https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39920803
> So while I am usually the person who would much rather the browser do almost nothing that isn't a hardware interface, requiring all software (including rendering) to be distributed as code by the website via the end-to-end principal--making the browser easy to implement and easy to secure / sandbox, as it is simply too important of an attack surface to have a billion file format parsing algorithms embedded within it--I actually would love (and I realize this isn't what Opera is doing, at least yet) to have the browser provide a way to get access to a user-selected LLM: the API surface for them--opaque text streaming in both directions--is sufficiently universal that I don't feel bad about the semantic lock-in and I just don't see any reasonable way to do this via the end-to-end principal that preserves user control over tradeoffs in privacy, functionality, and cost... if I go to a website that uses an LLM I should be the one choosing which LLM it is using, NOT the website!!, and if I want it to use some local model or the world's most powerful cloud model, I 1) should be in control of that selection and 2) pretty much have to be for local models to be feasible at all as I can't sit around downloading and caching gigabytes of data, separately, from every service that might make use of an LLM. (edit: Ok, in thinking about it a lot more maybe it makes more sense for this to be a separate daemon run next to the web browser--even if it comes with the web browser--which merely provides a localhost HTTP interface to the LLM, so it can also be shared by native apps... though, I am then unsure how web applications would be able to access them securely due to all of the security restrictions on cross-origin insecure port access.)