Tldr: Theyre adding an opt-in alt text generation for blind people and an opt-in ai chat sidebar where you can choose the model used (includes self-hosted ones)
And yet, Mozilla went for the 10% that do violate your privacy and gives your data to the biggest corporations: Google, Microsoft, OpenAI.
What happened to the Mozilla Manifesto?
The alternative is only supporting self hosted LLMs, though, right?
Imagine the scenario: you’re a visually impaired, non-technical user. You want to use the alt-text generation. You’re not going to go and host your own LLM, you’re just going to give up and leave it.
In the same way, Firefox supports search engines that sell your data, because a normal, non-technical user just wants to Google stuff, not read a series of blog posts about why they should actually be using something else.
The alt text generation is done locally. That was the big justification Mozilla used when they announced the feature.
I’m talking about the non-local ChatGPT stuff.
Ah, I missed that alt text specifically is local, but the point stands, in that allowing (opt-in) access to a 3rd party service is reasonable, even if that service doesn’t have the same privacy standards as Mozilla itself
To pretty much every non-technical user, an AI sidebar that won’t work with ChatGPT (Google search’s equivalent from my example previously) may as well not be there at all
They don’t want to self host an LLM, they want the box where chat gpt goes
