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Something that hasn't been made clear: Firefox will have an option to completely disable all AI features.
We've been calling it the AI kill switch internally. I'm sure it'll ship with a less murderous name, but that's how seriously and absolutely we're taking this.
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All AI features will also be opt-in. I think there are some grey areas in what 'opt-in' means to different people (e.g. is a new toolbar button opt-in?), but the kill switch will absolutely remove all that stuff, and never show it in future. That's unambiguous.
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I'm not asking for faith in our direction - the thing I love about the Firefox community is how open, honest, and technical it is.
But I do ask that you don't have the opposite of faith. Like, try not to be determined that we're going to do the wrong thing here.
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I hope we can (re)gain your trust here.
I don't personally work on this stuff, but I'll try hard to answer any questions you have.
And other than that, I'll get back in my lane, and stick to web platform stuff.
- Jake (@jaffathecake)
Just be glad this thread wasn't a long-ass video. It almost was.
@firefoxwebdevs Yeah I think most people mainly deplore the hype and the resources spent on technological trends whose benefits are not always obvious. Before that, Mozilla advertised about FirefoxOS, before killing it to focus on IoT, before moving on to blockchain, then crypto, then NFT's and now IA. In more that 10 years, none of this projects produced anything useful for the users.
@firefoxwebdevs Right now, Mozilla would probably be the first company to be diagnosed with ADHD. It really can't seem to focus and do something productive. The question was never "should Firefox have IA?". The question is "to do what?". Mozilla is communicating that IA is coming. Not announcing a new feature. TBH, it's worrying. IA should be an implementation detail, not the central point.
@firefoxwebdevs It's like Mozilla is a car company and it's advertising a new car with leather in it. Ok, cool but what is it? A berline, a pickup, a SUV? Will I recharge with electricity or fuel? And Mozilla's answer is: "it has leather in it!"
It's… not great.
@christophehenry @firefoxwebdevs look, you have a point about communication. It's hard and Mozilla isn't top notch at it, to be polite. But also, Mozilla never worked on IOT, nor blockchain nor crypto stuff. There were vague talks of transitioning some of the Firefox OS resources into IOT exploration for a very brief time, which didn't end up happening so I'll give you that one. But where the hell hell is the rest coming from?
@christophehenry @firefoxwebdevs no NFT either. Obviously.
@nical I can't find the sources although I remember clearly something about it but they definitively developped a Metaverse thing and IoT. This doesn't really change my argument.
@christophehenry @nical they very publicly had to walk back accepting crypto donations in 2022. It's not quite putting crypto miner in Firefox or linking it to a crypto exchange but still.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/06/mozilla-foundation-crypto/
@catch56 @christophehenry @nical Not quite a crypto miner? Do you even hear yourself?
The payment provider also allowed crypto-transfers, how is that even a scandal?
Somehow the Internet Archive takes in crypto donations to this day, and nobody cares.
@metasieben @christophehenry @nical because the Mozilla foundation kept going on about how they accept crypto currencies on their social media. If you don't know why it was a scandal maybe you could have done some research for 5 minutes instead of looking silly.
@catch56 @metasieben @christophehenry @nical And? What's wrong with cryptocurrency donations? How are social posts asking for USD donations different than posts asking for crypto?
@gsprs @metasieben @christophehenry @nical imagine having so little personality or interests that you have to put 'investor' in your masto profile, and can't think of anything to do with your spare time except to reply to people to 'defend' your pet technology with the most insane comments possible. Not a single post on main.
@catch56 That's... not very kind or thoughtful, and barely relevant to the topic.
@catch56 @metasieben @christophehenry @nical I have 156 posts and the vast majority are not about crypto, what are you even on about? Your most recent posts are pretty much all about AI, projecting much? 
@christophehenry They did work on both of those in Emerging Technologies (which was disbanded and most folks laid off in 2020).
I think IoT was seldom more than two people, usually one, and maybe some supporting folks around the web standards.
Hubs (a VR meeting space) was a bit larger, and had some external funding. Apparently it's spun off: https://hubsfoundation.org/ (it's always hard to know how successful these things are though)
In cases like these Mozilla usually hoped something would eventually spin off. These were never going to be a new direction for Mozilla or Firefox.
@christophehenry just to be clear, I've been working there for over a decade. I would know. Mozilla did not invest engineering resources into NFT, or crypto, not even IOT for all intents and purposes, although almost. You have a problem with VR? I don't blame you I don't think it's particularly interesting, but if a company decides to have a small team experiment with VR in case it becomes important, then maybe give them a break? The other 1000 employees are still working the usual stuff.
@christophehenry how many people will read your toot and think "oh, Mozilla was into NFT, that sucks, I guess I won't fact check, it's been written by someone on the internet, that must be true"? Mozilla is such an easy target with its frequent PR mess ups, could we focus on stuff that is actually real?
@nical I think you're missing my point entirely but it's ok. We don't have to agree.
@christophehenry @nical I mean you just falsley listed like a half a dozen things and didn't acknowledge or correct. Why is that?
@nical
We did a little bit of IOT during a year, but this was a smallish amount of engineers (including me).
And we also did Hubs more recently (is that a metaverse? I don't know).
But well, that's details and wasn't part of Firefox.
@areacode @christophehenry so VR was hot and a team at Mozilla experimented with VR experiences in the browser. That's pretty common stuff but I get the feeling that you think it is a problem somehow
@nical @areacode @christophehenry
"That's pretty common stuff"
No it isn't !!!! Please please please stop acting like one of the keystone pieces of software for millions of users is a playground for random pet projects following "hot" fads ! That is not good stewardship ! The only other actors that do this are the ones you're supposed to be a sane and reliable an alternative to, not more of the same crap !
@ddelemeny @areacode @christophehenry the VR stuff wasn't happening in firefox other than a web standard to bridge the gap between webgl and a headset. That standard was built in the w3c like everything else. Hubs was just a web page trying to do cool stuff on top of a standard web browser. Do you really want to blame them for that? At no point did Firefox try to nudge users towards some kind of meta verse.
@ddelemeny @areacode @christophehenry nor did Firefox engineers get pulled to focus on VR stuff (I am in the graphics team, that would have been me). I really think that it is pretty common stuff. Somehow there is a sort of narrative floating online that makes it sounds scary and evil but it doesn't seem to be grounded in reality. If IOT or something else makes a comeback in a few years, Mozilla will probably try to assemble a small team to see if it sticks, that seems pretty normal to me
@nical @areacode @christophehenry
do I want to blame them for that... yeah ? maybe ?
You make it sound like a company acquisition was a friday project for funsies on top of an already working implementation of standards. Aside from being the understatement of the year, that doesn't really weigh in favor of "good stewardship".
But you're right, that's the lesser offense and unrelated to the trend of force-feeding the kind of short-sighted feature-creep that's culminating in the current debacle.
@nical @areacode @christophehenry
Acquiring a company for a significant amount of money is different than having a small team nerding around a technology
There have been some hysterical responses to the Mozilla AI announcements, with a number of people instantly swearing off Firefox forever.
Frankly, I'll leave it and see what actually happens. Firefox is too important for the things I do.
They can play around with so-called "AI" a bit, so long as it's truly private, free software and I can completely remove it if I wish (which I probably do).
@ecadre agreed. Let's put the pitchfork away until something bad actually happens. Right now most of the the AI in Firefox is things like tiny models that do local translation (rather than send the whole text to Google who would use their own neural networks to do it), automatic captioning of images that lack alt text, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and other small neural nets that take less energy to train than a run of our test suite. Not all machine learning is chat-freakin-gpt.
@nical @ecadre Why isnt there already a kills switch or opt in for these "tiny models?"
Having a dozen about:config settings be the only effective configuration option to disable Mozilla's current forays into AI doesnt exactly inspire trust about its future plans when the new CEOs first post is all about Firefox's AI future.
We've seen the direction the browser is already moving in with AI and user consent, so it should be no surprise that people are even more skeptical now.
@liquidlamp @ecadre that's not my area so all I can offer is the following perspective: would you like a kill witch for all features that begin with the letter "t" or that are implemented with functional programming? That's about the same level of rationality. These huge LLMs that gobble up energy like there is no tomorrow are not making the world a better place (and don't get me started on training on the work of artists without their consent) but a neural isn't necessarily power hungry
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@liquidlamp @ecadre ... a neural net doesn't necessarily require scrapping the entire internet, it doesn't have to pretend to replace jobs. It's just an approach to implementing a wide range of different things. Perhaps what you want is a kill switch to disable features that lead to energy hungry uses of LLM (that would disable the search field) or a kill switch for disabling neural networks trained on dubious data sources (without the consent of authors), but firefox doesn't have those
@liquidlamp @ecadre if you don't want to use anything that has a neural net, then make sure to not take pictures with your phone, search something online or call anyone (on your phone, on zoom or other). So much basic signal processing uses neural networks these days without requiring nuclear power plants or using people's data. Mozilla's biggest mistake in my opinion is calling these things "AI".
@nical @ecadre so just dodges and snarky comments about "what even, like, is AI bro?"
This and farcical games about how "AI is actually opt in because you have to click the button we auto enabled and prominently added to the UI and can totally opt out of with obscure menu settings" makes it pretty clear Mozilla is just redefining common terms to avoid admitting it doesn't stand by its old core principlies of privacy and user consent.
@liquidlamp @nical @ecadre except for the part where they extensively responded to false claims about their use of like a half dozen technologies? Information literacy seems to have truly collapsed.
Yes, a good distinction. I am referring to the so-called "generative AI", Large Language Models (LLMs) etc. The chat bots, not the local software tricks that, for instance, help with exposure on your phone camera.
@nical @liquidlamp @ecadre somewhere that boolean is being checked to enable a code path.
It shouldn't be that hard tweak that so two bools are checked, the "master" AI enable and the feature-specific one.
I know enough rust so if it really isn't that simple, pointing me to where that's actually implemented so I can eat my crow would be welcomed.
This feels more like a "we didn't think it would be so controversial so we didn't bother yet." (I'd say "read the room next time first")
@nical @liquidlamp @ecadre huge LLMs that gobble up energy like there's no tomorrow are front and center in all the AI hype response deployed by Mozilla, from the gpt4 alt-text to the sidebar chatbot integration to the shake to summarize feature to whatever is "AI Window" supposed to mean.
But yeah "what about perceptrons and Bayesian filters" you say ? Get outta here...
@ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre that alt text generation model is 20MB and runs locally on a CPU. It is a great example of a thing that has the "AI" stamp but isn't an ecological and intellectual property disaster. Features like this one are so important for accessibility. If you want to blanket disable it along with unrelated things that happen to use a neural net under the hood, you do you, flip a few prefs. It's irational but you are in control.
@ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre don't like the chat bot thing in the side bar? Me neither, don't use it. Don't like Google, me neither switch to another search engine. These things do have engagement so just let other users have what they want and configure your browser how you like it. I am pretty sure I won't like the AI window thing whatever that will be, I won't have to use it and the folks who do want to use it will be able to
@nical @ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre Some of us don't like that Mozilla thinks its job is to make money (double bottom line) as the commons is robbed by the AI companies.
Where is Mozilla's moral clarity?
@nical @ddelemeny @liquidlamp @ecadre I hope you realise the logical conclusion to this is, don't like Firefox? don't use it.
And that's exactly what I'll be doing if Firefox continues down this path.
@nical @liquidlamp @ecadre well, things like "suggest tab group name" shouldn't go anywhere near LLM anyway!
@liquidlamp Those tiny models were present long before the current AI hype cycle. They're the same things that on-device translation has been using for a decade or more; the current iteration started development in 2019, based on a model from 2017 (five years before ChatGPT). IMO we don't need a kill switch for it for the same reason we don't need a kill switch for the bookmarks toolbar; if you don't want that, you just turn it off or ignore it.
@nical @ecadre #Firefox Translate is great.
Image captioning is great, as long as it's as clear it could be wrong as with translate.
Automatic tab groups are in theory fine and okay for ppl who want that, but there's been a lot of reports of big CPU usage% from it (odd tbh).
Link preview summaries are very much "nobody asked for this, stop dumbing everything down to summary slop, reading is good actually" >_<
Sidebar button for the big cloud chatbots is the one that feels the most offensive. Yes, it's not invasive and it would be great for Firefox to diversify its funding, but these big "AI" companies are so bad that one would hope an explicitly principled and "on our side" foundation could take a stand against them rather than effectively building promotions for them…
@nical @ecadre I'll be switching away from Firefox because I was already on the fence given my perception of poor management for at least a couple years now, and if I'm going to contribute any sort of energy to a project, even if it's only bug reports and recommendations to friends, I won't be contributing it to one where the designated leader reifies a pivot to generative AI as the most important development project, and drops hints that banning adblockers was on the table. no thanks. I'm out.
@ecadre
@nical
@firefoxwebdevs
To me this is not about AI part. It's about jumping wagons again without clear plan or future. @christophehenry put it best: "to do what?"
Firefox crossed multiple lines in the past especially on the management front (e.g., extravaganza salaries, mass layoffs,...) but this time around, I think perhaps it I should acknowledge my Stockholm Syndrome and jump off this sinking ship. It might not sink, but it for sure doesn't deserve my attention and trust.
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Despite lack of essential features (e.g., changing keyboard shortcuts), relatively slow speed, polluting home folder, outdated UI design (until few years back), community stayed behind #Mozilla, and more specially #Firefox. Look where 1.5 decades of trust and support have got us to. Don't answer me, just be honest with yourself. After 15 years of being in the community, I cannot recall a single instance that user feedback was taken into account.
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@ecadre@mastodon.socia
@nical @firefoxwebdevs
I just stumbled upon @ThePrimeagen on this very topic:
@ecadre @nical actually the alarm for me was as AI features with a sidebar was activated and i was pressured to choose my AI. The announcement just added to my fears and thought "shit i have to switch to another browser" . I will never go back. On my chromebook i seem to be stuck with chrome, because every other browser does not work, but on all other devices i have other than chrome and FF. The damage is done.
Erratum: yep, so my memory is possibly falty. I can't find anything about crypto or NFT though I clearly remember Mozilla anouncing something about it.
But IoT was announced and appearently developped from 2017 to 2020: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/06/building-the-web-of-things/.
They also tried the metaverse thing with Mozilla hub form 2018 to 2024 (so maybe that's the Web3 thing I remember): https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/26/mozilla-hubs-is-a-super-simple-social-chat-room-for-robots/
I can mention Firefox Reality, from 2018 to 2024, which was another Metaverse thing: https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/18/mozillas-firefox-reality-web-browser-is-now-available/.
I won't mention Pocket which is a bit off topic, although that was a thing too.
@christophehenry ah yeah, after 2017 this was a handful of folks.
Frankly building a IoT platform wasn't a bad idea...
@julienw Yeah, there are good ideas at Mozilla. My point is that it can't focus on one to try to build something solid and make a few bucks with it. Eventually, FirefoxOS was a good idea too but it would've needed 10 years in quiet to mature. Instead, Mozilla made big communication, toyed with it for a few years then tossed it away. Pocket feels the same: big purchase, big announcement and then closing after a few years.