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Comment by imiric | Hacker News Reader

I 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.

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Their marketed stance might be philosophical, but it also costs time, money and energy to add LLM-backed features (someone's got to do the inference, for instance). So it could definitely make sense to them for other reasons too, right?

With so many LLMs I thought the least they would do is let the search bar redirect to an LLM of your choosing (preferably with search keyword shortcut). Instead I read this:

> So, as we have seen, LLMs are essentially confident-sounding lying machines with a penchant to occasionally disclose private data or plagiarise existing work. 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.

Odd to compare to crypto which only has "store of value" as a use. It would be interesting to compare the energy of an LLM doing research tasks vs other means (e.g. a human working 8 hours a day).

> based on some philosophical stance, users will just choose another browser

Aren't most people using vivaldi for philosophical reasons in the first place ?

Can you name a few LLM-based features in browsers that users find useful?

one: 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

can you at least switch that, because if that is the default behavior I would hate it so much

Yes you have full control over when you use ai and when you don’t

Ctrl-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.

Rename tabs based on website content /s

It is in my screen reader, but it is used mainly in the browser - accessible description of an image without alt text. Translation of languages which I don't know is also nice.

Generally, I thing that the llm should be its own service and everything else should have an easy way to connect to it, but I'm a lowly user, not a product manager.

For accessibility it is truly awesome. Yes it can be wrong and isn't perfect, but the alternative is having no knowledge of the image at all. Alt descriptions are often missing or not detailed enough to be useful for vision impaired.

Having much better text to voice could also be nice for the blind. While screen readers are fine I don't know how bothersome that robot voice is for longer texts.

I'm okay with robot voices, tbh. The neural voices need modern hardware, and there is latency even then, together with some artifacts. Especially when speeding through a known screens I prefer responsiveness over fidelity or other nicities.

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