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Comment by JumpCrisscross

9 days ago

> so it's very hard to write selectors against

This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?

The power cost of doing this widely would be staggering, surely?

  • Worth a white paper to see which costs less energy, using Apple's built in LLM, or downloading and displaying all the FB ads using radio, playback, and screen animation energy.

  • Local models are not the same as the giant ones in data centers. They're in about the about the same ballpark as running a AAA game on max settings.

    Sure, it's more computationally-expensive than running an HTML selection, but it's also not "staggering" by any reasonable stretch.

    • I think “staggering” is a pretty accurate way of putting it if blocking ads is in the same ballpark as running a AAA game on max settings.

      4 replies →

    • Even the data-center-grade models are less intensive than people think. We recently installed a heavy-duty AI server (Gaudi2 cluster with 768GB VRAM) to run larger models up to 400B parameters on, and at full load, its power draw is about equivalent to a consumer stove or clothes dryer.

      If you're running thousands of those concentrated into a single data center, your aggregate power draw is going to be huge, but a single server is entirely reasonable for a small business, or even a home user, to operate.

    • The giant ones in data centers are models that broadly encompass a variety of data for general purpose applications. You can certainly train models specifically for processing DOM content, making them smaller and more efficient.

  • Apple Intelligence? I mean, you're only processing for the time your "AI|browser|agent" is acting as a firewall between you and Meta. Cache locally after processing and filtering. Use alongside the accessibility API. LLMs can, in many cases, reliably solve CAPTCHAs. I find it difficult to imagine they cannot defeat Meta ad blocking countermeasures.

    EFF: Adversarial Interoperability - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

  • Not really, no. LLMs get more computationally efficient and hardware gets more power efficient with each passing day. We're already at the point where reasonably competent models can be run a laptop GPU off of battery power. NPUs are even more power efficient, (though a bit slower).

It keeps changing all of the time, so it might be easier to have Facebook load up in a headless browser, that takes a screenshot and sends it to an LLM and uses that to convert into a standard JSON document that can be rendered nicely. Or something like that.