They support Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, HuggingChat, and Mistral.
Thing is, for your average user with no GPU and whp never thinks about RAM, running a local LLM is intimidating. But it shouldn’t be. Any system with an integrated GPU, and the more RAM the better, can run simple models locally.
The not so dirty secret is that ChatGPT 3 vs 4 isn’t that big a difference, and neither are leaps and bounds ahead of the publically available models for about 99% of tasks. For that 1% people will ooh and aah over it, but 99% of use cases are only seeing marginal gains on 4o.
And the simplified models that run “only” 95% as well? They can use 90% fewer resources give pretty much identical answers outside of hyperspecific use cases.
Running a a “smol” model as some are called, gets you all the bang for none of the buck, and your data stays on your system and never leaves.
I’ve been yelling from the rooftops to some stupid corporate types that once the model is trained, it’s trained. Unless you are training models yourself, there is no need for the massive AI clusters, just for the model. Run it local on your hardware at a fraction of the cost.
why a fucking chatbot? translate a page better for me you fucking losers, all the translation options suck for privacy outside of specifically trained local AIs. this is the BEST use case for a small local LLM yet mozilla with all its brains and resources couldnt rub two neurons together for this.
or they could do character prediction on your typing to make typing faster. just some legit examples, why waste resources to build a chat ai into my browser when i can just open a website???
I wish I had telemetry on such features.
I really doubt a significant number of people use AI chatbots often enough that having it in a dedicated sidebar is worth it.
I wish I had telemetry
I’m sure they do as Mozilla is an ad company
That was there before 133, don’t remember the exact release that added it.
They better not decide to enable it by default.
it’s not enabled by default … it’s opt out by default
I think that means that it’s opt-in.
if third-party accounts are needed, it’ll have to stay that way.
The chat isn’t the point, it’s needed as interface for storing your logins to summarization features
When internet is written by ai, you do need a tldr
Are any of these open source or trustworthy?
I think Mistral is model-available (ie I’m not sure if they release training data/code but they do release model shape and weights), huggingchat definitely is open source and model-available
probably not
as someone who’s never dabbled with ai bots, what does this feature do? is it only to query for information like a web search?
From the description in the UI, it does sound like it. Theoretically, a chatbot could be created where you can ask questions about the webpage you have currently opened, so if you don’t want to read a long article, for example. I guess, you could probably just throw a link into an existing chatbot either way, but yeah, direct integration might be convenient either way.
Well, or a chatbot could be created, which has access to your browser history, bookmarks and tabs, so you can ask it when you last saw certain information. However, you’d need a locally running chatbot for that, which makes it more difficult to implement.
It just adds ChatGPT or similar to your sidebar. Chatbots can do a lot of things, they are mostly good for information research and technical help, although they have serious flaws like hallucinating false information sometimes
good question
