I hope some governments and EU see the need of a foss browser engine alternative from a non-profit and stuff some Money there
this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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Chrome is the existential threat to FireFox.
Chrome is... Also Google.
Break up Google, make chrome competitive, and then we'll stop seeing advertisers own the web standards and implement things like AVIF and ManifestV3, and instead embrace open solutions that favor users.
The JPEG XL vs AVIF thing still makes me mad.
situational irony
Mozilla management was paid millions to develop a new “vision” of a theoretical future with AI chatbots
Is this llamafile?
The thing about LLMs is that no one knows how to write the ultra low level optimizations/runtimes, so they port others (llamafile largely borrows from llama.cpp AFAIK, albeit with some major contributions from their own devs).
Performance is insanely critical because they're so darn hard to run, and new models/features come out weekly which no sane dev can keep up with without massive critical mass (like HF Transformers, mainly, with llama.cpp barely keeping up with some major jank).
So... I'm not sure what Mozilla is thinking here. They don't have many of those kind of devs, they don't have a GPU farm, they're not even contributing to promising webassembly projects like mlc-llm. They're just one of a bazillion companies that was ordered to get into AI with no real purpose or advantage. And while Gemma 2B may be the "first" model that's kinda OK on average PCs, we're still a long way away from easy mass local deployment.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I'm a local LLM tinkerer, and I've never touched or even looked at anything from Mozilla. The community would have if anything of theirs was super useful.
From what I've heard the general idea is to run AI search on your browsing history, which is a very useful feature. I'm not deep into AI tech at all but to me it looks like that would involve local finetuning, ingesting all that history during inference sounds like a bad idea. It also wouldn't be necessary to generate stuff, only answer "Can you find that article about how nature makes blue feathers" and it's going to spit out previously-read links that match that kind of thing. Also, tl;dr-bot it.
Oh and there's already AI, as in ML, in firefox, in the form of machine translation. Language detection seems to be built-in, translating requires downloading a model per language pair, 16M parameters. Trained on workstations with 8GPUs. Which is all to say: You don't need gigantic GPU farms if you aren't training gazillion parameter models on the whole internet.
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I guess they read the room and this is why they started delving into the ad business