Yeah, we "self-host" our app at AWS at work, which means we configure everything ourselves. I "self-host" a VPS at Hetzner for personal projects, and my actual data is actually self-hosted on a machine on my LAN.
We use third parties to provide the Service to you, and have contracted with these companies requiring them to protect your information (Third-Party Services):
Google Cloud Platform. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a cloud-computing platform. We use GCP to manage services that facilitate responses to user prompts and page summarization.
By using the Services, you represent that you will only share material (including Inputs) that you own and/or have the legal right to share and sublicense to others, including without limitation, content and data contained in any web-page shared through the Services to generate Outputs. When you submit your own content through the Services, you continue to own the rights to that content. You grant Mozilla a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, sub-license, prepare derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display the Inputs for the purpose of operating the Services.
I don't want that. I want full control and absolute privacy. I do not want your AI reading my emails. Look at that summary, it's as long as the whole email, and you're not going to be able to trust that it picked up on the most important part of the email. This is not efficiency, this is novelty.
I won't trust the AI Mozilla uses until they show us the source data. Not the source code that consumes a massive binary blob; the stuff that generated the binary blob they are using.
Thing is, Pocket is also an extension. Just much less optional. If Mozilla makes this AI thing part of their flagship in a lot of the same ways. Possibly even more. It's not about what it is now, but rather what it means for the future of Mozilla and Firefox.
Here's the summary of their example article (or perhaps the page?):
This email expresses a sarcastic and exaggerated perspective on the advancements and implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The author begins by expressing excitement about the technological marvels of AI, but then proceeds to poke fun at the complexity and convoluted nature of AI, its ability to predict our actions, and the replacement of human interaction with AI chatbots. The author also mocks the idea of AI-generated content and its ability to replicate human creativity, and the potential ethical concerns of relying on AI for decision-making. The email concludes with a sarcastic call to embrace the "glory" of AI and its potential to take over human autonomy. The tone of the email is light-hearted and humorous, but it also raises valid concerns about the role and impact of AI on our lives.
This isn't really a summary, there's some interpretation going on as well. I don't want AI to do any form of interpretation, but if it does so, it should be as metadata below the actual summary.
And honestly, I almost never get an email that I actually want to summarize. Most of them I can either completely ignore (corporate BS), or they're short and to the point. So it's weird to me that email is the first thing they mention.
Orbit currently uses a version of Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) that is locally hosted on Mozilla’s Google Cloud Platform instance.
So it connects to Google Cloud for this? What does that mean "locally", if its a Cloud Platform? And what does that mean "Mozilla's", if its Google? I'm a bit confused with this sentence.
Does it download and execute it locally offline or does it send the data to Google Cloud Platform?? The page is not clear about this and I searched for an answer. I have the same Mistral 7B model that I downloaded from HuggingFace website and can use offline with a specific GUI application. It would be nice if I could Firefox point to that file instead.
Otherwise, this does not look very promising and I wouldn't trust it at the moment.
Google Distributed Cloud allows you to run Google Cloud Platform locally in your own datacenter. They can deploy apps to that infrastructure and use the cloud console for management, or even use normal kubernetes tools for it.
Couldn’t say if that’s what they’re actually doing, but running Google Cloud locally is a thing.
"Yeah sorry boss, i didn't actually read the email, instead i had an AI summarize it for me and it got a key detail wrong. Anyway what's a couple thousand dollars in lost sales right"
It is but it's also natural for them, they're slowly transitioning to a closed source company like all the other big tech companies.
The hope is that we don't notice, or that those of us who do notice are a small minority who can be stomped out or discredited by those who don't notice or are in their pocket.
Reddit too used to be open source, they're not anymore. This shit does happen, regardless of what anyone says.