Thunderbolt is Mozilla’s new self-hostable AI client designed for organizations seeking to run AI on their own infrastructure and maintain data in-house.
    • Sips'@slrpnk.netEnglish
      17 days

      Indeed… As far as I know at least the Thunderbird donations are not going towards this, its Mozilla funded. I just cannot see that anyone asked or needed this, such a waste of time that should have gonw towards Thunderbird.

      • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
        17 days

        If anybody needs to know: this is why you should not not donate to the Mozilla Foundation. No money goes towards Firefox or Thunderbird through it!

        The products I care about:

        • Firefox is funded by Google
        • Thunderbird is funded by donations

        The groups I don’t:

        • “Thunderbolt is funded through a dedicated investment from Mozilla”,
        • …and Mozilla is funded by separate donations too.
          • Rekall Incorporated@piefed.socialEnglish
            16 days

            Keep in mind that that there is a strong likelihood that XLE is a demagogue and is dedicated to shitting up any mozilla/Firefox/TB thread with lies and gross exaggerations that function as lies. XLE almost certainly does not use Firefox or Thunderbird (it wouldn’t make sense considering their posting history).

            XLE claimed that “Firefox is bursting at the seams with ads.” This is clearly not true.

            As an example they cited “sponsored search suggestions”, which to my mind isn’t a big deal and can easily be disabled. For the sake of transparency, I will note that I’ve never got them and it seems I can’t enable them even if I wanted to (likely due to my region?)

            XLE also claimed that the on-hover sponsorship notice for the Firefox weather widget as an example of “Firefox bursting at the seam with ads.” I haven’t used the default new tab page in a decade plus, so maybe this impacts how I see things. From my perspective, an on-hover sponsorship notice for optional widgets is a misleading example for their claims.

            You can make up your own mind and read our conversation here: https://piefed.social/comment/10831188

            P.S. I am not saying you shouldn’t cancel your donation. I’ve donated to Mozilla Foundation before and cancelled, so I would be a hypocrite for defending donations to MF.

            I also have a more hard-line position on MF; they’ve turned into a shitty, corrupt American tech company imitation. All open source foundations based in the US are suspect by definition (including Linux foundation, Debian foundation etc.) as US society is in a state where it is extremely unlikely that crime and corruption will be addressed in the next 20 years (I’ve lived in the US for several years, as well as other countries across NA, Europe and Asia).

            But that doesn’t mean you should trust an individual like XLE, who muddies the water with bombastic BS, while at the same time defending Brave; an American criminal gang that was caught re-writing referral URLs for their own financial benefit.

        • strifegroove@ani.socialEnglish
          16 days

          Honestly it’s been what… 8? Years since chrome could play HDR…

          Firefox

          Just make it work already… it kinda does on Linux if you enable experimental features just…do it

          • maccentric@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            16 days

            Every time I have tried enabling HDR on a monitor/TV/game, I end up turning it back off soon after. I can never seem to find a good balance of bright and dark; one of them is always off for me.

            • LucidNightmare@anarchist.nexusEnglish
              16 days

              I got my first OLED monitor a few days ago, and was excited to try HDR out.

              I have no idea what HDR is really supposed to look like, but Windows’ version or implementation of HDR is garbage. My icons on just my taskbar looked so incredibly washed out I worried I made a mistake getting the monitor itself.

              Turned off HDR and noticed colors popping again. The hell is so special about HDR…? lol

              • maccentric@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                16 days

                I’ve never seen it look better than without on any device—and I’ve tried it on many. I, too, am bewildered by this technology.

      • sorghum@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        17 days

        Money is fungible. Donating frees up money that would have gone elsewhere to go to this.

    • LordCrom@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15 days

      Actually, businesses need this to control AI use, log requests, be CMMC compliant, etc.

      The proxy to multiple backends is intetesting.

  • BoofStroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    17 days

    God dammit. All the whining they do about needing donations to keep developing and this is what they come up with.

    • Sips'@slrpnk.netEnglish
      16 days

      This is actually funded by Mozilla, not Thunderbird donations.

  • neclimdul@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16 days

    Thunderbird team unveils… 🙂 thunderbolt… 😃self-hostable… 🤯AI😒client 😓

    • Sips'@slrpnk.netEnglish
      17 days

      Omg take my money!! 💸💸💸💸

      Seriously loosing whatever faith i had left in Mozilla… I want to love them so badly, but this just hurts.

      • FaceDeer@fedia.io
        17 days

        Oh no, they wrote a free program that you don’t want to use.

        • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
          17 days

          I see your account is just here to troll/harass people who don’t love AI too, but we’re witnessing Mozilla burning goodwill and capital for no apparent reason.

          Please don’t tell people to stick their heads in the sand.

          Advocacy against Mozilla’s waste has already gotten them nervous and defensive, and that advocacy can and should continue.

          • FaceDeer@fedia.io
            17 days

            Really, you’re going to follow me around calling me a troll? That’s sadder than being a troll.

        • Zos_Kia@jlai.luEnglish
          16 days

          They have the audacity of doing things, that is despicable and definitely reprehensible.

    • Cherry@piefed.socialEnglish
      16 days

      AND all caps “trusted by organisations that don’t compromise”

      TBH that sounds like a warning.

  • harmbugler@piefed.socialEnglish
    16 days

    Sounds like this is in the same space as OpenWebUI? It would be good to have some more choice there.

    • CyberSeeker@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      16 days

      It sounds like a step further than open-webui; it’s an enterprise grade client-server model for access to agents, workflows, and centralized knowledge repositories for RAG.

      In addition to local chatbot for executive/admin use, I can see this being the backend for developers running Cursor or some other AI enhanced IDE, with local knowledge stores holding proprietary documents and running against local large models.

      I am also curious about time share and prioritization of resources; I assume it would queue simultaneous requests. Presumably this would let you more effectively pool local compute, rather than providing A100 GPUs to each developer that may sit unused when they’re not working.

      Edit: Somewhat impressively, this whole stack does not even include a local inference provider; so it does everything except local models right now, and requests are forwarded to cloud inference providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc). But it does have the backend started for rate limiting and queuing, and true “fully offline/local” is on the roadmap, just not there yet.

      • CyberSeeker@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        16 days

        After reading through the GitHub docs, the most impressive thing is that they open sourced their Thunderbolt coding agent for Claude Code. There are quite a few skills available for implementation planning, dependency/build environment setup, coding, linting/cleanup, QA, and managing agent pull requests. Pretty good examples if you are looking at building Claude Code skills.

      • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16 days

        Where are you seeing that it’s useable for RAG? I’ve gone through the github and not seeing anyting very specific that way.

        Edit: good lord their documentation is shit. Spend a few tokens on a proper mkdocs site or something.

    • Rekall Incorporated@piefed.socialEnglish
      16 days

      At last a useful comment thread about the actual functionality in question.

      While I am not moving back to reddit, Threadiverse is just terrible on any nuanced conversations on modern ML tools and approaches.

      The tech is not the issue here. It has legitimate use cases and it is here to stay (this is not a blockchain pump and dump scheme ala Web 3.0). The issue here are American tech companies and broader support for crime/corruption in US society (as of today, doesn’t mean that this can’t/won’t change in 20-30 years). We need truly independent open source systems and tools.

      I am aware OpenWebUI is based in San Francisco and Mozilla Foundation is based in the US. I am always on the lookout for alternatives.

    • FauxLiving@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16 days

      It looks like it, it doesn’t seem to be doing any self-referencing/agentic things out of the box so the end user would need to build a bit to cover their specific use cases.

      They seem to be aiming more at the startup/small company demographic than at self-hosters. This is just based on a skim of the repo and their product page, I haven’t looked at it too hard yet.

  • Grass@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    16 days

    literally all they had to do was maintain the good old status quo and everyone would have loved them for it

    • tb_@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16 days

      I don’t think their market share/relevance would start rising if they just maintained the status quo.

      Which isn’t to say this direction is great or the way to go about it, but they can’t do nothing either.

  • LiveLM@lemmy.zipEnglish
    16 days

    Idk why they tied it to the Thunderbird name but cool I guess

  • InFerNo@lemmy.mlEnglish
    16 days

    Does this have anything to do with Thunderbird? I’m confused.

    • CyberSeeker@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      16 days

      From what I can see, this is something the Thunderbird team had developed for their own internal tooling, and they’re open sourcing it.

  • 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘@infosec.pubEnglish
    16 days

    I can get behind this concept for those that want email summaries, I suppose. But absolutely not from a donation run nonprofit who was told time and again that we do not want ai shoved in every orifice.

    Edit. Autocorrect

    • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16 days

      I have read summaries of emails and meetings that had the action items all sorts of wrong, sometimes completely inverted.

      It seems to me that if an email or meeting is at all important, the stakes are too high to trust the summary, and if it is not important, neither is its summary.

      Add on to that the fact that locally running LLMs are even more scatterbrained, I don’t see how this fills even the limited need you’re describing in any useful way.

      So, they spent their limited available manpower on an unrequested feature, and to add insult to injury, the feature is unlikely to have effective practical uses. It might be capable of more limited scope text prediction like code auto-complete, but the field is already flooded with those. I think the Thunderbird users have far more use from improvements to Thunderbird than they do for other unrelated products.

    • Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.clubEnglish
      16 days

      However an AI by a nonprofit is the only kind of AI I would potentially use.

      I’m not against the LLM tech, it’s that by using it I would support the shittiest of megacorps that use their power for evil (from training data to direct politics, and let’s not forget markets disruptions).

      AI by a for-profit has guaranteed enshitification built into the business model, otherwise they wouldn’t get any capital.

    • blackbeans@lemmy.zipEnglish
      16 days

      Could you explain what email summaries have to do with this announcement? Thunderbird and Thunderbolt are separate applications. Thunderbolt doesn’t include AI models, it is merely a frontend to an AI API of choice, similar to how Thunderbird is a frontend to an email server of choice.

  • baduhai@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    17 days

    I’m note sure anybody asked for this.

    That said, I’ll give it a shot.

  • Sanctus@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    17 days

    I want to be able to login to my m365 work account without Owl (but I do love you for filling the gap Owl). Why weren’t these resources spent on making that a reality? Thats twenty times more useful for Thunderbird and its users.

    • XLE@piefed.socialEnglish
      17 days

      Supposedly, this is a new and different team that will be taking a grant from the Mozilla Foundation. (I have no idea where these new resources came from, but in the best case scenario, they will appear out of thin air and not slow down work on Thunderbird…)

      • badgermurphy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        16 days

        If it is “from the Makers of Thunderbird”, then I think it stands to reason that at least someone on the Thunderbird project spent time on this that they could have spent on that.

        These FOSS projects barely have enough resources to complete their primary charter most of the time, so it really grates to see them squander their most limited assets.

    • stephen01king@piefed.zipEnglish
      16 days

      Because of a separate app that doesn’t affect Thunderbird in day to day use? What?

      • ORbituary@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        16 days

        Because it is a pure, forked version attempting the evoke the intent of the original project.

        • stephen01king@piefed.zipEnglish
          16 days

          That’s a valid reason, but why does this announcement affect your reasoning for preferring the fork? This is a completely separate app from Thunderbird.

    • scytale@piefed.zipEnglish
      16 days

      Thanks, I had no idea that exists. I’ll give it a try.