[827a]

On the fingerprinting concerns: I have to imagine there will be an option in Chrome (certainly in Firefox) to "never download an LLM, turn off all LLM functionality". I suppose I can see an angle where a website could issue a small LLM request to try and fingerprint the model itself, which is another fingerprinting parameter. But as long as it can be turned off I don't see why this is a problem.

There's a broader class of concern here that reduces to the form: "The web platform should not be able to do this." For people who believe this, I think they'll invent any reason they can to push this narrative. E.g.: Well, sure, the user could turn it off, but then websites would say 'your browser isn't supported because it has no LLM' and now the web just got worse for me because I wanted to turn off LLMs.

But this reduces to "the web platform should not be able to do this" because at the end of the day it was the website operator's decision to turn off their website if an LLM is unavailable. Its not really the platform's fault, or the fault of its maintainers, that they built this capability and JP Morgan or whoever decided to screw over people who don't want to enable this feature. Similar to turning off Firefox support even though it would work fine, because they can't be assed to test their site in Firefox.

I don't know how to counter that take tbh. The web is the world's most successful application platform. It is not competing with PDF; it competes with SwiftUI. Of the options presented in front of you, you are hallucinating an option that reads like "we'll just keep the web nice and static and the way it is and nothing will ever change about it, the web is done". In reality your two options are: "We adapt the web to the evolving needs of its users" or "The web fails to serve the evolving needs of its users, and SwiftUI or WinUI steps in to fill that gap". This second option is far worse!

[codedokode]

> But as long as it can be turned off I don't see why this is a problem.

That immediately makes you stand out, and sites will start breaking, like now some sites (that do not do any 3D graphics) break without WebGL.

> web is the world's most successful application platform.

Also one of the ugliest and poorly designed in my opinion.

[domenicd]

Fingerprinting concerns here are really overblown. At least in Chrome's implementation, the model version / responses will give you ~2 bits over the browser major version: whether the machine can support the model, and whether the model is downloaded yet or not. (Really <2 bits, since these ratios aren't 50/50 in the population.)

This is discussed in detail in https://webmachinelearning.github.io/writing-assistance-apis....