This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud.
These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimum of ethics. If you're in a position of authority over your less technical users, you are ethically obligated to give them the full picture of what are you doing and why they should consent.
(Aside to any Mozilla people who might be reading HN, your page here[0] has an oversight, it advertises this model as "Mistral Small 4" but the hyperlink is to OpenAI's model card for gpt-oss-120b).
I am not trying to defend Mozilla doing this, and I don't support sending data to cloud based services like this in a way that users won't understand.
But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM as a prepackaged thing in a mass market distributed browser.
You don't want a browser that takes 10GB of extra RAM (on top of the memory hog that is having just 3 or 4 complex tabs open on its own already) and pegs your CPU at 99% usage for minutes at a time. And not in an era when mass market consumer laptops are still commonly 8GB or 16GB of total system RAM. Many of those with integrated-into-CPU onboard graphics (eg: not a gaming laptop with a discrete GPU on the PCI-E bus).
It'll be a catastrophe for laptop battery life, among other resource use problems. And an LLM that fits in under 8 to 10GB of RAM for CPU-only inference is not going to be nearly as capable as an off-device inference system.
I wish they had just done this with a very clear up front opt in (not enabled by default) thing that explains what Mistral is, that it's not some big American cloud company but a relatively small startup in France, and that your prompts/LLM interactions will go to their servers. And some documentation on how it will be handled/stored in a supposedly trustworthy manner.
Well, it depends on the task, doesn't it? "running shoes I looked at last week" / "Here's what I found in your browsing history:" doesn't need a 119 billion parameter frontier model; it's a RAG problem for the 0.6 B embedding models. That's an example Mozilla offers. Presumably to explain to their users why it's essential they hand over their last week's browsing history for this convenience (but it isn't! Hardly for that!)
I feel it's wrong to tell users that it's important and normal to relinquish all control of their—extremely personal—life history, in bulk, in plaintext, to strangers.
I agree wholeheartedly that remote server inference is super useful, and that local inference falls far short on many tasks. (I have no objection at all to Mozilla providing a cloud inference feature).
What I don't buy is that we must ask users to redraw their personal boundaries so that their most intimate life details, and remote frontier-model inference, overlap. They do not need to overlap.
You can accomplish a lot with private local inference with the smallest of models; and you can accomplish a lot on remote servers which aren't privy to everything. If some convenience is lost by not combining the two, well, so be it. I'm sure most people would agree, if all of this was laid out plainly.
I'm of the opinion that local inference should be done to the greatest extent that is realistically possible, at the earlier time that the hardware/average user platform is capable of doing so. I personally spend a fair bit on kWh extra in my home electrical bill monthly for having a good sized chunk of local inference ability in my house, but that's not a common thing yet.
If mozilla is doing things to send users down the path of doing this externally, they need to be much more upfront and transparent with the users about where their data is going, and not bury it in some terms/conditions that only nerds will hunt for.
peri-cl · · focus · HN ↗
These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimum of ethics. If you're in a position of authority over your less technical users, you are ethically obligated to give them the full picture of what are you doing and why they should consent.
(Aside to any Mozilla people who might be reading HN, your page here[0] has an oversight, it advertises this model as "Mistral Small 4" but the hyperlink is to OpenAI's model card for gpt-oss-120b).
[0] <a href="https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-models" rel="nofollow">https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-models
walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
But I also think that the state of the art in small LLM and user device capabilities aren't there yet to put a "good enough to be actually useful" local-only LLM as a prepackaged thing in a mass market distributed browser.
You don't want a browser that takes 10GB of extra RAM (on top of the memory hog that is having just 3 or 4 complex tabs open on its own already) and pegs your CPU at 99% usage for minutes at a time. And not in an era when mass market consumer laptops are still commonly 8GB or 16GB of total system RAM. Many of those with integrated-into-CPU onboard graphics (eg: not a gaming laptop with a discrete GPU on the PCI-E bus).
It'll be a catastrophe for laptop battery life, among other resource use problems. And an LLM that fits in under 8 to 10GB of RAM for CPU-only inference is not going to be nearly as capable as an off-device inference system.
I wish they had just done this with a very clear up front opt in (not enabled by default) thing that explains what Mistral is, that it's not some big American cloud company but a relatively small startup in France, and that your prompts/LLM interactions will go to their servers. And some documentation on how it will be handled/stored in a supposedly trustworthy manner.
peri-cl · · focus · HN ↗
I feel it's wrong to tell users that it's important and normal to relinquish all control of their—extremely personal—life history, in bulk, in plaintext, to strangers.
I agree wholeheartedly that remote server inference is super useful, and that local inference falls far short on many tasks. (I have no objection at all to Mozilla providing a cloud inference feature).
What I don't buy is that we must ask users to redraw their personal boundaries so that their most intimate life details, and remote frontier-model inference, overlap. They do not need to overlap.
You can accomplish a lot with private local inference with the smallest of models; and you can accomplish a lot on remote servers which aren't privy to everything. If some convenience is lost by not combining the two, well, so be it. I'm sure most people would agree, if all of this was laid out plainly.
walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
If mozilla is doing things to send users down the path of doing this externally, they need to be much more upfront and transparent with the users about where their data is going, and not bury it in some terms/conditions that only nerds will hunt for.