Try Orbit by Mozilla: a new AI productivity tool
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Hi folks, We’ve got something exciting to share first with our community! Introducing our beta version of Orbit by Mozilla, now available as a Firefox add-on. This is a new AI tool to help summarize emails, docs, articles, and even video transcripts. Designed to boost productivity, Orbit provides co...

Orbit is an LLM addon/extension for Firefox that runs on the Mistral 7B model. It can summarize a given webpage, YouTube videos and so on. You can ask it questions about stuff that’s on the page. It is very privacy friendly and does not require any account to sign up.

I personally tried it, and found it to be incredibly useful! I think this is going to be one of my long term addons along with uBlock Origin, Decentraleyes and so on. I would highly recommend checking this out!

  • toothbrushEnglish
    37·
    8 hours ago

    then why make it closed source to begin with?

    • vinnymac@lemmy.worldEnglish
      30·
      7 hours ago

      Believe it or not but it requires resources to open source an internal product, especially one that may have been an experiment where some small team was able to convince leadership could become useful to the masses.

      React.js at Facebook is a good example of this. It took a lot of effort to externalize and open source React, and tbh the codebase is still kind of garbage when it comes to contributions from those unfamiliar with its intricacies.

      • toothbrushEnglish
        8·
        6 hours ago

        but… you dont have to accept contributions? you can just make it open source and tidy it up at the same time?

        • Billiam@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 hour ago

          So risk someone else beating you to market? And they’ll either have the resources to make it superior, therefore making yours irrelevant, or they’ll make it inferior, which generates bad press for you?

        • vinnymac@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          6 hours ago

          In a different world maybe, but I can already see the headlines, “Mozilla open sources lackluster AI tool”. PR is unfortunately a thing, and once you miss that initial wave of interest, you’re unlikely to grab attention later without another marketing push. Mozilla is experienced in open sourcing software, so by now they’re pretty good at knowing when to do it and when not to. In other words, it says something that they chose not to do it in this case.

          • toothbrushEnglish
            7·
            6 hours ago

            Yeah, it definitly tells me something, namely that I should not use the tool.

            Why would news publish articles about the code quality of the tool, instead of its functionality?

            Now they have negative press about its closed source nature, which is a calculated risk they took, just to open source it soon anyway? I doubt it.