Technology

60123 readers

5054 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

151

Mozilla launches privacy friendly AI addon called "Orbit" (connect.mozilla.org)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

66 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] vinnymac 41 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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.

[+] [email protected] -7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

but... you dont have to accept contributions? you can just make it open source and tidy it up at the same time?

[–] vinnymac 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

In a different world maybe, but I can already see the headlines, “Mozilla open sources lackluster AI tool”. PR is unfortunately a thing, and once you miss that initial wave of interest, you’re unlikely to grab attention later without another marketing push. Mozilla is experienced in open sourcing software, so by now they’re pretty good at knowing when to do it and when not to. In other words, it says something that they chose not to do it in this case.

[–] billiam0202 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

So risk someone else beating you to market? And they'll either have the resources to make it superior, therefore making yours irrelevant, or they'll make it inferior, which generates bad press for you?