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Mozilla under fire for Firefox AI "bloat" that blows up CPU and drains battery (www.neowin.net)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 30 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Firefox has little financial motivation for this, though?

Other than getting "AI" investor money, if that's the plan... But otherwise it just feels like they're following a meme.

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  • [–] 34 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    It makes a lot more sense when you realize that the Mozilla corporation is a for profit run by the same techno-fascist aggrandizing bait-and-switch narcissists as the rest of SV.

    I've been saying it for years, but I will never donate to Firefox until it is freed from the shackles of a for profit corporation that can use your donation for any profit motive it sees fit; not even related to Firefox.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Isn't the "for-profit" Mozilla Corporation owned by the "non-profit" Mozilla Foundation though?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I don't care. It's a corrosive force that causes them to pay for over priced CEO's and integrate services that nobody cares about into Firefox (like pocket) or that runs against their principles (container VPN's exclusive to Mozillas for-profit VPN).

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    90% of their cash flow comes from google to be the default search engine - they are probably trying to open up alternative routes of funding to reduce the risk, since it's not guaranteed that the money will keep coming due to the current lawsuit.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Right, I sympathize with that.

    …But also it’s ridiculous. Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money? Even if that’s kinda reality?

    TBH they should just become a contributor to llama.cpp and market that somehow.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Like why should including a feature with “AI” in it get them VC money?

    Spoken like someone who's never interacted with Silicon Valley VCs... just imagine someone with tons of a money, a moderately competent business background, and very little understanding of even the basics of technology that you and I take for granted. And then make them stupid and greedy.

    "AI? Yes please! Here's some money, I've heard of Firefox so I know you're good for it." It's not really any more complicated than that, I don't think.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well, exactly. Then why the pretense?

    They could contribute to some existing local inference effort, do actually useful dev work, and slap their brand on it. It would both be cheaper and "look" better to VCs.

    Basically do what ollama's doing but less shady.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Yeah. There would be a way to do it that I feel like might potentially be useful. The described method (doing clustering instead of just having a similarity threshold to group tabs together, vectorizing the entire tab title through a whole fucking network instead of just tokenizing it and calling two tabs similar if they have uncommon tokens that are within a certain similarity level) really sounds to me like people who have no real idea what they're doing, just being "ML experts" all over the codebase and fucking things up, and probably walking away very proud of themselves while helping themselves to bunches and bunches of the Mozilla Foundation's Google-money.

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