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).
> This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference
I remember using a small model for autocomplete, I think it was Qwen 2.5 Coder 3B way back, on a laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a 13th Gen Intel i7 CPU. It made the fans spin up and loaded things so much (Ollama back then) that it was largely unusable for doing software development at the same time. I don't want inference anywhere near my personal computing devices (same in regards to phones, really, I don't want the power usage that'll just help degrade the battery faster). Also most small models just really suck, unless you have trained them on a very specific task, but then they suck at everything that is not that task.
Then again sending browser history online also sucks, unless you're into that kind of thing.
Not everyone uses laptops. I can run Qwen 3.8 27B (which is a REALLY capable model) in the background coding for me while I'm simultaneously browsing the web and playing VALORANT without any performance impact, and that's on a 6 year old GPU.
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
KronisLV · · focus · HN ↗
I remember using a small model for autocomplete, I think it was Qwen 2.5 Coder 3B way back, on a laptop with 32 GB of RAM and a 13th Gen Intel i7 CPU. It made the fans spin up and loaded things so much (Ollama back then) that it was largely unusable for doing software development at the same time. I don't want inference anywhere near my personal computing devices (same in regards to phones, really, I don't want the power usage that'll just help degrade the battery faster). Also most small models just really suck, unless you have trained them on a very specific task, but then they suck at everything that is not that task.
Then again sending browser history online also sucks, unless you're into that kind of thing.
redox99 · · focus · HN ↗