Why Vivaldi won't follow the current AI trend?

Seems like a reasonable and thought-out decision to me. Not sure why the comments here are so negative. Clearly LLMs don’t fit into Vivaldi’s vision and the features they’d like to provide to their users.

LLM's are not useful enough to me to want them integrated with my daily-drivers (web browser, email client, etc.) - so this is a great take & one that I personally identify with.

I dislike the trend of baking LLMs into browsers as well, but this is not a good strategic decision. LLMs still provide features that users find useful, even if they're not perfect. So if Vivaldi doesn't provide these features based on some philosophical stance, users will just choose another browser. Not that Vivaldi had a significant user base to begin with, but this decision won't help them.

Personally, I’m not interested in LLM in a browser as a chat bot. I do like Arc with their summary, but I’m not interested in asking questions etc - I’ll use ChatGPT&#x2F;Perplexity for that.<p>In fact, I’d prefer it not to be included as it’s bloatware.

Was using Vivaldi on Android, quite a solid browser.<p>Unfortunately, the lack of AI functionality has made Edge a more attractive browser. Very useful to let AI summarise a large wall of text when browsing Hacker News for example. If only they&#x27;d add a &#x27;close all tabs but this one&#x27; feature.

LLMs in the browser come across as too much like Microsoft Clippy.<p>Still, things in the Siri&#x2F;Alexa class have to have some kind of language model.

I understand this point of view; it&#x27;s a reasonable action to stop going in this direction if some valid concerns are still unanswered by the industry. At the same time, I suspect that a good part of the people who complain about LLM hallucinating underestimate the human rate of hallucinations&#x2F;errors.<p>Of course, there are a lot of other considerations linked to topics like accountability, etc.. but take autonomous driving as an example: we don&#x27;t need self-driving cars to be perfect and do exactly 0 incidents to be a better solution than human driving. They just need to be significantly better than us to be a very useful technology for mankind and let&#x27;s hope this happens soon.

Honestly, I see no reason why AI should be part of browser itself. If user wants those capabilities they should be free to choose extensions that add them. So they get to choose which AI or LLM model they use.

My browser should be my user agent, not my user nanny. I don&#x27;t want it depriving me of features or working against my interest, ever, on the grounds that the browser author&#x27;s personal opinions on the social impact of various technologies.

The AI hype relies on most common people misunderstanding what&#x27;s in front of them.<p>I&#x27;ve seen business people write prompts. They don&#x27;t understand the limitations or strengths. They tell the model it has a degree in something, they tell it not to hallucinate, they anthropomorphize it so far that they greet it in the morning &quot;to get into the mindset that you have a virtual colleague&quot;.<p>All the people who fearmonger about AGI really don&#x27;t help, because it implies our LLMs are anywhere close to sentience. They&#x27;re not.

I don’t mind for AI helping me browsing. Besides, all other got in the hype anyway.<p>Maybe this way Vivaldi can finally allocate resources to workspaces sync across devices.<p>Only 2 browsers do that: Edge and Arc. And Arc doesn’t work in Linux unfortunately.

For people in agreement with Vivaldi, how are you summarizing articles today? I often find content that&#x27;s not important but also too verbose, and having an LLM summarize it for me is perfect.<p>Right now, I&#x27;m doing this very manually, but am actually thinking of switching my browser just to have this capability baked in.<p>EDIT: Since everyone is asking why and how I use summaries, here&#x27;s an example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40881021">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=40881021</a>

Have no problem with them not following the trend, maybe even a good thing.<p>Their reasoning is shoddy. Misunderstands LLM&#x27;s and plagiarism is of no practical concern to a browser, may as well remove the copy function from the browser if that&#x27;s the view, theres also use cases where hallucinations don&#x27;t matter such as the AI tab sorting and semantic search. He should&#x27;ve just said they don&#x27;t see the value in it and left it at that.

Vivaldi user here. I also use LLMs - I subscribed for ChatGPT for a while, now I mostly play around with ollama. I also played around with Stable Diffusion extensively.<p>I think the article is excellent in its analysis and conclusion.<p>As much as I like the recent advancements in Generative AI, I don&#x27;t think it should be hamfisted in every software, and I also don&#x27;t think they come nearly close to all the hype surrounding it. It is a useful tool when you understand its shortcomings, and there is a long way to go until they are ready for more widespread use. Good on Vivaldi for taking this stance.

&gt; such text being baked into the model means that it is possible to cause it to output the same text verbatim<p>unlike humans, of course.

Spoilers: They couldnt even if they wanted, they dont have $budget for it. They even struggle paying normal developers, moving most of the stack to cheaper javascript.

I don&#x27;t use Vivaldi, but I think it&#x27;s fine on their side to avoid falling into this AI trap. You have to consider that there were 2 possibilities, they used their API key to send requests to openai&#x2F;claude or they did what Mozilla did and integrated gemini&#x2F;chatgpt at the expense of the user data, both of which are pretty scummy and barely help the end user. The only way to integrate AI fine into browser is to ship a model to run local, but that would require the user to have the computing power to run it. Google is trying this with chrome by integrating gemini mini in the browser as a 100mb blob.

I think this is the correct move. The correct one (and I&#x27;m not sure if this is feasible) would be integrating the OS level LLM facilities. AS an independent browser vendor, trying to chase the AI trend mirage is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.<p>Still, there is some marketing damage control dismissal of LLMs in the note that could have been avoided.

Smart. There&#x27;s already llm extensions so anyone who wants it can add it.

Why the word order in this sentence is weird?

Thank you for protecting me from &quot;misinformation&quot;, said no thinking person ever.

that just screams &quot;I don&#x27;t know what this technology is and I am too afraid to use it&quot; to me personally. Don&#x27;t use it as a source of information if you don&#x27;t want it to spew hallucinations to the user? There&#x27;s about a million other uses for LLMs.

&gt; was made by having many (underpaid) people to look<p>&quot;underpaid&quot;.<p>I wonder what this has to do with the discussion on how LLMs work.<p>I&#x27;d like to know more why does Vivaldi team thinks these people were underpaid, how do they know how much per hour they were paid and what would be a fair price for the job according to Vivaldi&#x27;s evaluation of the scope.<p>I&#x27;m really interested to know how did the Vivaldi team conclude that OpenAI forced unwilling people to do the work while paying less than what these people expected to receive for their time.<p>And most importantly. What does this have to do with LLM integration in browser?

A perfect place for multimodal Assistent would be in Operating System&#x27;s GUI. So that it sees and hears the same as its human user.