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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is a generational thing of fresh young people that already cannot live without LLMs versus crusty old people that don’t want to require a super computer just to run a web browser that violates all their privacy.

To me this sounds like the point where people start looking at and developing alternatives to the browser/web.

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This isn’t Mozilla taking a stance against AI.

It’s them articulating clear and logical reasons why the proposed API, in its current state, is bad for web interoperability.

Did they propose a specific alternative (non-extension) API?

Why would they need to?

Why would they? This is an issue put up on the "standards-position" repo. They requested a position on a proposed standard, and Mozilla gave it.

No, that’s not how this process usually happens.

There’s one obvious alternative:

   fetch("https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions", { ... });

Right and that means people have to send their data to an external service.

Give it X months (or years??) and people will realize this is actually a privacy/data autonomy issue.

It's just dominated right now by the anti-AI/anti-technology sentiment in the west. That will gradually go away as more people use AI and robotics and realize how wrong they were about it.

>Right and that means people have to send their data to an external service.

Nothing in this proposal claims it has to be a local AI. That just happens to be the implementation by Chrome and Edge (for now at least, I'd imagine Google will eventually start moving this API towards hosted Gemini).

That's an important aspect of this that should really be part of the discussion on GitHub. But I've been told I'm not qualified to interject so I am not going to bother.

I will use WebLLM if I want something like this (with local AI guaranteed).

So I guess the question would be, "What makes this acceptable Tech". I don't know how you get there without offering some type of "Search" like choice for open models. We all know how that turned out.

Maybe Mozilla can save itself by getting paid to serve Google's model as default rather than another providers. Would replace the revenue stream they lost.

I think the objection here is unrelated to the love or hate of LLMs. It's about the viability of this particular proposed open web API.

I personally use LLMs for coding assistance, and some home automation stuff, but I do not think this particular API is good for the web.

Meaning you do not want text generation in the web API at all, or you think the prompt API needs to be different? And if so can you give one sentence on how it should change?

https://github.com/runvnc/tersenet

If you glance at that then you may see that I am for the idea of leaner alternatives to the current web platform.

But in the context of the existing web API which has just about everything and the whole kitchen sink in it (hundreds of sub-APIs), I do not think it will really help anyone at this point just just stop adding features, especially major ones.

The web is basically an overlay operating system and has been for many years.

> Meaning you do not want text generation in the web API at all, or you think the prompt API needs to be different?

Not OP but I think you are misunderstanding the interaction as a whole here. The Chromium team made a proposal, then the Chromium team asked the Firefox team for a position on the proposal. Whether or not the Firefox team or anyone on the Firefox team has any goals around AI or whatever, this response was simply "We do not like this proposal for these reasons..."

How to fix those issues really isn't the Firefox team's job and also wasn't part of the question asked by the Chromium team.

You didn't read my comment carefully enough. It was not about AI in general. It was about the text generation API. And it is perfectly reasonable to ask if he wants to reject the feature entirely or if he can give a one sentence overview of how it might be fixed.

There are a lot of people reading his position. One or two additional clarifying sentences to spell it out for people skimming is not such an unreasonable ask.

> There are a lot of people reading his position. One or two additional clarifying sentences to spell it out for people skimming is not such an unreasonable ask.

I do think it is a bit unwarranted, actually. This isn't a press release, it's a technical discussion somewhat deep into a technical process that's open for archival purposes. His audience is not people skimming through, it's the Chromium team and other members of the standards body.

You're sort of overhearing a conversation and injecting yourself into it.

And so are you injecting yourself and objecting to me even discussing on HN.

And this is not really a technical issue. It's a worldview issue no matter how much you or others try to pretend it's a technical problem or that I am violating etiquette or something.

> And this is not really a technical issue. It's a worldview issue no matter how much you or others try to pretend it's a technical problem or that I am violating etiquette or something.

I'm actually so curious what you think is going on here

I do not want text generation in the web API at all.

A little off-topic, I honestly don't think it's as much as the browser interface that needs to be reworked as it is the idea of operating systems in general.

I don't know what the right answer is, but having used Niri/Wayland vs. GNOME vs. Windows vs. Mac... I will never go back to a non-tiling desktop and a none-kb driven workflow for desktop window management.

IME young people mostly hate AI.

The young kids I know who are into tech love AI. Albeit this is from a small sample size.

Funnily enough, most of the young people I know fall somewhere between those two sides of the spectrum.

I know some actual luddite-tier AI haters that believe it's ontologically evil, and another majoring in Data Science that went to the most recent career fair and told a recruiter "AI will replace you" (I uh don't think he's getting that internship)

And of course many, many, others that fall between the two extremes.

The one thing we can all agree on, is it makes homework a hell of a lot easier :) (well, except the luddite-types, they refuse to use it in any capacity)

The biggest irony with telling a recruiter they'll be replaced, is how much easier a data scientist is to replace with LLMs. With their sycophantic nature, execs will eat up whatever "data" the LLMs make up, too.

No, you don't understand. LLMs will never be capable of knowing what questions to ask, only how to ask the questions. /s

I'm a member of a political action committee, where I was brought in as an expert in professional media applications of AI. I've got extensive experience using AI tools in the production of well known entertainment properties (think VFX for film and animation.) Anyway, within the political action committee where is a diverse mixture of people, with about 1/5th of them under age 30. The entire under age 30 set are so AI negative, to such an irrational degree, I have been asked to do nothing and offer no advice that incorporates any technology at all. They are so paranoid. In a not really emotional discussion, a bunch of them erupted in tears, they are so irrational about it.

Are you able to share whether the PAC was Democratic Party or Republican Party aligned? When I first came to America, the headlines were about how Obama’s campaign embraced tech successfully. By now, tech is considered right-wing. If the young ‘uns who burst into tears were on a Republican aligned PAC that would be interesting. It would mean cross-political tech angst.

Democratic Party.

What does "into tech" even mean at this point?

Watching LTT all day? Playing on their iPhones constantly? Buying wireless earbuds?

Do they really? Hating on AI slop is a common sentiment on social media, but remember that the opinions you see on social media are often not representative of what the general population thinks at all.

I keep hearing stories about how homework is now useless because every student just gets ChatGPT to do it for them, and from personal experience, I'm inclined to believe them.

> every student just gets ChatGPT to do it

I don't believe every student uses a calculator to solve their math homework, so what makes ChatGPT unique here? For certain subjects the ability to cheat has been trivial for a long time, yet there was no crisis.

The children have long had sticks and stones, so why is everyone so freaked out now that they're all carrying around grenade launchers?

What kind of math homework has been trivial to solve with a calculator? I guess you're referring to elementary school arithmetic?

I don't follow the analogy.

When I was in high school a classmate did their chemistry homework by buying the teachers edition of the textbook, which had the answer key. The whole class knew this trick existed, but most of us slogged through the work manually. I knew another group who divided up the homework problems and then combined. Students have always known how to cheat on homework, but enough students actually do it anyway.

What makes ChatGPT unique here?

Young people love AI when it helps them cheat homework, or when used for roleplay and memes. Generating "content" with AI - is generally more hated, especially art and video.

Sounds hypocritical.

I hate knives cause they kill people, but I love my kitchen knife when I make dinner.

That is a bad counter-example, because its just a poorly conceived statement. You apparently don't hate knives. You hate killing people, which isn't remotely similar.

Using AI to cheat at academics and then hating on people who use AI to cheat on media creation is absolutely hypocritical. Its qualifying hypocritical stupidity like this results in shoving a single vendor's LLM into the browser.

If that's still too complicated then just call it complexity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_complexity

> that don’t want to require a super computer just to run a web browser that violates all their privacy.

That shipped sailed in 2008.

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