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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

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

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@lemmy.blahaj.zone 40 points 2 months ago

then why make it closed source to begin with?

[-] vinnymac@lemmy.world 41 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 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.

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[-] CluckN@lemmy.world 5 points 2 months ago

It’s provocative it gets the people going.

[-] cloudless@lemmy.cafe 28 points 2 months ago
[-] n2burns@lemmy.ca 19 points 2 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 24 points 2 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 2 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 2 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 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 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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[-] zecg@lemmy.world 9 points 2 months ago

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

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.

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[-] dantheclamman@lemmy.world 2 points 2 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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[-] treadful@lemmy.zip 42 points 2 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 2 points 2 months ago

No association with any account. Therefore, no profiling.

[-] pmc@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 2 months ago

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

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[-] AceBonobo@lemmy.world 39 points 2 months ago

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

[-] reddig33@lemmy.world 36 points 2 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 29 points 2 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 12 points 2 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 6 points 2 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 4 points 2 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 2 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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[-] tb_@lemmy.world 22 points 2 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 18 points 2 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 8 points 2 months ago

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

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[-] xan@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 2 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.

[-] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 2 points 2 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

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[-] FreshLight@sh.itjust.works 14 points 2 months ago

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

[-] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 9 points 2 months ago

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

[-] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 6 points 2 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 12 points 2 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 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 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!

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[-] macattack@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

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

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

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

[-] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 6 points 2 months ago

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

[-] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 4 points 2 months ago

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

[-] 0x0@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

Maybe they could focus on developing a web browser instead...

[-] Railcar8095@lemm.ee 10 points 2 months ago

Considering how google is making chrome worse every day, they could do only security updates and still be the best browser.

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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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