this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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[–] [email protected] 92 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 26 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Coincidentally, also why I don't care much for most social media content.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well I don’t know about you, but my mind goes to user-written instagram posts, Facebook posts, and tweets. You know, things like local moms groups circlejerking about toxins in foods etc etc

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I think that's just for a different sort of person. While there is some relatively high level discussion on lemmy we also like to circlejerk just about other things. Different strokes for different folks. The two services aren't that different besides Lemmy being foss

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

They did say “most”, so I’m not sure what you’re trying to call out here

[–] [email protected] 66 points 9 months ago (5 children)

Didn't even think of it as a possibility. WTF would a browser need with LLM?

[–] [email protected] 64 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 9 months ago

Cheers DANNY BOOOOOOOYYY!

[–] [email protected] 58 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Reminds me of the amazon products titled: “I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy,”.

I think we’re way beyond the point of no return. The internet has been ruined for good.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

The circle of death.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I do this already. It's great. Kagi has a browser plugin that does it.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thank you for calling that out. I'm well aware, but appreciate your cautioning.

I've seen hallucinations from LLMs at home and at work (where I've literally had them transcribe dates like this). They're still absolutely worth it for their ability to handle unstructured data and the speed of iteration you get -- whether they "understand" the task or not.

I know to check my (its) work when it matters, and I can add guard rails and selectively make parts of the process more robust later if need be.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Local translation of text comes to mind.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yup, Firefox has it: https://browser.mt/ (it's now a native part of Firefox)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Hmm maybe this is why Firefox is so damn slow on my raspberry pi

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Hmm I don't think it's because of that feature, because it only runs when you explicitly ask it to translate a page for you. You should probably check your extensions, see if you have some redundant ones (a mistake people make is use multiple ad-blockers/anti-trackers, when just uBlock Origin + Firefox's defaults are usually good enough).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Firefox has that already (without using an LLM). But yeah, it's still another way this could be implemented or possibly improved.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I was thinking more along the lines of communicating with a Klingon captain on a D7 Battlecruiser.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Vivaldi has had local translation for about half a year now. No need for LLM for this feature.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Yet another reason why I use Vivaldi over every other chromium fork.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago

Still a Chromium fork.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Basically, there's no commercial benefit at this stage.

Once there is benefit they will add it in.

Whole lot of article for nothing.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's not what they said at all.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Kind of ironic how they use an AI generated article image