It's more un-fathomable if you recall Mozilla were the people who *pioneered* local browser ML as a privacy feature. Back in 2022—when Chrome was doing language translation by uploading to Google servers, and Mozilla introduced the (actually innovative!) idea of baking small ML models into the browser,
And look: they were 100% cognizant, then, of how vital local processing is to privacy:
> "...called Project Bergamot. The ultimate goal of this consortium was to build a set of neural machine translation tools that would enable Mozilla to develop a website translation add-on that operates locally, i.e. the engines, language models and in-page translation algorithms would need to reside and be executed entirely in the user’s computer, so none of the data would be sent to the cloud, making it entirely private."
Even more un-fathomable, Mozilla's CTO has been writing a substack with the underlying theme of "if the AI isn't running on your hardware, you don't own it" https://newsletter.ownersnotrenters.com/
You cannot ship on device inference with a real LLM still. Average people freak the hell out if it's even 10% slower than whatever google ships. At least thats the claim for how Firefox lost all their marketshare in the first place (Which was not the case. When everyone was claiming firefox was "slow", it simply was not, as long as you used an ad blocker. Normal people like my dad didn't switch to Chrome. It was installed through a sketchy mechanism and they never noticed)
Meanwhile, if you CAN run these models locally, using your own hardware for inference is supported. It's a setting option.
Google still blasts you to install Chrome at every opportunity if you use their services, and is heavily optimized for Chrome (e.g. Docs, YouTube). That's not really Firefox's fault.
The requirements for the third party app-stores are completely ridiculous and unreachable by 99% of the individuals and organisations out there. In practice, only vetted partners with huge resources can operate one.
This is an assumption that since Amazon Sidewalk exists, smart TVs must have something similar. There's no proof, and I think if it were happening without being documented it would be a huge scandal.
I see it differently: as a teen, I could remember the exact word for lots of things, I could recall numbers and data with high precision. Nowadays, I'm pretty bad at all those things, but I can very well understand metaphors and connects concepts from wildly different topics — which I couldn't back then.
I see this kind of "interconnecting ideas" of my current years as somewhat connected with "fuzzy memory". It's like, when I retrieve data, it's not as precise, and sometimes I get neighbouring data, but that can actually of use.
You may have lost your superhuman ability to recall the script of every single episode of a pop cartoon with 20 seasons but you have gained the superhuman ability to make dad jokes.
In fact, If I were asked to explain the opposite of private, I might give this kind of design as an example.
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