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
- Watching o3 guess a photo's location is surreal, dystopian and wildly entertaining - 26th April 2025
- Exploring Promptfoo via Dave Guarino's SNAP evals - 24th April 2025
- AI assisted search-based research actually works now - 21st April 2025