this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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Firefox

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They support Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, HuggingChat, and Mistral.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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 :/

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

oh good. hurray.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I mean, if you're going to do it, where's the Ollama love?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

I was disappointed there was no local option...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I don't get it, ollama is a provider no?

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

I think the point is it's open source

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

and so is firefox, so why use another model provider

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

Now add support for GPT4All and everyone is happy again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Could this replace Perplexity for (assisted free) online search?

[–] [email protected] 41 points 4 months ago (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for nothing, Mozilla.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They should raise the ceo's pay some more to celebrate.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

And fire a few employees just cause.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

For a second I thought it said "experimental failure". Would be more accurate, I think.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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???

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Perhaps Mozilla’s biggest "failure" is just communication...

Firefox actually has this now.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Try again. Simplified models take the large ones and pare them down in terms of memory requirements, and can be run off the CPU even. The "smol" model I mentioned is real, and hyperfast.

Llama 3.2 is pretty solid as well.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

They're fast and high quality now. ChatGPT is the best, but local llms are great, even with 10gb of vram.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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:config settings.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 113 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 23 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (6 children)

I wish I had telemetry

I'm sure they do as Mozilla is an ad company

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Are any of these open source or trustworthy?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There are no open source ai models, even if they tell you that they are. HuggingFace is the closest thing to as something like open source where you can download ai models to run locally without internet connection. There are applications for that. In Firefox the HuggingChat uses models from HuggingFace, but I think it is running them on a server and does not download from?

The reason why they are not open source is, because we don't know exactly on what data they are trained on. We cannot rebuild them on our own. And for trustworthy, I assume you are talking about the integration and the software using the models, right? At least it is implemented by Mozilla, so there is (to me) some sort of trust involved. Yes, even after all the bullshit I trust Mozilla.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

It's "open weights" if they are publishing the model file but nothing about its creation. There's some hypothetical security concerns with training it to give very specific outputs for certain very specific inputs but I feel like that's one of those kind of far fetched worries especially if you want to use it for chat or summarization and the comparison is getting AI output from a server API. Local is still way better.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

~~Sorry but HuggingChat / HuggingFace and all models on it are not open source~~ (Edit: Oh you meant the UI HuggingChat is Open Source. Yeah sorry, I was focused on the models. And there is no Open Source model from my understanding.) -> https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition Off course opensource.org is not the only authority on what the word opensource means, but its not a bad start.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

probably not

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (4 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

It gives you many options on what to use, you can use Llama which is offline. Needs to be enabled though about:config > browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

and thus is unavailable to anyone who isn't a power user, as they will never see a comment like this and about:config would fill them with dread

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Lol, that is certainly true and you would need to also set it up manually which even power users might not be able to do. Thankfully there is an easy to follow guide here: https://ai-guide.future.mozilla.org/content/running-llms-locally/.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

good question

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They better not decide to enable it by default.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (2 children)

it's not enabled by default ... it's opt out by default

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I think that means that it's opt-in.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

if third-party accounts are needed, it'll have to stay that way.

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