Firefox introduces AI as experimental feature
Firefox introduces AI as experimental feature
They support Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, HuggingChat, and Mistral.
Luckily, it seems to be disabled by default. At the moment.
Sigh. I'm glad to have switched to LibreWolf.
I switched a while back before all the Ai and "privacy preserving" telemetry stuff.
Every update note I see for Firefox now just reinforces my decision.
Wasn't this there for a while, or just me.
It is since version 128 I think
I think 130
I wonder if this can be removed at compile time, like Pocket.
Wow, great job Firefox. Thanks.
If I wanted unreliable bullshit like AI, I'd use Chrome.
Didn't want it in Opera, don't want it in Firefox. I mean they can keep trying and I'll just keep on ignoring this shit :/
hopefully, it'll be possible to opt out somehow.
I don't understand the hate. It's just a sidebar for the supported LLMs. Maybe I'm misunderstanding?
Yes, I would prefer Mozilla focus on the browser, but to me, this seems like it was done in an afternoon.
It seems like common cynicism. Mozilla add this feature, as not to yield major features to other browsers. Mozilla's lets you natively have lots of different AI solutions to pick from.
Not every feature is for everyone. Not every feature is done being improved on at release.
And in spite of popular opinions, organizations don't do just one thing and then do just the next thing and the thing after that. Organizations can and do focus on and prioritize many things at the same time.
And for people who are naysaying AI at every mention, it has a lot of great and fascinating uses, and if you think otherwise, you really should try them more. I've used it plenty for work and life. It's not going away, might as well do some nice things with it.
I want my browser to be a browser. I don't want Pocket, I don't want AI, I don't want bullshit. There are plugins for that.
This happened ages ago, didn't it? Am I missing something new?
I will say, the Le Chat provider is pretty decent. You really can use it more natural language. "Rewrite it with a better rhyme scheme" "remove the last line" and it just got it.
Why no local option though? Why no anonmysing option?
Edit: There is a right click option which does make this officially actually useful for me now (summarize this!).
Other models do have RAG options and Mist real supports making agents with specified documentation too to at least fine tune too (not as good as full grounding though IMHO)
If they do it in a privacy-preseeving way, this could help them get back market share which will generally benefit an open internet.
Why would anybody want to have AI in their browser? It's a fucking browser.
Because browsers are the most useful tool on most computers. Ordinary People go on google/ask chatgpt for mundane questions. If their browser can do that they need 1 app less and it will be more convenient which is what especially non-tech savy people care about.
But it's gonna be very difficult when you've got Google and OpenAI up there.
It's an open source project, you can keep it in a box and people are able to check it.
I really wish there was another way.
Thing is, for your average user with no GPU and whp never thinks about RAM, running a local LLM is intimidating. But it shouldn't be. Any system with an integrated GPU, and the more RAM the better, can run simple models locally.
The not so dirty secret is that ChatGPT 3 vs 4 isn't that big a difference, and neither are leaps and bounds ahead of the publically available models for about 99% of tasks. For that 1% people will ooh and aah over it, but 99% of use cases are only seeing marginal gains on 4o.
And the simplified models that run "only" 95% as well? They can use 90% fewer resources give pretty much identical answers outside of hyperspecific use cases.
Running a a "smol" model as some are called, gets you all the bang for none of the buck, and your data stays on your system and never leaves.
I've been yelling from the rooftops to some stupid corporate types that once the model is trained, it's trained. Unless you are training models yourself, there is no need for the massive AI clusters, just for the model. Run it local on your hardware at a fraction of the cost.
Idk I noticed pretty significant differences between models of various sizes. I mean there are lots of metrics on this
There's the tragedy with this new feature: they fast-tracked this past more popular requests, sticking it into Release Firefox.
But they only rushed the part that connects to third parties. There was also a "localhost" option which was originally alongside the Big Five corporate offerings, but Mozilla ultimately decided to bury that one inside of the
about:configsettings.I'm guessing that the reason (and a good one at that) is that simply having an option to connect to a local chatbot leads to just confused users because they also need the actual chatbot running on their system. If you can set up that, then you can certainly toggle a simple switch in about:config to show the option.
Can you point me to some resources to running smol llm?
My use case prob just to help "typing" miscellaneous idea I have or check for my grammatical error, in english.
Thanks, in advance.
Here you go: Review of SmolVLM https://www.marktechpost.com/2024/11/26/hugging-face-releases-smolvlm-a-2b-parameter-vision-language-model-for-on-device-inference/
Model itself: https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceTB/SmolVLM
And you can use Ollama to run it locally, and Open WebUI to access it in browser.
Last time I tried using a local llm (about a year ago) it generated only a couple words per second and the answers were barely relevant. Also I don't see how a local llm can fulfill the glorified search engine role that people use llms for.
They're fast and high quality now. ChatGPT is the best, but local llms are great, even with 10gb of vram.
Thanks for nothing, Mozilla.
They should raise the ceo's pay some more to celebrate.
And fire a few employees just cause.
Now add support for GPT4All and everyone is happy again.
That was there before 133, don’t remember the exact release that added it.
why a fucking chatbot? translate a page better for me you fucking losers, all the translation options suck for privacy outside of specifically trained local AIs. this is the BEST use case for a small local LLM yet mozilla with all its brains and resources couldnt rub two neurons together for this.
or they could do character prediction on your typing to make typing faster. just some legit examples, why waste resources to build a chat ai into my browser when i can just open a website???
oh good. hurray.
I wish I had telemetry on such features.
I really doubt a significant number of people use AI chatbots often enough that having it in a dedicated sidebar is worth it.
I think nobody uses AI Chatbots, unless you're forced to do it. They're utter shit.
I've never had the urge to use a chat bot personally, but I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority. Lots of people use these things all the time for so much stuff we probably wouldn't even consider.
I've worked with a few people that all but rely on these things to produce any creative work they have to do.
Maybe we run in different circles but I think a lot of people don't even talk about how they're using it.
I wish I had telemetry
I'm sure they do as Mozilla is an ad company
This is apparently either not widely known or some people just like to shoot the messenger.
- jwz, Jun.: Mozilla is an advertising company now
- jwz, Oct.: Mozilla's CEO doubles down on them being an advertising company now
- Mozilla support: Share data with Mozilla to help improve Firefox
- Firefox documentation: Telemetry
For a second I thought it said "experimental failure". Would be more accurate, I think.
They better not decide to enable it by default.
it's not enabled by default ... it's opt out by default
I think that means that it's opt-in.
if third-party accounts are needed, it'll have to stay that way.
as someone who's never dabbled with ai bots, what does this feature do? is it only to query for information like a web search?
It is a sidebar that sends a query from your browser directly to a server run by a giant corporation like Google or OpenAI, consumes an excessive amount of carbon/water, then sends a response back to you that may or may not be true (because AI is incapable of doing anything but generating what it thinks you want to see).
Not only is it unethical in my opinion, it's also ridiculously rudimentary...
It just adds ChatGPT or similar to your sidebar. Chatbots can do a lot of things, they are mostly good for information research and technical help, although they have serious flaws like hallucinating false information sometimes
good for information research and technical help
i’d say they are good precursors for information research… never trust them, but use them to find terms to search for reliable sources
From the description in the UI, it does sound like it. Theoretically, a chatbot could be created where you can ask questions about the webpage you have currently opened, so if you don't want to read a long article, for example. I guess, you could probably just throw a link into an existing chatbot either way, but yeah, direct integration might be convenient either way.
Well, or a chatbot could be created, which has access to your browser history, bookmarks and tabs, so you can ask it when you last saw certain information. However, you'd need a locally running chatbot for that, which makes it more difficult to implement.
good question
Are any of these open source or trustworthy?
I think Mistral is model-available (ie I'm not sure if they release training data/code but they do release model shape and weights), huggingchat definitely is open source and model-available
probably not
Could this replace Perplexity for (assisted free) online search?
The chat isn't the point, it's needed as interface for storing your logins to summarization features
When internet is written by ai, you do need a tldr