this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
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Firefox

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[–] [email protected] 103 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.

Hmm.

>locally hosted

>Google Cloud

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Sounds like they’re running their own LLM instance on googles cloud infrastructure vs using something like OpenAI via API.

As web dev parlance it makes sense but for marketing it is definitely confusing and they should do better.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

It’s a thing.

Remember how the cloud is someone else’s server? Now you can buy it and bring it home, and it becomes only sorta someone else’s.

Amazon and Azure offer their own on-prem products.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

"Locally hosted" means it's running on the local host. In this case, that would mean on the same computer running Firefox.

Calling something that is only accessible over the internet "locally hosted" is outrageous doublespeak.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Why does local mean local? I'm not sure I understand your question.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter” would you be confused why they didn’t move a rack into your house?

My question is why are you projecting your limited interpretation as a global truth?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

In IT context local is a well establised term. It's either hosted locally, i. e. on machine running the browser or not. A datacenter or cloud are remote machines also by the same well established definition.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Ok, now do your own datacenter vs cloud.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The language is confusing, and Mozilla should fix it themselves.

The important takeaway is: data is sent over an IP address controlled by Google, to a remote server, running Google software. No processing is taking place on someone's local computer.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

IP address can belong to Mozilla, but the rest is correct.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

If they had said “locally hosted in our datacenter”

Then that would also be an oxymoron.

Local is the opposite of remote. This is a remote server. Remote servers are not local. This is not a matter of interpretation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

It is, actually. It is local to them, it is remote to you. They are differentiating from a remote server in someone else’s datacenter. It is not that confusing.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It just started and already have buzzwords floating around

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Probably written by an AI?

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 month ago (1 children)

https://orbitbymozilla.com/terms

4. Content

A. Content You Share

By using the Services, you represent that you will only share material (including Inputs) that you own and/or have the legal right to share and sublicense to others, including without limitation, content and data contained in any web-page shared through the Services to generate Outputs. When you submit your own content through the Services, you continue to own the rights to that content. You grant Mozilla a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, sub-license, prepare derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display the Inputs for the purpose of operating the Services.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thanks for the link to the privacy policy. You notice, at the bottom, it has links to both "About Mozilla" and "About FakeSpot"?

When you run the Orbit extension, it connects to two domains with every request:

  1. orbitbymozilla.com
  2. prod.orbit-ml-front-api.fakespot.prod.webservices.mozgcp.net

There's FakeSpot again.

And FakeSpot has a terrible privacy policy that allows sale of private data directly to advertisers.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Yeah, that's a no-go. I probably wasn't going to use it anyway, but if it had a decent privacy policy, I might at least try it.

But no, not happening.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 month ago (6 children)

I don't want that. I want full control and absolute privacy. I do not want your AI reading my emails. Look at that summary, it's as long as the whole email, and you're not going to be able to trust that it picked up on the most important part of the email. This is not efficiency, this is novelty.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Then don't install the extension?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (4 children)

“AI you can trust” …

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Well, you can just... not install the extension then?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I won't. But my concern is that Mozilla is heading in the wrong direction lately, and I have used Firefox for a very long time.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

We always told them we want things to be optional, and now this is an extension so I dunno. Seems they're listening?

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

AI you can trust

Lost me there

Easily summarize emails

Haha "Give us access to all your emails for data and corporate espionage we pwomise nothing bad will be done with it!"

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I sent in a support ticket asking them to save Firefox and stop all this AI bullshit

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm sure their support appreciates that a lot.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Yeah, there is a lot they can do about it.

Email their CEOs or some shit instead.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.

So it connects to Google Cloud for this? What does that mean "locally", if its a Cloud Platform? And what does that mean "Mozilla's", if its Google? I'm a bit confused with this sentence.

Does it download and execute it locally offline or does it send the data to Google Cloud Platform?? The page is not clear about this and I searched for an answer. I have the same Mistral 7B model that I downloaded from HuggingFace website and can use offline with a specific GUI application. It would be nice if I could Firefox point to that file instead.

Otherwise, this does not look very promising and I wouldn't trust it at the moment.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Google Distributed Cloud allows you to run Google Cloud Platform locally in your own datacenter. They can deploy apps to that infrastructure and use the cloud console for management, or even use normal kubernetes tools for it.

Couldn’t say if that’s what they’re actually doing, but running Google Cloud locally is a thing.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago

"Yeah sorry boss, i didn't actually read the email, instead i had an AI summarize it for me and it got a key detail wrong. Anyway what's a couple thousand dollars in lost sales right"

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

why are they promoting web-based mail when their email solution is thunderbird?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thunderbird is more a community project that's outside of Mozilla's jurisdiction at this point

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Thunderbird is built by a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, it just isn’t the Mozilla Corporation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (11 children)

Thunderbird is an independent, community-driven project that is managed and overseen by the Thunderbird Council, which is elected by the Thunderbird Community.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Thunderbird

No. It's not.

Edit: sort of is, under a subsidiary called MZLA but still seems more independent from mozilla and their shenanigans (I hope)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago

Well that's disappointing.

Just add it onto the pile of all the other stupid stuff Mozilla is doing I guess.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Not available on mobile, which is sad. I consume 99% of my internet via mobile devices.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

If you install it from a file, everything else seems to work except dragging it around.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I find it kind of suspicious that the extension (the fake spot one to) are proprietary.

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