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Mozilla launches privacy friendly AI addon called "Orbit" (connect.mozilla.org)

submitted 2 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 124 points 2 months ago (23 children)

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 57 points 2 months ago (22 children)

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.

[–] zecg@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism?

Yes, their "privacy friendly ad measurement" that's opt out is a faux pas that I just can't forgive. I used to donate to the fuckers.

[–] zkfcfbzr@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That feature (more) they've been getting all that negative press over for the past two days is an absolutely gigantic non-issue. Like most anti-Mozilla stories end up being.

The whole thing is an experimental feature intended to replace the current privacy nightmare that is cross-site tracking cookies. As-implemented it's a way for advertisers to figure out things like "How many people who went to our site and purchased this product saw this ad we placed on another site?", but done in such a way that neither the website with the ad, nor the website with the product, nor Mozilla itself knows what any one specific user was doing.

There are definitely things that can be said about this feature, like "Fuck ad companies, it should be off by default" (my personal take). But the feature itself has virtually no privacy consequences whatsoever for anybody, and Mozilla is at least trying to build a system that would legitimately improve the privacy situation on the internet created by companies like Google.

[–] EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 0 points 2 months ago

I don't think that whether it has a privacy impact even matters. What matters is how it demonstrates Mozilla's attitude towards user consent.

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