The web browser Vivaldi is taking a firm stance against including machine learning tools to its browser.
So, as we have seen, 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 and are happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them which is a problem we’ve seen before in the field of cryptocurrencies.
As such, it does not feel right to bundle any such solution into Vivaldi. There is enough misinformation going around to risk adding more to the pile. We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.
↫ Julien Picalausa on the Vivaldi blog
I’m not a particular fan of Vivaldi personally – it doesn’t integrate with KDE well visually and its old-fashioned-Opera approach of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at itself is just too cluttered for me – but props to the Vivaldi team for taking such clear and firm stance. There’s a ton of pressure from big money interests to add machine learning to everything from your operating system to your nail scissors, and popular tech publishers are certainly going to publish articles decrying Vivaldi’s choice, so they’re not doing this without any risk.
With even Firefox adding machine learning tools to the browser, there’s very few – if any – browsers left, other than Vivaldi, it seems – that will be free of these tools. I can only hope we’re going to see a popular Firefox fork without this nonsense take off, and I’m definitely keeping my eye on the various options that already exist today.