My feeling is that AI is the new solution looking for too many problems to solve. I had the same feeling with microservices, big data, block chain, NoSQL databases and all those other hype driven development things. Different products and solutions exist to solve their respective problems. I notice that AI (notably since ChatGPT and related) are pushed in all directions.

Isn't Firefox generally quite good at letting you turn off features you don't want?

The use local models for Firefox Translations so I would expect they would do something similar

I mean, so far their most recent attempt at AI is a local AI based on PrivateGPT called MemoryCache.

I've been hopeful for an external hardware device, something akin to MythicAI's analog hardware. It essentially offloads the heavy duty work done by the GPU, with far lower power consumption and about 98-99% accuracy, then sends the output data back to the computer to be digitized. Adding more tensor cores is just making more power consumption which is already an issue.

That company in particular was using this method for real time AI tracking in cameras but I feel like it could be easily adapted to effectively eliminate the work in AI that NVIDIA is doing for GPU's. Why brute force AI with power and tensor cores when a couple wires and some voltage can sift through the same or larger models at the same.or faster speeds with, well okay about 98-99% accuracy. It could be a simple hardware attachment via PCIe or hell even USB with a small bottleneck for conversion times. I just used an app to upscale a photo locally on my phone, took about 14m (Xperia 1IV), I could easily have offloaded that work to an analog AI device. We are nearly to the point where we can just run "AI*" on a phone at nearly PC speeds.

All this to say - local AI indeed. The only way AI works is when everyone has access to it. Give full, free access to everybody and the fear of corporate interference drops drastically. There are plenty of models available online not made by Google or Microsoft pushing whatever or harvesting data back (remember to firewall your programs if you run them locally). Ideally tagsets could be open sourced but in the capitalist world I could also see independent artists selling models of their work under a license

/* Of course, AI as a broad spectrum term encompassing model based projects, LLM's for assistants & generative imaging, and not the actual AI as a semi-autonomous intelligence

The vast majority of consumer devices, both mobile and laptops/desktops, are not powerful enough to run local AI with a good user experience yet, and even if they were, a lot of users would still prefer having it run in the cloud rather than using up their phone battery

Local by default, option to go remote. Even the privacy-first types might want to offload that to a more powerful local machine.

They could even sell access to a Mozilla provided AI server like they do with the VPN service.

The conspiracy theory I've heard is that Mozilla is basically paid opposition to Google. Their leadership is being paid (by Google) to run Firefox into the ground without actually going out of business.

Whats wrong with firefox currently?

Yeah and AI is pretty useful for doing certain things. For example my pixel can turn on subtitles for any video or audio playing and even translate it for me on the fly. AI isnt blockchain and it isnt all chatgtp or making images with too many fingers. People are talking about improving web standards as if whatever ai stuff google,MS, and apple are cooking up wont be used in order to enhance various web features.

Likewise firefox is currently a good browser and does keep up for the most part. I'd understand the criticisms if firefox was suck in 2009, but modern day firefox is fast and works well and they will likely continue keeping up with standards while an independent team works on the open source AI stuff

I happen to be a Firefox user

I happen to be a former conkeror user, which was based on XULRunner, which Mozilla dropped, just like other ways to use their engine for other browsers.

But I could use pre-Australis Firefox.

Only then their experiments on people with UI design happened.

And yes, Mozilla as an organization has objective flaws. Their treatment of the SeaMonkey project (now separate) has not been good as well.

Pretty much.. Mitchell baker gets paid 7 million.

That being said though, just to play devils advocate, she was there since the beginning apparently (at Netscape). So, she actually seems to somewhat deserve it. And she's well educated too and I get the impression she's also a good person too

Whereas, you look at the Oracle CEO, and she's what you expect (donates a lot of money to the right wing, banker, etc)

I mean HDR support in Windows, at least in my anecdotal experience, is garbage, anyway. But I agree, that doesn't mean the browser shouldn't support it by now.

Are you talking about this? Because it exists since ~2016

Yes, let's let Google have complete control over the web, that will show them!

Literally the worst take I've heard all day

what does that creative commons license have to do with Firefox?