alt Hacker NewsI wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough?
And calling translation "AI" seems like deceitful retroactive rebranding. Why is machine translation suddenly "AI" now? It was never branded as such before. Is "AI" here just used to mean machine learning?
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"AI" is a term which means a dozen things and has changed a dozen times. It's about as meaningful a signifier as "smart".
If I were to draw a line, I'd say AI is anything with a transformer model powering it.
As exhausted by 'AI' as I am, translation is one of the things neural networks (and especially transformers) have been constantly improving SOTA on.
IMHO no. Every chatbot has so much wasted space, it really doesn't need to be full-width. Also, what's easier?
Option 1: Being on a tab, copying the URL of the tab, switching to the chatbot tab, pasting the URL and writing some instructions about what to do with that tab.
Option 2: Clicking on the "summarise page" button (whether from the sidebar or from right-click context menu), and having the browser pre-fill the prompt with the URL + the reader view version of the content on that page.
I've run an AI translation tool under a debugger just to see what it did.
It tokenized your input, fed it into a model, then ran the model. Literally the same thing as any other local AI software. Except the model was for translation.
I saw someone else using this feature. It does more than just be a chat bot. You can direct it to automate tasks like go to a web page, search for stuff, etc. -- I asked it to go to pinterest and download the top ten images for "cyberpunk," and it succeeded. Nifty I suppose.
They use a Neural Network engine to power it. That definitely counts as AI:
The transformer architecture that powers large language models was designed by Google for the purposes of machine translation. As others have said, ML and AI have always been closely related if not synonymous.
> I wonder what sort of user testing made them decide that what Firefox users really need is a chat bot in the site bar. Isn't a chat bot in a tab good enough?
If it wasn't because I find myself using the AI-sidebar all the time I would probably have shared your opinion.
I guess it's just quite convenient to have it separated from the "regular" tabs and their history.
Wouldn't be the first time. Google gave an option to turn off gemini in Gmail, and suddenly the inbox tabs they had for over a decade decided to disappear.
The word artificial intelligence was coined in a 1955 research proposal [1] which listed seven aspects of the "artificial intelligence problem". Computers using languages was one of them. Another is "neuron nets", which would indeed encompass a large part of ML and at least Google Translate since circa 2016 [2].
This is also perfectly in line with how the word AI was used until circa 2022. The weird thing is this narrowing of AI to only mean transformer or diffusion based neural network approaches.
And many translation approaches would even fall under that, so not sure how narrow you perceive the term to be now. How do you even define AI to include everything OpenAI calls AI but not include modern translation approaches
1: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180507195240/https://ai.google...