this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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Orbit is an LLM addon/extension for Firefox that runs on the Mistral 7B model. It can summarize a given webpage, YouTube videos and so on. You can ask it questions about stuff that's on the page. It is very privacy friendly and does not require any account to sign up.

I personally tried it, and found it to be incredibly useful! I think this is going to be one of my long term addons along with uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes and so on. I would highly recommend checking this out!

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[–] cloudless@lemmy.cafe 123 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Most important part of the thread:

In it's beta stage, Orbit is currently not open-source. This doesn't mean it will remain this way forever. If orbit gains traction and we have the resources and funding to support an Open-Source project, I'm sure things could change.

Press X to doubt.

[–] n2burns@lemmy.ca 56 points 4 days ago (7 children)

Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism? They were founded on open-source and AFAIK have continued to support open-source. Mozilla is far from a perfect organization, but if this project was a success I think it would be out of character for them to keep it closed-source.

[–] cloudless@lemmy.cafe 28 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] n2burns@lemmy.ca 19 points 4 days ago

That's a pretty good answer. I knew Mozilla had bought it, and were operating it as an independent subsidiary. I didn't know they promised to open-source it over 7 years ago.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 24 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Eh, skepticism should be the default.

But I agree with you, nothing they've done is inherently bad, though they've done some abysmally stupid things in the way they handle them.

But I also really wish they'd stop fucking around with half-assed things like this and focus on core utilities.

[–] skulblaka@sh.itjust.works 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

What core utilities does Firefox need that it doesn't have? Honest question. I've been using it over a decade and never had it fail to do something I asked it to, and I'm a little out of the loop on the web browser development news cycle beyond the recent wave of Google Bad.

[–] southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 days ago

Mozilla has firefox and thunderbird. They're the two core utilities. The vpn attempt, the Mastodon server, that kind of stuff is fluff.

I may be using the wrong terminology? It was an offhand comment and that's the word that I picked out of my head, it might mean something different to a developer, I dunno.

But Mozilla, if you ignore what Google pays them, is not exactly a high profit endeavour, and we don't want it to be. So having what funds they have focused onto the things that matter is what I'd prefer they do. Mind you, if the vpn pulls enough in to generate funds rather than cost them, that's great.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 days ago

This is enough to warrant scepticism for me: https://lemmy.ml/post/20683744

[–] toothbrush@lemmy.blahaj.zone 40 points 4 days ago (2 children)

then why make it closed source to begin with?

[–] vinnymac@lemmy.world 40 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Believe it or not but it requires resources to open source an internal product, especially one that may have been an experiment where some small team was able to convince leadership could become useful to the masses.

React.js at Facebook is a good example of this. It took a lot of effort to externalize and open source React, and tbh the codebase is still kind of garbage when it comes to contributions from those unfamiliar with its intricacies.

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[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Firefox is sustained (biggest funder) by google who needs artificial competitions to not be labeled a monopoly.

Its still the best browser i can think off that isn’t chromium but i would recommend staying skeptical.

[–] Tobberone@lemm.ee 1 points 4 days ago

Well, that's been the basis for some other products. AMD and Intel comes to mind😊 They both have IP the other need and historically Intel has been the dominant one, but now the tables have turned somewhat.

[–] zecg@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism?

Yes, their "privacy friendly ad measurement" that's opt out is a faux pas that I just can't forgive. I used to donate to the fuckers.

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[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 18 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Ooh, I just tried it out and I can tell I'm going to love it - if not this specific plugin (the UI needs some work) then this general concept of a plugin.

I just popped over to Youtube and went to a ten-minute video of something or other, clicked the "summarize transcript" button, and within a few seconds I had a paragraph-long summary of what the whole video was about. There have been sooo many Youtube videos over the years that I've reluctantly watched with a constant "get to the point, man!" Frustration. Now I'll know if it's worth it.

Huh, I'll have to check it out then. This will be especially useful for Louis Rossmann videos because he rambles and repeats himself a lot.

[–] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 2 points 4 days ago

RIGHT?!!! IT'S SO FKIN AMAZING

This is especially going to be useful for me as a student. It's just feels like browser 2.0 at this point haha

[–] TheRedSpade@lemmy.world 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Hm...could be useful for those times you want to read a guide but can only find one in video form

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[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works -1 points 4 days ago
[–] treadful@lemmy.zip 41 points 4 days ago (2 children)

It is very privacy friendly [...]

What makes you believe that? The most information I could find about this is that it doesn't "save your session data." The Orbit privacy policy also seems a bit bare, and I can't decide if that's a good thing or not.

Either way, you're still sending data to a third party service to process. Might be worth it for some people.

[–] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

No association with any account. Therefore, no profiling.

[–] pmc@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 3 days ago

Facebook and Google profile you with no account. Accounts aren't required for tracking.

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[–] AceBonobo@lemmy.world 38 points 4 days ago (2 children)

So mozilla is paying the server costs for this, what's the business model?

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[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 34 points 4 days ago

I’m just glad it’s an add on/extension. A lot of the crap baked into browsers these days is just bloat nobody wants or uses.

[–] macattack@lemmy.world 29 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Probably not for me as I'm not interested in a summarizing tool, but I'm not against AI in general.

OAN, I think over time, the community will see that AI was a bubble, but in the same way that the internet was a bubble back in the day.

[–] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

OAN, I think over time, the community will see that AI was a bubble, but in the same way that the internet was a bubble back in the day.

Surprised to see this opinion on Lemmy haha. Yep, totally agree with ya here!

[–] WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Everyone wants a Her style personal assistant — as in one that is personal-context aware, can simplify, and generally enrich their lives (not for emotional support) — but if most people knew how unintelligent AI is, how spectacularly it fails, and how dangerous it is to integrate it into information systems and (especially) give it any ability to act ... Literally nobody would want to give it access to all their data, or use it beyond an advisory role.

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[–] DarkThoughts@fedia.io -1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

In before is not just skips important details in its summarization, but also hallucinates its own interpretation of things into it.

Generally, don't call it "AI", don't overhype it, don't use it where it is bad in its function (like telling you "facts"), don't shove it into everything. I bet 80+ percent of all "AI" energy consumption is wasted on completely useless and moronic tasks that have 0 value even on a personal level.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 10 points 4 days ago (1 children)

"The term "AI" has been in use since 1956 for a wide range of computer science techniques. LLMs most certainly qualify as AI. You may be thinking of the science-fiction kind of "artificial people" AI, which is a subset of AI called Artificial General Intelligence when researchers want to be specific about that kind.

[–] tb_@lemmy.world 21 points 4 days ago

The general tone in this thread seems so very different from when "Mozilla is working on AI" was first announced

[–] FreshLight@sh.itjust.works 13 points 4 days ago

Can I just trade in that LLM for the old Firefox please?

[–] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If you really care for an LLM, run it locally... Not sure if this does it...

[–] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 6 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Don't want to install and maintain 10gigs of cuda stuff on my PC. Next, my mum won't know how to do that. Her laptop is a potato. This add-on makes all of this way easier.

[–] photonic_sorcerer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 4 days ago (3 children)

You don't need CUDA, it's actually pretty easy. You can run the Mistral 7B model this add-on is based on using GPT4All. It doesn't require much, if any, technical knowledge.

[–] UraniumBlazer@lemm.ee 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

HOLY HELL THAT'S COOL. It can do so much too!!!

I locally installed some small LLM model more than a year ago. It took up like 25 gigs or something along with all CUDA libraries n stuff. It was alright, but I figured that cloud based solutions were the best for my use case, as they were better and for free.

I had no idea that open sourced AI progressed so much in the last year. Amazing stuff!

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[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 5 points 4 days ago

You're not generating models at this point. You don't need that kind of hardware to run these.

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