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Mozilla launches privacy friendly AI addon called "Orbit" (connect.mozilla.org)
submitted 4 months ago by UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Orbit is an LLM addon/extension for Firefox that runs on the Mistral 7B model. It can summarize a given webpage, YouTube videos and so on. You can ask it questions about stuff that's on the page. It is very privacy friendly and does not require any account to sign up.

I personally tried it, and found it to be incredibly useful! I think this is going to be one of my long term addons along with uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes and so on. I would highly recommend checking this out!

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[-] cloudless@lemmy.cafe 131 points 4 months ago

Most important part of the thread:

In it's beta stage, Orbit is currently not open-source. This doesn't mean it will remain this way forever. If orbit gains traction and we have the resources and funding to support an Open-Source project, I'm sure things could change.

Press X to doubt.

[-] n2burns@lemmy.ca 63 points 4 months ago

Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism? They were founded on open-source and AFAIK have continued to support open-source. Mozilla is far from a perfect organization, but if this project was a success I think it would be out of character for them to keep it closed-source.

[-] toothbrush 47 points 4 months ago

then why make it closed source to begin with?

[-] vinnymac@lemmy.world 42 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Believe it or not but it requires resources to open source an internal product, especially one that may have been an experiment where some small team was able to convince leadership could become useful to the masses.

React.js at Facebook is a good example of this. It took a lot of effort to externalize and open source React, and tbh the codebase is still kind of garbage when it comes to contributions from those unfamiliar with its intricacies.

[-] toothbrush 9 points 4 months ago

but... you dont have to accept contributions? you can just make it open source and tidy it up at the same time?

[-] vinnymac@lemmy.world 14 points 4 months ago

In a different world maybe, but I can already see the headlines, “Mozilla open sources lackluster AI tool”. PR is unfortunately a thing, and once you miss that initial wave of interest, you’re unlikely to grab attention later without another marketing push. Mozilla is experienced in open sourcing software, so by now they’re pretty good at knowing when to do it and when not to. In other words, it says something that they chose not to do it in this case.

[-] toothbrush 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Yeah, it definitly tells me something, namely that I should not use the tool.

Why would news publish articles about the code quality of the tool, instead of its functionality?

Now they have negative press about its closed source nature, which is a calculated risk they took, just to open source it soon anyway? I doubt it.

[-] billiam0202@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

So risk someone else beating you to market? And they'll either have the resources to make it superior, therefore making yours irrelevant, or they'll make it inferior, which generates bad press for you?

[-] CluckN@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago

It’s provocative it gets the people going.

[-] cloudless@lemmy.cafe 27 points 4 months ago

Pocket.

[-] n2burns@lemmy.ca 18 points 4 months ago

That's a pretty good answer. I knew Mozilla had bought it, and were operating it as an independent subsidiary. I didn't know they promised to open-source it over 7 years ago.

[-] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 26 points 4 months ago

Eh, skepticism should be the default.

But I agree with you, nothing they've done is inherently bad, though they've done some abysmally stupid things in the way they handle them.

But I also really wish they'd stop fucking around with half-assed things like this and focus on core utilities.

[-] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months ago

What core utilities does Firefox need that it doesn't have? Honest question. I've been using it over a decade and never had it fail to do something I asked it to, and I'm a little out of the loop on the web browser development news cycle beyond the recent wave of Google Bad.

[-] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 months ago

Mozilla has firefox and thunderbird. They're the two core utilities. The vpn attempt, the Mastodon server, that kind of stuff is fluff.

I may be using the wrong terminology? It was an offhand comment and that's the word that I picked out of my head, it might mean something different to a developer, I dunno.

But Mozilla, if you ignore what Google pays them, is not exactly a high profit endeavour, and we don't want it to be. So having what funds they have focused onto the things that matter is what I'd prefer they do. Mind you, if the vpn pulls enough in to generate funds rather than cost them, that's great.

[-] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Firefox is sustained (biggest funder) by google who needs artificial competitions to not be labeled a monopoly.

Its still the best browser i can think off that isn’t chromium but i would recommend staying skeptical.

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[-] dantheclamman@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

They said they'd open source Pocket and they didn't. In fact, they've simply allowed it to rot and just removed features. So here I think the skepticism is warranted.

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[-] deafboy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

No need for doubt. There is no technology in place that would guarantee any kind of privacy.

For the current version, we are using a Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) hosted within Mozilla’s GCP instance.

[-] treadful@lemmy.zip 42 points 4 months ago

It is very privacy friendly [...]

What makes you believe that? The most information I could find about this is that it doesn't "save your session data." The Orbit privacy policy also seems a bit bare, and I can't decide if that's a good thing or not.

Either way, you're still sending data to a third party service to process. Might be worth it for some people.

[-] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 3 points 4 months ago

No association with any account. Therefore, no profiling.

[-] pmc 8 points 4 months ago

Facebook and Google profile you with no account. Accounts aren't required for tracking.

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[-] AceBonobo@lemmy.world 36 points 4 months ago

So mozilla is paying the server costs for this, what's the business model?

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[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 32 points 4 months ago

I’m just glad it’s an add on/extension. A lot of the crap baked into browsers these days is just bloat nobody wants or uses.

[-] macattack@lemmy.world 30 points 4 months ago

Probably not for me as I'm not interested in a summarizing tool, but I'm not against AI in general.

OAN, I think over time, the community will see that AI was a bubble, but in the same way that the internet was a bubble back in the day.

[-] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 14 points 4 months ago

OAN, I think over time, the community will see that AI was a bubble, but in the same way that the internet was a bubble back in the day.

Surprised to see this opinion on Lemmy haha. Yep, totally agree with ya here!

[-] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago

Everyone wants a Her style personal assistant — as in one that is personal-context aware, can simplify, and generally enrich their lives (not for emotional support) — but if most people knew how unintelligent AI is, how spectacularly it fails, and how dangerous it is to integrate it into information systems and (especially) give it any ability to act ... Literally nobody would want to give it access to all their data, or use it beyond an advisory role.

[-] Pyotr@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

Perhaps I'm a luddite - but I unequivocally do not want an assistant like that. I dislike even the basic commands of google assistant. I can do the tasks better and faster than than the assistant can.

[-] doctortofu@reddthat.com 2 points 4 months ago

Amen to that. I'm not a busy CEO of four companies, I don't need or want an assistant, digital or otherwise. I want to read through articles and watch videos, I can scroll/fast-forward through myself if I feel like it. And while we're at it, I don't really need or want personalized anything - just give me ALL the search results and I'll sort through them myself. Luddite? Maybe, but I literally cannot think of a case where this would be useful or helpful to me...

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[-] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 6 points 4 months ago

In before is not just skips important details in its summarization, but also hallucinates its own interpretation of things into it.

Generally, don't call it "AI", don't overhype it, don't use it where it is bad in its function (like telling you "facts"), don't shove it into everything. I bet 80+ percent of all "AI" energy consumption is wasted on completely useless and moronic tasks that have 0 value even on a personal level.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 10 points 4 months ago

"The term "AI" has been in use since 1956 for a wide range of computer science techniques. LLMs most certainly qualify as AI. You may be thinking of the science-fiction kind of "artificial people" AI, which is a subset of AI called Artificial General Intelligence when researchers want to be specific about that kind.

[-] DarkThoughts@fedia.io 2 points 4 months ago

I'm thinking of something that actually processes some form of "thought", in the abstract sense. Even video game AI does that to an extend (granted, there's various techniques depending on the game type), so the term here is actually somewhat appropriate. LLMs don't do that at all though, they're just word guessing based on the texts they were trained upon (while we stick with text gen here at least) and that just so happens to sound like somewhat coherent sentences that can fool someone into thinking that their computer actually talked to them. There never was any sort of thought behind that though. It functions closer to how your mobile keyboard predicts the next word you want to use in its suggestions at the top. It just tries to complete the text it was already presented with. A lot of the illusion here comes actually from the tools used to display this information in a chat like manner, but that's just frontend foolery for the user.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 9 points 4 months ago

I think it's more that you're overestimating video game AI, here. If your definition of "abstract thought" doesn't include what LLMs do then it definitely shouldn't include video game AI. It's even more illusory.

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[-] tb_@lemmy.world 20 points 4 months ago

The general tone in this thread seems so very different from when "Mozilla is working on AI" was first announced

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 19 points 4 months ago

Ooh, I just tried it out and I can tell I'm going to love it - if not this specific plugin (the UI needs some work) then this general concept of a plugin.

I just popped over to Youtube and went to a ten-minute video of something or other, clicked the "summarize transcript" button, and within a few seconds I had a paragraph-long summary of what the whole video was about. There have been sooo many Youtube videos over the years that I've reluctantly watched with a constant "get to the point, man!" Frustration. Now I'll know if it's worth it.

[-] TheRedSpade@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago

Hm...could be useful for those times you want to read a guide but can only find one in video form

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 points 4 months ago

Indeed. And after generating the summary, there's a chat field below that where you can ask the AI to elaborate on particular subjects. This is really nice.

[-] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 5 points 4 months ago

RIGHT?!!! IT'S SO FKIN AMAZING

This is especially going to be useful for me as a student. It's just feels like browser 2.0 at this point haha

[-] xan@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 4 months ago

Do you have the SponsorBlock add-on installed? Most videos have user-submitted sections that it lets your skip. Also, a highlighted part.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 months ago

Huh, I'll have to check it out then. This will be especially useful for Louis Rossmann videos because he rambles and repeats himself a lot.

[-] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 14 points 4 months ago

Gross.

[-] FreshLight@sh.itjust.works 13 points 4 months ago

Can I just trade in that LLM for the old Firefox please?

[-] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 10 points 4 months ago

If you really care for an LLM, run it locally... Not sure if this does it...

[-] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 11 points 4 months ago

Don't want to install and maintain 10gigs of cuda stuff on my PC. Next, my mum won't know how to do that. Her laptop is a potato. This add-on makes all of this way easier.

[-] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 4 months ago

You don't need CUDA, it's actually pretty easy. You can run the Mistral 7B model this add-on is based on using GPT4All. It doesn't require much, if any, technical knowledge.

[-] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 10 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

HOLY HELL THAT'S COOL. It can do so much too!!!

I locally installed some small LLM model more than a year ago. It took up like 25 gigs or something along with all CUDA libraries n stuff. It was alright, but I figured that cloud based solutions were the best for my use case, as they were better and for free.

I had no idea that open sourced AI progressed so much in the last year. Amazing stuff!

[-] macattack@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago

what's the min-sys requirements for a good experience?

[-] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago

A midrange graphics card and 16 GB of RAM should suffice. Check their site for specifics.

[-] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 5 points 4 months ago

You're not generating models at this point. You don't need that kind of hardware to run these.

[-] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 5 points 4 months ago

Well that comes with shit ton of privacy risk. If y'all are comfortable, then it is your choice

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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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