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This sounds great, will have to try it out. Interested in the business value they gain from this, as this appears to be free.
I guess for mistral it's great marketing material.
Edit: Quite interested in the differences of local optimizations... that does allow for specific sensorship, but alas that's already possible in a more direct, reliable way.
What is "AI browsing"?
Seems like what Chrome has with the default built-in Gemini Nano model.
Hey at least "some" news/things from Mistral. Seems like ages ago when they launched vibe-code.
I don't think it is comparable. Nowhere in the news they say it is offline but IMO Gemini Nano is offline (?)
I'm not a Google fan but I never understood the outrage as it is a local model ... sure, you have to trust them, but if you use their browser you already do.
The outrage about Gemini Nano in Chrome was the surprise extra 4GB download plus their attempt to expose it as a non-standard browser API, IIRC.
This is an excellent use case for completely local, small model inference, yet for inexplicable reasons Mozilla wants to normalize uploading your entire private browsing history to a cloud.
These (Mistral's and Mozilla's) marketing pages aren't candid enough to clearly explain the difference between local and cloud inference, and that they're asking you to consent to enabling the latter. I'd call that the bare minimum of ethics. If you're in a position of authority over your less technical users, you are ethically obligated to give them the full picture of what are you doing and why they should consent.
(Aside to any Mozilla people who might be reading HN, your page here[0] has an oversight, it advertises this model as "Mistral Small 4" but the hyperlink is to OpenAI's model card for gpt-oss-120b).
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/smart-window-models
I can't fathom how they'd consider "Private" something that uploads all the sensitive information in readable form to a third party service.
In fact, If I were asked to explain the opposite of private, I might give this kind of design as an example.
It's all the more un-fathomable if you recall Mozilla were the people who *pioneered* local browser ML, as a privacy feature. Back in 2022—when Chrome was doing language translation by uploading to Google's cloud, and Mozilla introduced the (actually innovative!) idea of baking small ML models into the local browser,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33792447 ("Firefox Translations: Translate websites in your browser without using the cloud (addons.mozilla.org)")
And look, they were 100% cognizant of how vital local processing is to privacy. Read their own marketing material, from 2022:
Didn’t OpenAI tried to build even a new AI browser and failed? I honestly don’t need AI in my browser and would not let an agent to access my login credentials/cookies/saved payment methods for various sites.
this is chatgpt, web gui from mistral built-in Firefox, not for tech savvy users. I think anyone that will complain about this knows very well that you can just give your harness control over firefox through puppeteer, which is much more powerful. could firefox itself become a harness and speak openai api responses? maybe yeah, but why?