They support Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, HuggingChat, and Mistral.
That was there before 133, don’t remember the exact release that added it.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/ai-chatbot
Note that you need an account to use one of these supported systems. HuggingChat allows for a few connections as a gues before cutting the access; basically a trial version, so you have to create an account.
They better not decide to enable it by default.
as someone who’s never dabbled with ai bots, what does this feature do? is it only to query for information like a web search?
It just adds ChatGPT or similar to your sidebar. Chatbots can do a lot of things, they are mostly good for information research and technical help, although they have serious flaws like hallucinating false information sometimes
From the description in the UI, it does sound like it. Theoretically, a chatbot could be created where you can ask questions about the webpage you have currently opened, so if you don’t want to read a long article, for example. I guess, you could probably just throw a link into an existing chatbot either way, but yeah, direct integration might be convenient either way.
Well, or a chatbot could be created, which has access to your browser history, bookmarks and tabs, so you can ask it when you last saw certain information. However, you’d need a locally running chatbot for that, which makes it more difficult to implement.
It is a sidebar that sends a query from your browser directly to a server run by a giant corporation like Google or OpenAI, consumes an excessive amount of carbon/water, then sends a response back to you that may or may not be true (because AI is incapable of doing anything but generating what it thinks you want to see).
Not only is it unethical in my opinion, it’s also ridiculously rudimentary…
It gives you many options on what to use, you can use Llama which is offline. Needs to be enabled though about:config > browser.ml.chat.hideLocalhost.
and thus is unavailable to anyone who isn’t a power user, as they will never see a comment like this and about:config would fill them with dread
There’s a huge difference between something that is presented in an easily accessible settings menu, and something that requires you to go to an esoteric page, click through a scary warning message, and then search for esoteric settings… Before even installing a server.
Nothing was compelling Mozilla to rush this through. In addition, nobody was asking Mozilla for remote access to AI, AFAIK. Before Mozilla pushed for it, people were praising them for resisting the temptation to follow the flock. They could have waited and provided better defaults.
Or just wedged it into an extension, something they’re currently doing anyway.
Are any of these open source or trustworthy?
I think Mistral is model-available (ie I’m not sure if they release training data/code but they do release model shape and weights), huggingchat definitely is open source and model-available
Sorry but HuggingChat / HuggingFace and all models on it are not open source (Edit: Oh you meant the UI HuggingChat is Open Source. Yeah sorry, I was focused on the models. And there is no Open Source model from my understanding.) -> https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition Off course opensource.org is not the only authority on what the word opensource means, but its not a bad start.
There are no open source ai models, even if they tell you that they are. HuggingFace is the closest thing to as something like open source where you can download ai models to run locally without internet connection. There are applications for that. In Firefox the HuggingChat uses models from HuggingFace, but I think it is running them on a server and does not download from?
The reason why they are not open source is, because we don’t know exactly on what data they are trained on. We cannot rebuild them on our own. And for trustworthy, I assume you are talking about the integration and the software using the models, right? At least it is implemented by Mozilla, so there is (to me) some sort of trust involved. Yes, even after all the bullshit I trust Mozilla.
It’s “open weights” if they are publishing the model file but nothing about its creation. There’s some hypothetical security concerns with training it to give very specific outputs for certain very specific inputs but I feel like that’s one of those kind of far fetched worries especially if you want to use it for chat or summarization and the comparison is getting AI output from a server API. Local is still way better.
