Most 'regular' users aren't using Firefox. FF has something like 5% market share — it's basically just for people techie enough to understand why chromium-based browsers are bad. I'm willing to bet that there's a significant overlap between those users and users who understand why AI is bad.

If this feature is intended for the people who want it, then it should be opt-in.

I'm in the same boat - my work uses chromebooks.

I got frustrated earlier this week, trying to remove AI suggestions from Google on my work account. It's set up in such a way that I can't opt out. Search for ways to remove AI from your results, and all the tutorials say to "Click the lab button" to disable AI.

I looked on my Google page - there is no "lab" button.

I looked up trouble-shooting for "no lab button," and attempted to follow a direct link to the controls it's supposed to provide.

Apparently, since my account is managed by a company, I don't have access to permissions... including the permission to remove AI results. Fuck.

Long story short, although I really wanted to throw my work laptop into a fire, I instead decided to change my default search engine to DuckDuckGo.

I can't escape the Google environment entirely, but at least I can still use a search engine that lets me opt out of automatically generating AI crap.

Ah, developer? Or they just force it in a work computer? Either way, feel your pain.

When I say "forced," I mean that you shouldn't have to go into about:config to hunt for something that doesn't even say the phrase "time zone" in it to disable this. It should be openly in the browser's options. There should also be a warning about this; I read of no such notice when first firing it up. It came off as shady and an unwanted, initially forced "feature" that caused way more problems than it solved.

Assuming you meant harm. My assumption is that this is a locally CPU run model that is basically a glorified AOL chatbot. Again, I'm making some assumptions here.

But I really think the "AI" in this is just using a buzzword. When technically it is but it's likely not what we think like a heavy LLM like ChatGPT. I really doubt Firefox is sending prompts to GPU farms and it's likely just a simple model that runs on your local CPU. Likely optimized to answer browser related prompts or Firefox related prompts in general. I could be wrong. But I'd be surprised if it was at all outsourcing prompts to a GPU farm.

It's a good example (if my assumptions are correct and Firefox is not braindead plugging in ChatGPT into the browser) actually of how AI application specific models can be very efficient and helpful. All the money we push into the "god AI" is really what people think of with "fuck AI". China is working heavily in models like this.

For example. They just released a new application specific model that is extremely efficient at character recognition in images. Basically, if you took a picture of a page in a book it converts it to text that can be edited on a computer. It's a case of an AI model actually improving compute efficiency when compared to other previous "non-ai" methods of computer vision.

But I digress. I think most of "fuck AI" could be summarized as "fuck capitalism" though. American investors are chasing a "worker replacement" model that they are failing at obtaining.