. There are low-stakes use cases that only make sense if they're local (available offline) and free. But in practice I've see…

In practice it’s useful too. The local translation in Firefox is quite good, and I love that I can translate pages entirely on my machine; without the contents going to another server.

As for Apple foundational models, I think the issue is more that they’re just not very intelligent or good; maybe WWDC will change that; but if you want to implement LLM functionality, you’re better off either calling an API, or shipping a better small on device model.

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

#54

Post by archargelod »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #43
austin-cheney wrote: post #40

I wonder if this is a generational thing of fresh young people that already cannot live without LLMs versus crusty old people that don’t want to require a super computer just to run a web browser that violates all their privacy. To me this sounds like the point where people start looking at and developing alternatives to the browser/web.

IME young people mostly hate AI.

Young people love AI when it helps them cheat homework, or when used for roleplay and memes. Generating "content" with AI - is generally more hated, especially art and video.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

varun_ch wrote: post #5

I wonder if it makes sense for browser vendors to agree upon and ship various ‘standard models’ that are released into the public domain or something, and the API lets you pick between them. The models themselves would be standardized and the weights and everything should be identical between browsers. They’d be standard and ‘web-safe’ like CSS colors or fonts. Probably would help to give them really boring/unbranded…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by Wowfunhappy »

> According to Chrome's documentation, to use the prompt API you must 'acknowledge' Google's Generative AI Prohibited Uses Policy. Elements of this policy go beyond law. For example:

>> Do not engage … generating or distributing content that facilitates … Sexually explicit content Do not engage in misinformation, misrepresentation, or misleading activities. This includes … Facilitating misleading claims related to governmental or democratic processes

> This seems like a bad direction for an API on the web platform, and sets a worrying precedent for more APIs that have UA-specific rules around usage.

I will say this more strongly—I think it is completely insane, and a violation of free expression principles, for a browser API to have content restrictions.

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

#57

Post by dannyw »

darkwater wrote: post #20
youre-wrong3 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only have yourselves to blame. Chrome made the internet better but everyone put their fingers in their ears about it getting worse at the same time.

Which Internet did make better?

You remember the IE days right?

Being a web developer was not fun; and the web was absolutely being held back. Chrome did a lot of things right: per-origin sandboxing, properly implementing web standards, V8, developer tools, and back then Chromium was super close to Chrome.

Do I think Chrome is a net-negative for the web over the past ~3-5 years? Yes, especially with manifest v3, “privacy sandbox”, and them basically forcing through web APIs because they have the dominant marketshare.

But early Chrome was a technologically impressive and user-friendly browser that really did make the web massively better.

I remember happily putting Firefox and Chrome mini-banners (what are they called? Those little rectangular images) on my website, for free, because I recommended it.

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

#58

Post by jaffathecake »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #56

> According to Chrome's documentation, to use the prompt API you must 'acknowledge' Google's Generative AI Prohibited Uses Policy. Elements of this policy go beyond law. For example: >> Do not engage … generating or distributing content that facilitates … Sexually explicit content Do not engage in misinformation, misrepresentation, or misleading activities. This includes … Facilitating misleading claims related to go…

Agreed. Maybe Google will propose a CSS text formatting property that cannot be used on paragraphs that are critical of the US administration.

Like, that sounds daft, but it's not really far from what they're doing here.

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

#59

Post by dannyw »

bilekas wrote: post #38
darkwater wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which Internet did make better?

For anyone working in the web area during the old IE days will know, not having to have a dedicated css and js for each browser type was a gamechanger. Chrome's introduction, albeit through smoother, lighter browser experience at the time, pushed other browsers to standardize to google. In one way it's bad to have a homogenous approach to all things web based, but in another way it did make the internet a better expe…

In the horror days of IE, I remember having to look up some DirectX filter to properly display PNG images with transparency. It was that bad, and that’s one example of 1000.

Some libraries/scripts helped normalise things a little, but never enough. Yuck.

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