I feel stupid for asking but what is an AI agentic browser even supposed to do? Search things based on your query? Well search bars have been a thing since forever. 🤷
Comment on No AI* Here - A Response to Mozilla's Next Chapter - Waterfox Blog
just_another_person@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Am engineer. Know zero professional people in the engineering community who use AI browsers, and very few who even touch AI for anything aside from docs or stats.
In my personal life I know zero people who use these browsers. I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing or is about, even.
Start making tools to give to people to combat this bullshit from the EU. Build a USABLE and decentralized chat app that people can actually use FFS. Build something like Proton and ACTUALLY BECOME SELF-SUFFICIENT.
Others have eaten your lunch because of this exact thing. Do better.
hayvan@feddit.nl 2 days ago
scarabic@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing or is about, even.
There’s another possibility I don’t see anyone talking about. It could just be the higher ups at Mozilla doing hr performative “we’re doing AI” dance for their shareholders and the investment community. Everyone assumes they are 100% sincere about embracing AI but this could simply be them paying the AI tax that all companies seem required to pay right now.
If this is plausible, then we should just wait for it to manifest as actual feature changes and then judge. Right now this is just high level messaging and PR.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
If you’ve not been paying attention to their other random products, it would seem this is unlikely.
They just jump from random thing to random thing and collect money along the way, draining the coffers with their C-level titles. Absolutely bullshit.
setsubyou@lemmy.world 2 days ago
very few who even touch AI for anything aside from docs or stats
Not even translation? That’s probably the biggest browser AI feature.
JayGray91@piefed.social 2 days ago
Translation is my main use. Yes, the caveat that AI is 50/50 wrong is still there but at least I don’t have to pester friends that know the language for everything. I only use it for unimportant things.
SmoothOperator@lemmy.world 2 days ago
To be fair, it’s way better than 50/50, but of course no guarantees still.
JayGray91@piefed.social 2 days ago
It gets the job done enough to understand the jist for me, yeah. But mostly I only do short posts. A language like Japanese makes it just a lot harder from what I understand from friends that learned the language. IIRC it’s because the language relies on unspoken context and of course its grammar making machine translation trip.
MagicShel@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I only use it for unimportant things.
The key to responsible AI use. Of course, in the grand scheme, few things are all that important.
If the marginal cost of being wrong about something is essentially zero, AI is a very helpful resource due to its speed and ubiquity.
Hawk@lemmynsfw.com 1 day ago
Similarly, translating from html/QML or js/py/rust is handy.
Its still a pain because even good models like opus are hit or miss. The code still has to be reviewed and adapted. Can save time though.
They are also very useful for mocking up a quick proof of concept.
Is X doable? Will Y potentially solve the problems that my clients need me to solve? mock it up in two seconds with a few prompts and a language model and you don’t have to take a stroll down a garden path.
The actual work I still have to do but that’s why I’m paid to do it.
ashughes@feddit.uk 19 hours ago
I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing or is about, even.
As someone who started their career as a volunteer at Mozilla and was fortunate enough to become an employee (although am no longer), I can say with a fair amount of confidence that this has been their standard operating mode for over a decade. Nothing I’ve seen from them since I was let go has shown me they’re operating any differently.
I still support Firefox because I oppose a browser monoculture owned by Google, and the advocacy work the Foundation is vitally important. The Corporation lost the plot ages ago though, and does more harm to Mozilla’s mission than any other player out there. No amount of re-orgs or pivots can fix this.
I hope, someday, for Firefox to be freed from the Corporation as a sustainable community run project (like Debian), with infrastructure sponsored by the Foundation and others who want to see it continue. Unfortunately the Corporation will never let Firefox go because its existential for them, and will be stuck in this panic cycle for as long as Google keeps them on life support.
Anyway, still using Firefox and pruning all the weeds from it each release, but it’s become exhausting.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 days ago
Am engineer. I use AI features in browsers, and know several others who also do. I'm looking forward to trying additional features Mozilla's going to be bringing in the future.
Basing your view of what everyone does on what everyone you know does is a perfect way to amplify the effects of a social bubble.
Ashtear@piefed.social 2 days ago
Mind explaining what features and why?
FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 days ago
Earlier on, Mozilla released a plugin called Orbit that summarized Youtube videos with a single click. Then they shut it down. I'd love to see that back. I've found some similar plugins since then but none as elegant and integrated as Orbit was. "Chat with this page" features in general are nice when I come across a big paper or news story where I only want a specific bit of information out of it.
I use the "translate this" function quite frequently, and I'd like to see that using local models instead of relying on Google Translate. I avoid Chrome because I don't want everything to be Google dominated.
I suspect AI is still too heavyweight for this application yet, but as the advertising wars continue and advertising starts getting slipped directly into the content of pages I bet an AI-enabled adblocker would be nice.
A fact-checker AI that goes through the content of a page and adds footnotes and references would be great. I try to fact-check news stories but it's a lot of manual drudgery so I'm sure I miss a lot.
Sure, much of this could be done with plugins. Orbit was one originally. But if everybody's having to create the AI framework for plugins from the ground up that's going to result in a ton of inconsistency, extra resources wasted, and potential insecurities. I'd like Firefox to provide some kind of unified interface to plugins to let them call AIs as part of whatever they're doing so that I can pick which models I'd like them to use. I run Ollama on my computer, it provides AI inference to anything that wants to use it locally through a unified API. Something like that built into Firefox would be awesome.
And there'll likely be plenty of other new things I haven't thought of to try out. AI is a very active field, there are new models with new capabilities coming out all the time.
Mac@mander.xyz 2 days ago
You sure are relying on the accuracy of the misinformation machine.
selokichtli@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Wow, that carbon footprint. You must be proud.
MagicShel@lemmy.zip 2 days ago
I’ve avoided using AI features in Firefox. If I want AI, I explicitly go to AI rather than having it integrated. But you offer some good use cases. And fundamentally I agree that 100% fact checking with a 90% accuracy rate is better than the 0% fact checking most of us do except when we think subverting is wrong and we go digging through for arguments against it.
That being said, I would worry about model makers building in inherent bias. Like I could never trust Grok as the engine behind a fact checker (though it is surprisingly resilient and often calls out bullshit it is supposed to be peddling).
Like imagine the person who only wants OANGPT to summarize or fact check every article they read. Can you imagine the level of self-delusion that would come from a MAGA-fied version of everything they read? It would be like living in a propaganda factory. Deliberately.
Facebook: Bob Smith [woke, probably drinks soy milk and dresses as a woman on weekends]: Had a great day at work today. [he’s probably on welfare so this is bullshit] Big things are coming! [He’s part of a trans pedo ring, guaranteed!]
Which feels like stupid hyperbole, but I’ll bet every one of us knows at least one person who is that stupid.
Eh. I use AI all the time, but my level of skepticism…
BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days ago
I’m curious, what AI features do you use and why? I can’t even figure out what one is supposed to do.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 days ago
I just responded to a similar question by Ashtear@piefed.social above, listing a bunch of things I do with AI that having a framework embedded right into Firefox would make a lot more convenient, hopefully it provides some answers for this as well.
474D@lemmy.world 2 days ago
“Am engineer”. This is reddit level cringe stuff. There are tons of engineers, we’re not special and most of us are equally dumb. Its funny you mention proton when they’ve made pro-***** statements and then trying to stay neutral in the blowback. “AI” has its uses like you said, in docs and stats. Firefox will NEVER be self-sufficient because they exist on funding from Google to exist as their only competition to not be a browser monopoly. As much as we hate it, there is a complicated line to be towed here. Mozilla isn’t perfect, but they’re far from an enemy here
CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
What about all those ladder climbers who want to sound like they’re tapped in to the pulse of cutting edge technology to the bosses? I work with engineers and it seems to be pretty split between full adoption and full rejection.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 2 days ago
LLMs aren’t going to make you good at your job.
If you lacked coming in and relied on this bullshit, you’ll suck even more going out when they figure out you can’t have a conversation about the thing you were hired to be an expert on, buddy.
Good luck to you.
CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Im genuinely confused by your reply. I wasn’t referring to ladder climbers in a positive light. I see them shoehorning AI into pointless projects that dazzle the bosses because they don’t know any better or because they want to dazzle their own bosses with more jumbo jumbo derived from their own reports.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 2 days ago
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 day ago
I think this is just panic from the higher ups at Mozilla who have no idea what in the fuck the company should be doing
It’s not panic, it’s consequence of networking and a very specific culture having formed for CEOs and such.
A bit like Silicon Valley tech bros, they think they are the chosen ones leading the charge and able to make decisions for all of us, sort of aristocracy.
So in their circles it’s fashion now to play this “AI” thing.
And mechanisms to remove those fools from places they don’t belong to and make them clean streets have rotten.
Usable and decentralized - well, you’ll need some beyond-the-horizon planning for how the development of that will go on. Because 90s Web was kinda normal too, except there were future stages.
You need something that’s usable almost from the beginning, but that is also usable for everything you haven’t yet thought about. Something that allows any use, but doesn’t limit any, even needed only by a handful of people, task.
You need universal open infrastructure. Something allowing to pool public service trackers, storage services, relay services, notification services, key services, search services, but tying them into specific applications on the client. Different applications, over the common high-level medium (of authors and messages and groups, for example ; perhaps subscriptions). And you need that to be untrusted and backed up by DHT and sneakernet as perfectly functional alternative ways for the same system. You need them all.
And you need means of development with higher common, basic level. You need something like Hypercard on the clients, so that development in this “alternative Web” were accessible in its full power. With “cards” shared like messages. That’d be similar to how we fetch different websites.
Messages and people and groups would have global identifiers, tied to cryptography. One could have sort of “permission rule” messages to be interpreted by clients to decide, during “replaying” a group with its messages, which action was valid and which wasn’t, and what can this specific user do to the group at this specific moment.
There could be different types of messages, perhaps with references to “interpreter” messages containing scripts.
OK. That’s just a pet dream of mine, but I don’t yet have a full picture in my mind.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
One could have sort of “permission rule” messages to be interpreted by clients to decide, during “replaying” a group with its messages, which action was valid and which wasn’t, and what can this specific user do to the group at this specific moment.
clients could then be overwhelmed with mass invalid messages by bad actors
There could be different types of messages, perhaps with references to “interpreter” messages containing scripts.
I don’t know how safe could that be, but deltachat does something like that
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 2 hours ago
clients could then be overwhelmed with mass invalid messages by bad actors
It could be a shared responsibility to filter these out, similarly to email spam.
Both by users and by relay\storage services.
Repelle@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I miss HyperCard.
owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
The main use for AI that I’ve seen in my circles is a search engine replacement. Not because AI is a good search engine, but because search engines have largely become useless.
If Mozilla wants to cement their place, create a better search engine. It’s how Google came to control a huge portion of the internet, and there’s now a huge vacuum waiting for someone to replace what we lost.
warm@kbin.earth 2 days ago
Exact same thing with anyone I know who uses it. You used to be able to type questions into search engines, now it picks one word from that question and gives you slop results.
iopq@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Why, you didn’t want all of the top results to be scams?
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Ulrich@feddit.org 2 days ago
AI search is useless for the same reason search engines are useless. But at least search engines force you to look at the source information and the context around it. So AI search is even more useless.