[brooke2k]

"AI" as it's used nowadays is unfortunately usually a shorthand for LLM. When firefox talks about "AI features", I think most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.

[PaulHoule]

LLMs are sequence-to-sequence like language translation models, were invented for the purpose of language models, and if you were making a translator today it would be structured like an LLM but might be small and specialized.

For practical purposes though I like being able to have a conversation with a language translator: if I was corresponding with somebody in German, French, Spanish, related European languages or Japanese I would expect to say:

  I'm replying to ... and want to say ... in a way that is compatible in tone

and then get something that I can understand enough to say

  I didn't expect to see ... what does that mean?

And also run a reverse translation against a different model, see that it makes sense, etc. Or if I am reading a light novel I might be very interested in

  When the story says ... how is that written in Japanese?

[r721]

>Starting today, Google Translate uses advanced Gemini capabilities to better improve translations on phrases with more nuanced meanings like idioms, local expressions or slang.

https://blog.google/products/search/gemini-capabilities-tran... [Dec 12, 2025]

[godelski]

Firefox is local

[tjpnz]

I think it's simpler than that. AI is fast becoming synonymous with something being force fed and generally unwanted.

[godelski]

  > most people interpret that as "LLM integration", not the page-translation feature that's been around for ages.

Which seems to be the problem. People don't even realize they're being irrational, despite Mozilla being quite transparent about what they're doing. It's pretty clear.

I mean a Firefox download is 150MB, not 16GB...

Plus, we know what Firefox is looking to do. In their labs tab they let you opt into trying out semantic search of your history. So that's a vector embedding model, not an LLM.

Edit:

Okay, they have "Shake to summarize". But that's a shortcut to Apple Intelligence. Nothing shipped with the browser. Similarly I don't understand how the chatbot window is so controversial. I̶'̶m̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶r̶t̶c̶u̶t̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶l̶i̶n̶u̶x̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶w̶i̶n̶d̶o̶w̶s̶,̶ ̶but are people really pressing <C-x> on a mac or ctrl+alt+x on linux/windows? It's not a LLM shipped with the browser, it is just a window split ("shortcut") to literally one of the most popular websites on the internet right now (ChatGPT is literally the #5 most visited website and you all think AI is unpopular?!). Adding shortcuts isn't shoving AI down your throat. Are they shoving Wikipedia down your throat because you can do "!w hacker news"? Give me a break guys