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Comment by red_admiral | Hacker News Reader

I'm just happy the update is not "We've integrated new AI features".

Why? Fully offline translations they've added in one of the recent versions are nice, I've used them today to read a couple of articles in French and did not notice any difference with Google Translate (compared them side by side). Another AI-related feature they promised recently are automatically generated alt descriptions for images that don't have any. Seems like a massively useful feature for the visually impaired.

To give a serious answer to your serious reply to my snarky post: I think we're in an AI hype cycle, I don't deny that AI is sometimes useful but it seems like everyone and their dog is trying to add some kind of "AI" to their product now, without thinking through either the value to the end user, or any privacy implications. They've just heard that AI = $$$ and are running with it. In some cases it even becomes one more way to slurp up everyone's data for ads and training yet more AI.

Even Microsoft Recall could be useful for many people, but it should have been opt-in from the start. Personally I'd also wish that AI modules were only installed when you opt in, so you don't take up valuable space (especially on mobile) with a massive matrix of model weights unless the user actually asks for that.

I am responsible for the Firefox Translation feature (with my dev partner Andre Natal) and I'm proud to have introduced a great "AI" feature. Firefox Translation is powered by small language models (and a transformer architecture) that gives you 100% local translation with a minimal of hassle. It's the opposite of AI-hype and when I was at Mozilla building this, everyone was on the same page as me with using AI only where appropriate and not as a hype mechanism. I left Mozilla about a year ago so perhaps things have changed, but IMO you don't have to worry about Mozilla treating AI as $$$ (mostly because it's actually a huge cost center, I couldn't even get budget to train up beyond about 10 languages when Firefox is available in 100 languages.)

Thank you for this. That is very encouraging.

I wish that offline translation system was part of the desktop rather than the browser, so we could use it in every app.

Unfortunately it only supports a very small number of languages, none that I really care about, but also of the times I did try it on a supported language, it only translated the first ~1/3rd of the page for some reason.

Why? I'd love to see a fully-local LLM for text generation, proofreading etc.

Nobody forces you to use it, and I have much higher trust in Mozilla to not do a sneaky switcheroo to a cloud-based model or something similar than I have in the other browser vendors.

Does it really have to be integrated in the browser, though? Because Mozilla already distributes offline LLMs: https://github.com/Mozilla-Ocho/llamafile.

Don't hold your breath, it's Mozilla after all. They're king of shooting themselves in the foot to pursue trends.

I mean, technically they have? Maybe not in this update, but they include local AI models for webpage translation. It's pretty useful (when it's a supported language pair, at least)

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