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Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox (arstechnica.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

It depends on what they mean by AI. I can think of oodles of great uses:

An AI-powered adblock that removes all trackers, cookie confirmation popups, those annoying “please subscribe” popups, etc. would be badass. It would be virtually invisible but it would make the internet usable again.
A content filter that magically extracts the recipe you’re looking for out of the stupid blog post they write for SEO
Or to expand on that, an AI that goes through the page of search engine results and removes the ones that are SEO spam instead of actually useful content
An AI that can review at a page or email and determine if it’s a scam would save a TON of people by pointing out suspicious features.
Basically anything that requires you to copy data from one context to another is a good use of AI. You could probably have a nice resume-filling feature, for example.

But yeah, Mozilla will probably just go for a “chat with your browser” feature. Total waste of space.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (4 children)

All of those could be terrible to be honest, because AI is a data tracking vacuum. An AI adblocker or content filter sounds cool at first, but it would mean it reads and analyzes your data, just like the shit you do with chatbots too. Reading your mails? That's basically what Google does for years with gmail, that's why they have such a good spam filter. I agree that a chatbot would be kinda useless though, even if privacy friendly, which in of itself would be great but I just don't see the use. This could simply be outsourced to a website.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (3 children)

The only reason this would be an issue is if it’s sending that data off to a third party. If its fully local, who cares what data it sees?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (2 children)

If they're local they'd be basically useless due to a lack of computing power and potential lack of indexing for a search engine chatbot, so I doubt it. It would also have to be so polished that it wouldn't require further user knowledge / input, and that's just not a thing with any local LLM I've come across. Mozilla can gladly prove me wrong though. I certainly wouldn't mind if they generally can make the whole process of local LLMs easier and more viable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

The requirements to run good local LLMs have really been shrinking this past year… I have a lot of faith that there is a generally useful yet tiny AI tool within the grasp of Mozilla.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I can understand your thinking, but it could be as simple as giving the user the option to outsource the computation to a secure something or other, if their machine can’t handle it.

And yeah, the requirements are still quite high, but they are being reduced somewhat steadily, so I wouldn’t be surprised if average hardware could manage it in the long term.

Edit: For the record, Mozilla is one of the only companies I would trust if they said “the secure something or other is actually secure.” And they’d likely show actual proof and provide and explanation as to how.