After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla’s new CEO that Firefox will evolve into “a modern AI browser,” the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser.
On Tuesday, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo was named the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, the company behind the beloved Firefox web browser used by almost all GNU/Linux distributions as the default browser.
In his message as new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo stated that Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software while remaining the company’s anchor, and that Firefox will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
What was not made clear is that Firefox will also ship with an AI kill switch that will let users completely disable all the AI features that are included in Firefox. Mozilla shared this important update earlier today to make it clear to everyone that Firefox will still be a trusted web browser.
This is probably true but makes me sad. I tell all my friends not to use the lie machines but a bunch of people at work use them all the time.
It is what it is. I do personally use LLMs because I recognize it is a tool that is actually good at some things, for instance, cursory research on something I'm working on that can get me a general idea of the knowledge I should be looking into to get the task done. Key aspect being I need to do all the follow up research from real sources to gather more data, and of course verify the assumptions from the LLM.
The problem is people taking the word of the actually incredibly cool (on a math level) next best token generator as the truth of God. Its dumb people doing dumb things, problem is dumb people imo.
Edit: I guess that's sort of harsh. There should also just be some better education from the people making these tools on the problems and correct ways to use them.