And while not all people are fond of AI, there are shit tons of people out there who do. Which means you automatically diminish your market share if you don't (because your most important competitors do)
If they aren’t trying things, they would also then be accused of languishing in obscurity.
AI being built into browsers isn’t new. Summarization isn’t novel. It’s not early in the game where resources are crazy high.
Summarization could run with a basic low powered model privately hosted.
Market share changes based on what browsers do well.
So we’re now in the timeline where Mozilla is the liquid metal terminator in T2 trying to escape lava by shapeshifting, as you say, three horns and a bubble dome. Accurately put! And a hilarious image too.
We’d best hope that the antitrust lawsuits don’t kill the Google money that’s keeping their car fueled.
Firefox the browser is responsible for the vast majority (81%?) of the money that is injected into Mozilla annually.
You're moving the goalpost rather substantially. "It makes no money" and "it costs millions to maintain" -> it pulls in hundreds of millions per year, the majority of their income. They can afford to focus on it.
They are languishing into obscurity not because they aren't trying things, but because their browser functionality is languishing behind the others.
I appreciate the languishing comment, at the same time Firefox has features that seem to be a little unique to it out of the box. Spaces comes to mind.
Getting really good at one thing might be beneficial.
Ai summarization seems to be more and more common in a browser. Maybe they’ll add it as a local feature once a model can comfortably run.
Someone on this site also assured me ten years ago that we'd have full self driving by 2020.
It works.
That's pretty much accurate. Mine's been up and running on my clunky old home machine for 6 months, and I just this morning overheard a couple coworkers talking about the local llms they're running. Right now a substantial minority of PCs could run useful models. Usage is at the stage where it's small and growing rapidly. Early adapter phase, but all you need is a relatively modest years-old GPU to handle something like this model.
What isn't done, and probably won't be for a while, is a nice generic framework so we can tie their local llm into all sorts of local apps and processes. The big players all want us to use cloud services.