2nd June 2024 - Link Blog
Experimenting with local alt text generation in Firefox Nightly (via) The PDF editor in Firefox (confession: I did not know Firefox ships with a PDF editor) is getting an experimental feature that can help suggest alt text for images for the human editor to then adapt and improve on.
This is a great application of AI, made all the more interesting here because Firefox will run a local model on-device for this, using a custom trained model they describe as "our 182M parameters model using a Distilled version of GPT-2 alongside a Vision Transformer (ViT) image encoder".
The model uses WebAssembly with ONNX running in Transfomers.js, and will be downloaded the first time the feature is put to use.
Recent articles
- Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code? - 5th March 2026
- Something is afoot in the land of Qwen - 4th March 2026
- I vibe coded my dream macOS presentation app - 25th February 2026