this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 75 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.

Hmm.

>locally hosted

>Google Cloud

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (2 children)

It’s a thing.

Remember how the cloud is someone else’s server? Now you can buy it and bring it home, and it becomes only sorta someone else’s.

Amazon and Azure offer their own on-prem products.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

"Locally hosted" means it's running on the local host. In this case, that would mean on the same computer running Firefox.

Calling something that is only accessible over the internet "locally hosted" is outrageous doublespeak.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Why does local mean local? I'm not sure I understand your question.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (3 children)

If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter” would you be confused why they didn’t move a rack into your house?

My question is why are you projecting your limited interpretation as a global truth?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

In IT context local is a well establised term. It's either hosted locally, i. e. on machine running the browser or not. A datacenter or cloud are remote machines also by the same well established definition.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 46 minutes ago

Ok, now do your own datacenter vs cloud.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

The language is confusing, and Mozilla should fix it themselves.

The important takeaway is: data is sent over an IP address controlled by Google, to a remote server, running Google software. No processing is taking place on someone's local computer.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

IP address can belong to Mozilla, but the rest is correct.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 38 minutes ago

Hadn't checked, that is not a hard requirement for the platform - assuming they actually have it in their infrastructure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter”

Then that would also be an oxymoron.

Local is the opposite of remote. This is a remote server. Remote servers are not local. This is not a matter of interpretation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

It is, actually. It is local to them, it is remote to you. They are differentiating from a remote server in someone else’s datacenter. It is not that confusing.

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

This is a FAQ for end users, about a feature in software running on end users' computers.

It is absolutely doublespeak to call it "local". Are we supposed to invent an entirely new term now to distinguish between remote and local? Please do not accept this usage. It will make meaningful communication much harder.

Edit: I mean seriously, by this token OpenAI, Google, Facebook, etc. could call their servers "locally hosted". It is an utterly meaningless term if you accept this usage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

lol, I think we're giving too little credit to the marketing people in tech. I want to read their blogs!

[–] [email protected] 29 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Sounds like they’re running their own LLM instance on googles cloud infrastructure vs using something like OpenAI via API.

As web dev parlance it makes sense but for marketing it is definitely confusing and they should do better.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

It just started and already have buzzwords floating around

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago

Probably written by an AI?