9 ms·
Why Vivaldi won't follow the current AI trend?
- hmans 2y ago[dead]
- jabrown 2y agoWhy the word order in this sentence is weird?
- nhinck3 2y agoIt's the question mark that is messing it up.
- bool3max 2y agoI guess the question mark at the end makes it weird, with a period it would make more sense, to me. Why Vivaldi won't follow the current AI trend(.) ---> the article explains why Vivaldi will not follow the trend. Why (won't) Vivaldi follow the current AI trend(?) ---> someone's wondering and asking why Vivaldi will not follow the trend.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- julienmarie 2y agoAuthor is francophone (Belgian). This explains the order of the words. The french order would be the same "Pourquoi Vivaldi ne va pas suivre l'actuelle tendance IA"
- jabrown 2y agoI figured as much, but is English proficiency no longer a requirement for writing articles on an organization's official English-language website?
- pprotas 2y agoSeems like a reasonable and thought-out decision to me. Not sure why the comments here are so negative. Clearly LLMs don’t fit into Vivaldi’s vision and the features they’d like to provide to their users.
- stavros 2y agoFor me I think it's because the article appears biased. It's not just "we can't think of any problem it'd solve", it's "LLMs are bad and you should feel bad for liking them".
- pprotas 2y agoI don't really have that feeling. The author says that LLMs make stuff up and are often wrong about non-widely known facts. They present hallucinations in a confident way, which makes them come across as liars. This is true. That is exactly what the most popular LLMs do. They don't say that you should feel bad. The author simply says that the characteristics and unreliability of LLMs make them unfit to be implemented in the Vivaldi browser at this moment. They even close off the article with a positive sentiment about the future of the ML field. They don't burn any bridges there.
- stavros 2y agoThis doesn't sound biased to you?: > While they do this, they also use vast amounts of energy and are happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them which is a problem we’ve seen before in the field of cryptocurrencies.
- novaRom 2y agoA perfect place for multimodal Assistent would be in Operating System's GUI. So that it sees and hears the same as its human user.
- diffeomorphism 2y agoThat is called windows recall and it flopped so hard that it was not even launched.
- quotemstr 2y agoIt was killed by fear-mongering, a common cause of death for new technologies. (Remember the press fomenting a moral panic over Google Glass?) The idea is sound and will be part of our normal day-to-day computing experience in the future.
- 9dev 2y agoRight. Having a plain SQLite database with everything you do on your computer accessible to any program you or Microsoft run on your machine isn’t a problem at all? That open source utility you installed and forgot about that can now gleefully compile statistics on your porn usage and threaten you to send them to your spouse, whose email address and phone number it was able to pull from that same database, unless you pay a few bitcoins-that isn’t an issue at all? The fact that this was enabled for professional users handling your patient records, insurance details, personal finance, or your stock trades and make all that available at a whim, that is nitpicking? The TLS-encrypted API calls Windows computers make to Microsoft servers multiple times per day, any of which could include data from that database as anyone at Microsoft sees fit, they are paranoia? Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
- quotemstr 2y ago> Right. Having a plain SQLite database with everything you do on your computer accessible to any program you or Microsoft run on your machine isn’t a problem at all? We're way beyond the days when every program you run has equal access to all your data. These days, different programs have different levels of data access.
- jebronie 2y agoThank you for protecting me from "misinformation", said no thinking person ever.
- DarkNova6 2y agoMaybe that’s the problem.
- bottled_poe 2y agoWe’re trying to deprecate the brain.
- DarkNova6 2y agoI'd be curious to hear how you guys are trying to achieve this.
- exe34 2y agoYes, I want somebody else to control my intake of information for my own good, because I am not intelligent enough. /s, because this is the internets.
- DarkNova6 2y agoStatistically speaking, maybe you are not in the minority. Given that the vast amount of people get their information from social media and take it verbatim.
- arunharidas 2y agoInformed individuals prefer not to have corporations shield them from potential misinformation.
- nhinck3 2y agoDoing your own research has lead to an incredible advance in public intelligence.
- UrineSqueegee 2y agothat just screams "I don't know what this technology is and I am too afraid to use it" to me personally. Don't use it as a source of information if you don't want it to spew hallucinations to the user? There's about a million other uses for LLMs.
- pjerem 2y ago> There's about a million other uses for LLMs. Ok. But in browsers ?
- Closi 2y agoSure, I mean i'm not their product team but surely LLM's could easily complement things like parental controls, autocomplete mail / language assistance (there is mail in the browser), in-browser language translation etc
- _flux 2y agoSummarizing web contents without requesting the summarization from a cloud service?
- KoolKat23 2y agoSemantic search, browser tab sorting are two examples of use cases.
- surfingdino 2y agoHahaha... search is essentially a solved problem if you are literate and work with well-structured data sets. The market for a tab sorting solution is zero.
- KoolKat23 2y agoI didn't say there aren't alternatives. Search datasets still are not really semantic search, and I'd wager many require online search if they required a well structured dataset, or a dumbed down query. You only have to look to the relative popularity of something like Arc browser to determine there is a market for such things.
- Animats 2y agoLLMs in the browser come across as too much like Microsoft Clippy. Still, things in the Siri/Alexa class have to have some kind of language model.
- benbristow 2y agoWas using Vivaldi on Android, quite a solid browser. Unfortunately, the lack of AI functionality has made Edge a more attractive browser. Very useful to let AI summarise a large wall of text when browsing Hacker News for example. If only they'd add a 'close all tabs but this one' feature.
- LM358 2y ago>If only they'd add a 'close all tabs but this one' feature. ??? Right click tab -> O ? Edit: oh, you're talking about Edge, not Vivaldi
- benbristow 2y agoOn Android
- timeon 2y agoSeems strange that people were damning algorithmic social media walls but are now welcoming preprocessed reality.
- benbristow 2y agoIt's different though, isn't it? Social media walls are the social media sites giving you what they want to show you. AI tools are (mostly) you asking for what you want - albeit you're at the mercy of whatever the AI gives you back, but usually it's what you ask for.
- quotemstr 2y agoMy browser should be my user agent, not my user nanny. I don't want it depriving me of features or working against my interest, ever, on the grounds that the browser author's personal opinions on the social impact of various technologies.
- OccamsMirror 2y agoWhat features are Vivaldi depriving you of by not including an LLM?
- lionkor 2y agoBS (business speak) generation
- LocalH 2y agoIf you really want generative AI in your browser, go use one of the many browsers that are chomping at the bit to get in on the AI fad.
- KoolKat23 2y agoHave no problem with them not following the trend, maybe even a good thing. Their reasoning is shoddy. Misunderstands LLM's and plagiarism is of no practical concern to a browser, may as well remove the copy function from the browser if that's the view, theres also use cases where hallucinations don't matter such as the AI tab sorting and semantic search. He should've just said they don't see the value in it and left it at that.
- kolinko 2y agoNot sure why you get downvoted. The article indeed has only very shallow critique of LLMs.
- KoolKat23 2y agoI've noticed lately many people here tend to hate on LLM's and downvote any dissenting opinion into oblivion without a reply. Could be the copyright-LLM-bad crowd or luddites, who knows. /s
- joduplessis 2y agoLLM's are not useful enough to me to want them integrated with my daily-drivers (web browser, email client, etc.) - so this is a great take & one that I personally identify with.
- imiric 2y agoI don't want them in my browser either, but if implemented correctly, it would just be another feature you wouldn't use. So Vivaldi deliberately not having this feature only hurts people who _would_ find it useful, and thus the adoption of their browser. This is not a good strategic decision.
- trog 2y agoThe opportunity cost of it though, like every major feature decision in a browser, is presumably very significant. What could they be doing that their users actually want? As a dyed in the wool Firefox user, I am of course very used to disappointment about how they direct their development effort. There are a million things I'd rather see them work on than strapping in an LLM. I don't know much about the Vivaldi community but I assume they took this into account when making this decision.
- Dr4kn 2y agoLLMs are difficult to run and very few people have the hardware to run a big enough model to be useful. This means you have to integrate LLMs over an API, which costs you money. LLMs are to expensive for a free browser to just give away free usage. Implementing APIs that you can login with an account and use a specific LLM is a lot of work and difficult to communicate the privacy nightmare that comes with sending that data to some LLM. You don't have to cater to every user. Focusing on things you do better for a huge portion of potential users is a much better decision. If features turn out to be so useful that everyone needs to integrate them to not be left behind you have to do it. LLMs are not there yet. They are to unreliable, expensive and difficult to run locally. In a few years when most users might be able to run decent models locally you can reevaluate that decision
- timeon 2y ago
- stranded22 2y agoPersonally, I’m not interested in LLM in a browser as a chat bot. I do like Arc with their summary, but I’m not interested in asking questions etc - I’ll use ChatGPT/Perplexity for that. In fact, I’d prefer it not to be included as it’s bloatware.
- Lucasoato 2y agoI understand this point of view; it's a reasonable action to stop going in this direction if some valid concerns are still unanswered by the industry. At the same time, I suspect that a good part of the people who complain about LLM hallucinating underestimate the human rate of hallucinations/errors. Of course, there are a lot of other considerations linked to topics like accountability, etc.. but take autonomous driving as an example: we don't need self-driving cars to be perfect and do exactly 0 incidents to be a better solution than human driving. They just need to be significantly better than us to be a very useful technology for mankind and let's hope this happens soon.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- imiric 2y agoI dislike the trend of baking LLMs into browsers as well, but this is not a good strategic decision. LLMs still provide features that users find useful, even if they're not perfect. So if Vivaldi doesn't provide these features based on some philosophical stance, users will just choose another browser. Not that Vivaldi had a significant user base to begin with, but this decision won't help them.
- linza 2y agoCan you name a few LLM-based features in browsers that users find useful?
- ikari_pl 2y agoone: in Arc browser, if your Ctrl-F find window doesn't find and exact match, it turns into a LLM question box that will try to answer based on the page content
- Dr4kn 2y agocan you at least switch that, because if that is the default behavior I would hate it so much
- maniflames 2y agoYes you have full control over when you use ai and when you don’t
- timeon 2y agoCtrl-F without match is often useful result in itself. I've been burned by LLMs several times where it always came-up with some answer while it was either misleading or there should be no answer at all.
- gherkinnn 2y agoRename tabs based on website content /s
- chad1n 2y agoI don't use Vivaldi, but I think it's fine on their side to avoid falling into this AI trap. You have to consider that there were 2 possibilities, they used their API key to send requests to openai/claude or they did what Mozilla did and integrated gemini/chatgpt at the expense of the user data, both of which are pretty scummy and barely help the end user. The only way to integrate AI fine into browser is to ship a model to run local, but that would require the user to have the computing power to run it. Google is trying this with chrome by integrating gemini mini in the browser as a 100mb blob.
- pantulis 2y agoI think this is the correct move. The correct one (and I'm not sure if this is feasible) would be integrating the OS level LLM facilities. AS an independent browser vendor, trying to chase the AI trend mirage is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. Still, there is some marketing damage control dismissal of LLMs in the note that could have been avoided.
- cglong 2y agoFor people in agreement with Vivaldi, how are you summarizing articles today? I often find content that's not important but also too verbose, and having an LLM summarize it for me is perfect. Right now, I'm doing this very manually, but am actually thinking of switching my browser just to have this capability baked in. EDIT: Since everyone is asking why and how I use summaries, here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40881021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40881021
- psini 2y agoCall me old-fashioned but I read the article top to bottom :^)
- PhilipRoman 2y ago>content that's not important I just don't read it in the first place.
- LM358 2y ago>For people in agreement with Vivaldi, how are you summarizing articles today? I fucking read, like absolutely everyone and their dog did two years ago before this pest stole everyone's attention.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pverghese 2y agoWith summarization, you still read, but have to read less. These days a lot of articles have a lot of verbose content, just to keep a person on the page for a long time. Reminds me of students writing essays just to get to a word or page count.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago> With summarization, you still read, but have to read less. Sure, and 10% of the time you get something that's lies which you don't get from actual reading.
- Ekaros 2y agoHonestly, I see no reason why AI should be part of browser itself. If user wants those capabilities they should be free to choose extensions that add them. So they get to choose which AI or LLM model they use.
- redox99 2y agoIt's pretty nice that a web developer can leverage an offline local LLM, without leaking data, instead of piping stuff through their servers and then OpenAI servers.
- _cenw 2y agoThe AI hype relies on most common people misunderstanding what's in front of them. I've seen business people write prompts. They don't understand the limitations or strengths. They tell the model it has a degree in something, they tell it not to hallucinate, they anthropomorphize it so far that they greet it in the morning "to get into the mindset that you have a virtual colleague". All the people who fearmonger about AGI really don't help, because it implies our LLMs are anywhere close to sentience. They're not.
- egorfine 2y ago> was made by having many (underpaid) people to look "underpaid". I wonder what this has to do with the discussion on how LLMs work. I'd like to know more why does Vivaldi team thinks these people were underpaid, how do they know how much per hour they were paid and what would be a fair price for the job according to Vivaldi's evaluation of the scope. I'm really interested to know how did the Vivaldi team conclude that OpenAI forced unwilling people to do the work while paying less than what these people expected to receive for their time. And most importantly. What does this have to do with LLM integration in browser?
- minasmorath 2y agoAt a glance, it feels more likely to me that they're criticizing training LLMs on content without compensating the original creators, not the salaries of OpenAI engineers. It's a pretty common moral / ethical stance to take now.
- pleurotus 2y agoI think this is what they are referring to: https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
- minasmorath 2y agoThat seems more likely than my initial interpretation, in which case the moral and ethical implications just so you can have a "Summarize with AI" button or other such features in your web browser are obviously much worse.
- egorfine 2y ago> It feels more likely to me that they're criticizing training LLMs on content without compensating the original creators, No, the phrase they have written specifically talks about the RLHF workers and they do evaluate the pay of these people and somehow bring this issue into the discussion of how LLMs are useful to browsers. And because I'm being downvoted for asking a simple logical question whether this has anything to do with LLM features in browser, I logically conclude that there are some things in current American culture that I literally (literally!) don't understand.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- egorfine 2y ago> such text being baked into the model means that it is possible to cause it to output the same text verbatim unlike humans, of course.
- krapp 2y agoI don't know what this is meant to prove or disprove, I can only assume the constant urge to compare human beings with LLMs has simply become a pathological drive at this point. Yes, humans are capable of reproducing copyrighted text verbatim, as are LLMs, and when they do, as with LLMs, it is copyright infringement and plagiarism. An irreducible and unavoidable tendency towards committing copyright infringement and plagiarism are not features one generally wants in either a human author or a piece of software.
- egorfine 2y agoIt means that if LLMs mimic humans in learning and creating, then we should probably apply similar standards to LLMs. It is impossible to create an LLM without training it on copyrighted text. Just like in humans. Should the world refuse to use LLMs because of that?
- krapp 2y agoYes, because LLMs are not humans. LLMs are software.
- langsoul-com 2y agoSmart. There's already llm extensions so anyone who wants it can add it.
- surgical_fire 2y agoVivaldi user here. I also use LLMs - I subscribed for ChatGPT for a while, now I mostly play around with ollama. I also played around with Stable Diffusion extensively. I think the article is excellent in its analysis and conclusion. As much as I like the recent advancements in Generative AI, I don't think it should be hamfisted in every software, and I also don't think they come nearly close to all the hype surrounding it. It is a useful tool when you understand its shortcomings, and there is a long way to go until they are ready for more widespread use. Good on Vivaldi for taking this stance.
- swed420 2y agoAgreed. As a long time Firefox user, I replaced FF with Vivaldi on Android and haven't looked back, since FF has failed to address the battery drain issues that so many people are experiencing: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/firefox-for-android-v122-high-battery-usage/td-p/50056 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/firefox-for-andro... No way bundling a LLM is going to help that matter. I am pleasantly surprised how snappy Vivaldi feels.
- surgical_fire 2y agoI use Vivaldi because I used to be an Opera user a long time ago. Absolutely loved it, and Vivaldi leans a bit on the same interface. Firefox is my backup browser. I really like it on desktop, but I agree that on mobile it feels clunky. I see no reason to hamfist LLM into the browser itself yet. A lot of the ideas surrounding LLM seem to be more on the style of devs trying to latch on the latest trend without any proper thought of how useful/desirable LLMs can be on their product. Also, while I don't share the ethical concerns surrounding how LLMs highjacked intellectual property, I think those are legitimate concerns. I have no issues with a dev taking a stance based on it, especially on a product I use for free.
- wtcactus 2y agoI don’t mind for AI helping me browsing. Besides, all other got in the hype anyway. Maybe this way Vivaldi can finally allocate resources to workspaces sync across devices. Only 2 browsers do that: Edge and Arc. And Arc doesn’t work in Linux unfortunately.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rasz 2y agoSpoilers: They couldnt even if they wanted, they dont have $budget for it. They even struggle paying normal developers, moving most of the stack to cheaper javascript.