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.
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.
Yeah, we “self-host” our app at AWS at work, which means we configure everything ourselves. I “self-host” a VPS at Hetzner for personal projects, and my actual data is actually self-hosted on a machine on my LAN.
Remember how the cloud is someone else’s server? Now you can buy it (or lease) and bring it home, and it becomes only sorta someone else’s.
Amazon and Azure offer their own on-prem products.
“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.
Why does it mean that?
Why does local mean local? I’m not sure I understand your question.
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?
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.
Ok, now do your own datacenter vs cloud.
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.
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.
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.
IP address can belong to Mozilla, but the rest is correct.
Information We Share.
We use third parties to provide the Service to you, and have contracted with these companies requiring them to protect your information (Third-Party Services):
Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a cloud-computing platform. We use GCP to manage services that facilitate responses to user prompts and page summarization.
lol, I think we’re giving too little credit to the marketing people in tech. I want to read their blogs!
It just started and already have buzzwords floating around
Probably written by an AI?
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.
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:
- orbitbymozilla.com
- 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.
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.
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.
Then don’t install the extension?
So do you actually draw the line at Mozilla never building stuff like this into their browser, or is that a line you would be willing to cross too?
“AI you can trust” …
I won’t trust the AI Mozilla uses until they show us the source data. Not the source code that consumes a massive binary blob; the stuff that generated the binary blob they are using.
Not far enough. I won’t trust it until I can build it myself and self-host it. Then if they provide reproducible builds and hashes of the currently running build, I can decide whether it’s better to use their hosted version or my own.
I’d want both.
My biggest gripe is that when companies provide “source code,” it often is technically reproducible and “works,” but only with a gigabytes-large binary blob that cannot be debugged and will not be sourced.
But but but … they said…
Well, you can just… not install the extension then?
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.
We always told them we want things to be optional, and now this is an extension so I dunno. Seems they’re listening?
Yes, I’m glad this BS is an extension. I’m not happy that they’re spending time on this vs projects people actually seem to want. AI appeared nowhere on the top-10 survey results, yet this is what they come up with. I just hope they didn’t spend a ton of time on it.
Thing is, Pocket is also an extension. Just much less optional. If Mozilla makes this AI thing part of their flagship in a lot of the same ways. Possibly even more. It’s not about what it is now, but rather what it means for the future of Mozilla and Firefox.
Pretty sure the email is longer than is shown, hence why the last sentence is cut off
Here’s the summary of their example article (or perhaps the page?):
This email expresses a sarcastic and exaggerated perspective on the advancements and implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The author begins by expressing excitement about the technological marvels of AI, but then proceeds to poke fun at the complexity and convoluted nature of AI, its ability to predict our actions, and the replacement of human interaction with AI chatbots. The author also mocks the idea of AI-generated content and its ability to replicate human creativity, and the potential ethical concerns of relying on AI for decision-making. The email concludes with a sarcastic call to embrace the “glory” of AI and its potential to take over human autonomy. The tone of the email is light-hearted and humorous, but it also raises valid concerns about the role and impact of AI on our lives.
This isn’t really a summary, there’s some interpretation going on as well. I don’t want AI to do any form of interpretation, but if it does so, it should be as metadata below the actual summary.
And honestly, I almost never get an email that I actually want to summarize. Most of them I can either completely ignore (corporate BS), or they’re short and to the point. So it’s weird to me that email is the first thing they mention.
I did exactly this at work the other day. Someone had forwarded a full email thread to me and asked my opinion on it - they gave no summary or outline of the thread and expected me to read through it. I don’t have time to read through a full thread and work out what they want from me so I copied it into chatgpt and asked it to summarise and tell me points that might need my attention. It was pretty good
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!”
I sent in a support ticket asking them to save Firefox and stop all this AI bullshit
I’m sure their support appreciates that a lot.
I hope they do
Yeah, there is a lot they can do about it.
Email their CEOs or some shit instead.
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.
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.
Thanks for the clarification. That’s interesting indeed. Unfortunately Mozilla is so dependent on Google.
I agree. I’d prefer they just run their own Kubernetes and manage it themselves. Maybe throw some business at Red Hat if they need help with it.
“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”
why are they promoting web-based mail when their email solution is thunderbird?
Thunderbird is more a community project that’s outside of Mozilla’s jurisdiction at this point
Thunderbird is built by a for-profit subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, it just isn’t the Mozilla Corporation.
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)
That changed in 2020: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2020/01/thunderbirds-new-home/
Wiki truth
deleted by creator
What’s the sentence before that one?
Here, read the latest news: https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-moves-to-monetize-thunderbird-transfers-project-to-new-subsidiary/
Never wondered why Thunderbird donations aren’t tax deductible?
OK… Now what actionable thing can I do with this info? Use outlook? What good would that do?
I want firefox to exist to create a good browser and thunderbird to exist for a good email client. Is that too much to ask?
I don’t think you need to do anything different. Sometimes when I learn new things I say “oh, interesting.”
Fair nuff. Sometimes it’s just overwhelming getting information of something I can’t do anything by. Like oh great another thing that’s going wrong rn… Woo hoo
Fuck off
Well that’s disappointing.
Just add it onto the pile of all the other stupid stuff Mozilla is doing I guess.
Not available on mobile, which is sad. I consume 99% of my internet via mobile devices.
If you install it from a file, everything else seems to work except dragging it around.
Thanks for the heads up.
I find it kind of suspicious that the extension (the fake spot one to) are proprietary.
It is but it’s also natural for them, they’re slowly transitioning to a closed source company like all the other big tech companies. The hope is that we don’t notice, or that those of us who do notice are a small minority who can be stomped out or discredited by those who don’t notice or are in their pocket.
Reddit too used to be open source, they’re not anymore. This shit does happen, regardless of what anyone says.
Never meet your heroes, or better yet, never have heroes.
Booooooooo
🙄
Prob not Privcy focusing extension
