Vivaldi explains why they will not embed LLM functionality in their browser
The world of web browsers have not been spared by the trend of integrating LLM functionality. But there are fundamental issues with it and Vivaldi addresses them.
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
Just described most people
Didn't even think of it as a possibility. WTF would a browser need with LLM?
Edge is branding itself "The AI Browser". Chrome has plans to embed LLMs for text input. Opera, the browser which was commandeered from the original Vivaldi team and turned into a crypto/VPN gimmick browser, is of course among the hardest leaning into the LLM trend.
Cheers DANNY BOOOOOOOYYY!
Webpage authors use LLMs to generate extremely long articles, to make you scroll by ads for longer. You use LLMs in your browser to summarize those articles. The circle of life, or something.
I stumbled upon a website through DDG, and after a long intro, the main section supposedly where the thing I was searching for had "Sorry I can't fulfill your request right now". Basically a fully generated page to match my search with some parasitic seo tactics. The web be chaging. Front page of DDG.
The circle of death.
I do this already. It's great. Kagi has a browser plugin that does it.
I'd love a browser-embedded LLM that had access to the DOM.
"Highlight all passages that talk about yadda yadda. Remove all other content. Convert the dates to the ISO standard. Put them on a number line chart, labeled by blah."
That'd be great UX.
You are falling into a common trap. LLMs do not have understanding - asking it to do things like convert dates and put them on a number line may yield correct results sometimes, but since the LLM does not understand what it's doing, it may "hallucinate" dates that look correct, but don't actually align with the source.
That's actually fascinating to think about. Would be a fun project to mash something like Blazor Server and an LLM together and allow users to just kindly ask to rewrite the DOM in plain English.
Arc has an LLM that lets you replace your search functionality with search or ask, where if you type a question it tries to answer it based on the content on the page. Kinda close to what you're talking about.
Arc is genuinely trying to use LLMs in their browser in interesting ways.
Local translation of text comes to mind.
Yup, Firefox has it: https://browser.mt/ (it's now a native part of Firefox)
Firefox has that already (without using an LLM). But yeah, it's still another way this could be implemented or possibly improved.
Vivaldi has had local translation for about half a year now. No need for LLM for this feature.
I was thinking more along the lines of communicating with a Klingon captain on a D7 Battlecruiser.
Quick tool to summarize a page, proofread, or compare it to another source. Still needs a functioning human brain to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak, but I could see a LLM (especially local) being useful in some ways.
I'm sure there are disabilities or unique use cases that could increase it's usefulness, especially once they improve more.
Yet another reason why I use Vivaldi over every other chromium fork.
Still a Chromium fork.
Same. Which is to say I have it installed and boot it along with GNOME Web every time I need to check that my shitty web programming work outside of Gecko. Which is thankfully rare.
Vivaldi is nice though.
Basically, there's no commercial benefit at this stage.
Once there is benefit they will add it in.
Whole lot of article for nothing.
That's not what they said at all.
Yeah they did, but with some nice words around it all.
Did you read the article? It's literally that llms are not at a stage where they're useful. And then they end that once they become useful they'll look at adding them in.
And Vivaldi is a business like any other, so it's ultimately commercially driven. If you think they're just running the business for the sake of being good then you're incredibly naive.
Kind of ironic how they use an AI generated article image
Ummm... No?
Upload Date: Oct 9, 2022
Another cue is that the numbers aren't gobbledigook
