Oh no! Chrome is trying to enhance user agency again! Oh no! Chrome is trying to make the web better for end users!
Mozilla's concerns aren't totally bogus, I'm not going to try to laugh them out of the room. But their pearl clutching & belly-aching about "oh no what if not all implementations of ai prompts work exactly the same" feels fucking tired and weak sauce to me.
This post really doesn't deserve our attention, my my view. But I'd challenge the haters to at least try to connect their reflexive hate meaningfully to what the topic at hand actually is, to provide something worth considering in some way. But that I think asks too much, for what posts like this seek: merely to inflame the world.
Maybe you shouldn't reflexivly defend Chrome when they clearly abuse their market leading position to push their own AI.
The models themselves would be standardized and the weights and everything should be identical between browsers. They’d be standard and ‘web-safe’ like CSS colors or fonts. Probably would help to give them really boring/unbranded names too. These would work identically across browsers and web developers can rely on them existing on modern setups.
If you want more models, you could install them as a user or your browser could ship them or the web developers could bundle them through a CDN (and another standard for shared big files across domains would probably be needed)
Not to mention many other UX questions the come with this, most importantly, how unusable these local models are on regular 3-year old laptops that are constrained in RAM, GPU/CPU capability and likely disk space despite what enthusiasts say here. (They have a Macbook Pro with 32+GB of RAM, reports it works great with xyz model -- fine -- but somehow thinks it works for everyone and local models are the future.)
The model is pretty slow on my M4 Pro mac.
The API allows the browser to use a cloud service instead, but then privacy is lower. So, more privacy for the rich.
...what's the exact problem here? Believe it or not, most non-tech-savvy users use the search engine just fine.
Are they?
[0] https://github.com/webmachinelearning/prompt-api/blob/main/R...
Operating Systems: Windows (built-in Copilot), MacOS, iOS (Apple Intelligence)
So it's >90% desktop browser and OS, plus >30% mobile OS.
Yes, I think it's very safe to say "browsers and operating systems are increasingly expected to gain access to language models."
So they should provide an interface to LLMs, disabled by default, enabled when users want it, and that’s it imho.
That also gives me the choice of which LLM provider to use, rather than being locked in whatever LLM Apple decided to do put in their OS.
I want to give Claude access to the stuff Apple Intelligence has access to, for example.
What are you trying to say?
GP is clearly asking ”Are they?”
So my question is: are browsers and operating systems really expected to gain access to language models? If so - by whom: the users or LLM vendors like Google?
We've seen this sort of song and dance before, crypto jumps to mind. Remember when social media sites suddenly were all about those hexagonal avatars? Most of this stuff is really in that same vein.
(Which to be clear, users don't want this. AI pushes by pretty much all recent user feedback metrics are largely tiring out users and reek of corporate desperation to sell shit. It's only a very specific subsection of Silicon Valley that wants to stuff AI in everything like this.)
But if no browser other than Chrome supports this, and only Google's (proprietary) model (edit: plus Microsoft's Phi-4 mini in Edge), it should be clear it's Google abusing its position. There is nothing worth standardizing.
And we have seen that too many times -- FLoC/Privacy Sandbox/Topics API, Web Environment Integrity just to name a few. Google has been relentless in using its dominant position to push terrible ideas that harm both users and other browser vendors but help only Google's business.
Surprised this did not really come up in previous discussion in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47917026
PS: looks like Google's fanboys have arrived. Someone better finds good counterarguments, especially technical ones, instead of just downvoting.
shevy-java•1h ago
Google is again doing Evil.
I am very annoyed that Google kind of de-facto controls the www (through chrome, let's be honest here).
We really need to change this. I don't have a good solution here, but it can not continue that way.
youre-wrong3•1h ago
hk__2•23m ago
darkwater•18m ago
thrance•29m ago
motbus3•18m ago
jraph•14m ago
Advocacy (against chromium and its forks) is one way.