Orbit is an LLM addon/extension for Firefox that runs on the Mistral 7B model. It can summarize a given webpage, YouTube videos and so on. You can ask it questions about stuff that’s on the page. It is very privacy friendly and does not require any account to sign up.
I personally tried it, and found it to be incredibly useful! I think this is going to be one of my long term addons along with uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes and so on. I would highly recommend checking this out!
I’m just glad it’s an add on/extension. A lot of the crap baked into browsers these days is just bloat nobody wants or uses.
The general tone in this thread seems so very different from when “Mozilla is working on AI” was first announced
If you really care for an LLM, run it locally… Not sure if this does it…
Don’t want to install and maintain 10gigs of cuda stuff on my PC. Next, my mum won’t know how to do that. Her laptop is a potato. This add-on makes all of this way easier.
You’re not generating models at this point. You don’t need that kind of hardware to run these.
You don’t need CUDA, it’s actually pretty easy. You can run the Mistral 7B model this add-on is based on using GPT4All. It doesn’t require much, if any, technical knowledge.
Most important part of the thread:
In it’s beta stage, Orbit is currently not open-source. This doesn’t mean it will remain this way forever. If orbit gains traction and we have the resources and funding to support an Open-Source project, I’m sure things could change.
Press X to doubt.
Has Mozilla done sometime to deserve this skepticism? They were founded on open-source and AFAIK have continued to support open-source. Mozilla is far from a perfect organization, but if this project was a success I think it would be out of character for them to keep it closed-source.
then why make it closed source to begin with?
Believe it or not but it requires resources to open source an internal product, especially one that may have been an experiment where some small team was able to convince leadership could become useful to the masses.
React.js at Facebook is a good example of this. It took a lot of effort to externalize and open source React, and tbh the codebase is still kind of garbage when it comes to contributions from those unfamiliar with its intricacies.
but… you dont have to accept contributions? you can just make it open source and tidy it up at the same time?
In a different world maybe, but I can already see the headlines, “Mozilla open sources lackluster AI tool”. PR is unfortunately a thing, and once you miss that initial wave of interest, you’re unlikely to grab attention later without another marketing push. Mozilla is experienced in open sourcing software, so by now they’re pretty good at knowing when to do it and when not to. In other words, it says something that they chose not to do it in this case.
It is very privacy friendly […]
What makes you believe that? The most information I could find about this is that it doesn’t “save your session data.” The Orbit privacy policy also seems a bit bare, and I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or not.
Either way, you’re still sending data to a third party service to process. Might be worth it for some people.
No association with any account. Therefore, no profiling.
Facebook and Google profile you with no account. Accounts aren’t required for tracking.
Can I just trade in that LLM for the old Firefox please?
So mozilla is paying the server costs for this, what’s the business model?
AI
Maybe they could focus on developing a web browser instead…
Considering how google is making chrome worse every day, they could do only security updates and still be the best browser.
Ooh, I just tried it out and I can tell I’m going to love it - if not this specific plugin (the UI needs some work) then this general concept of a plugin.
I just popped over to Youtube and went to a ten-minute video of something or other, clicked the “summarize transcript” button, and within a few seconds I had a paragraph-long summary of what the whole video was about. There have been sooo many Youtube videos over the years that I’ve reluctantly watched with a constant “get to the point, man!” Frustration. Now I’ll know if it’s worth it.
Do you have the SponsorBlock add-on installed? Most videos have user-submitted sections that it lets your skip. Also, a highlighted part.