Topic · 35 posts

Inteligência Artificial

I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

2 comments on “I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla”

Mozilla is developing a built‑in AI assistant for Firefox that will be offered as a third browsing mode alongside Normal and Private tabs. They’re calling it “Window AI.”

Details are still scarce. Based on Mozilla’s official announcement on Thursday (13th), it looks like a deeper implementation than the existing sidebar that gives access to third‑party chatbots (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, etc.). The post stresses the feature will be opt-in and that the user “is in control.”

There’s a waitlist to try the feature and a Mozilla forum thread inviting people to “help shape” the initiative.

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How to disable AI “improvements” in YouTube videos

A few months ago, youtubers reported unsolicited interventions by Google to “improve” their videos with generative AI. It appeared to be a test; now it’s official.

Channel owners can disable this feature in Studio: go to Settings, Channel, Advanced settings and uncheck the two options under Video quality enhancements. For viewers, Google’s suggested workaround is to change the resolution in the player’s settings.

1 comment on “How to disable AI “improvements” in YouTube videos”

The (not so) futuristic technology of “Lazarus”

I’m currently watching an anime that the streaming service Max kind of threw in my face, Lazarus. The animation is stunning, and the soundtrack is awesome. It really reminds me of Cowboy Bebop, and not by coincidence: both series, separated by nearly 30 years, are directed by Shinichirō Watanabe.

The story of Lazarus takes place in 2052. There are several curious nitpicks, such as the nationality of the protagonist, our Brazilian Axel Gilberto. (A risky bet by the writers, suggesting that by ~2030 “Axel” will took over Enzo and Gael as popular foreigner boy names for newborns in Brazil.)

Right at the beginning of the fifth episode, “Pretty Vacant,” two technological details caught my attention.

The first was that Delta Medical, the company responsible for manufacturing the drug that drives the story, published the test results of the medication encoded in audio files on SoundCloud. Did you remember that SoundCloud still exists? I could bet that by 2052, SoundCloud will just be a footnote in some Wikipedia entry.

(By the way, someone noticed that in February 2024, SoundCloud changed its terms of use to give itself the right to use user content to train AIs. The future is now, and it’s dystopian.)

The other detail, which is kinda bad news, is that we will still be using phones, and the ones in the future will also have glass screens prone to breaking. Early in the fifth episode, the CEO of Delta Medical, Dr. Ahmed Rahman, throws his phone against the wall and *crack*, another shattered screen.

A murky future for Corning and a bright one for the case and screen protector industry — which products, apparently, Dr. Rahman wasn’t using. (My pet conspiracy theory involves manufacturers of phone cases and screen protectors, but that’s another story.)

In the lawsuit where the US Justice is deciding which “remedy” to give to Alphabet, following its conviction for monopolizing the search engine market, Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of services, said that in April, the volume of searches made via Safari shrank for the first time in history — that is, in almost two decades.

Eddy attributes the decline to the rise of generative AI assistants that deliver pre-digested search results, such as Perplexity (with whom Apple is reportedly in talks), ChatGPT, and Claude.

Alphabet (Google) shares took a 7.5% dive following the Apple executive’s statement, as reported by Bloomberg. The company released a statement disputing the information, saying that “we continue to see overall query growth in Search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple’s devices and platform”

Who to believe? I don’t know, but if there were doubts that a seismic shift is underway, data like this helps dispel them.

Eddy Cue also said that Apple is considering changing Safari so that the browser can incorporate AI assistants, and that he has lost sleep over the possibility of losing the annual USD 20 billion that Google pays as a “sweetener” to be Safari’s default search engine. I almost feel sorry for him.