Orbit by Mozilla: “AI You Can Trust”
December 31st, 2024“Easily summarize emails, docs, articles, and videos across the web — without sacrificing your privacy.”
Mmm hmm.
In the first entry of Orbit’s frequently asked questions, “How does Orbit work?” we read:
For the current version, we are using a Mistral LLM (Mistral 7B) hosted within Mozilla’s GCP instance.
In case you don’t know, and I assume Mozilla didn’t spell it out on purpose, GCP stands for Google Cloud Platform.
Mozilla is so concerned with my privacy that this supposedly privacy focused AI assistant is hosted on Google’s infrastructure.
Well, that’s just ******* great.
*sigh*
Mozilla goes on to apply a soothing balm of meaningless words:
Does Orbit save the content of the pages I visit or summaries generated?
No, it does not.
When you use Orbit, we receive a payload back that contains the contents of your query; information about the model queried (such as the name and version number); information about technical problems with processing the query, if any; the number of tokens required to process the query; and the model outputs in response to the query. We do not store this data beyond temporarily caching it to process your query and return the outputs to you.
Orbit summaries are only available on the page that you are actually on. As soon as you navigate away from that page, Orbit erases the session.
Ok. They state the contents of the payload that comes back.
However, when a user queries Orbit, what exactly is sent to GCP instance?
Even assuming Mozilla is telling the truth about not storing anything (I wouldn’t believe this/no way to verify), what is Google storing about you, me and everyone else who uses Orbit?
Hmm.
“What is Google storing…?” Everything, in a nanosecond. Retrieving it at will, too.
I feel another sci-fi AI plot coming together…
What if all these electronically stored personas start merging up there in the clouds, creating teams of minds, so to speak, that act as one? There could be the good guys and the bad guys and the bystanders, the former two striving to use tech either to either save the planet or to destroy it, and the bystanders just standing around, maybe taking sides, maybe ignoring them.
They would do this secretly so that humans couldn’t figure out what’s happening when little clues are accidentally revealed. The humans would be stumped as to why events on earth are increasingly failing to respond to their control efforts.
How to end the story? How about if a series of super-flares from the sun wipes out everything on earth and above it? But, at least one of these group minds has already been picked up by the gravity of a passing asteroid/s and is headed wherever it is going…