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My favorite part privacy is at its core.
“Which is perfect,” he said.
Krystian Kolondra, EVP of Desktop & Gaming at Opera, opened up the Opera Browser Days in Bristol with the promise of bringing on-device AI by the end of 2025.
“Because then you have no issue when it comes to privacy.”
“Aria today is built on top of multiple large language models, like Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT.
But we’re also building local models that are going to work that way,” Kolondra told me.
Advanced Search, tab management, personalized content, animation: there are just some if the things that AI in Opera browsers can offer.
This is exactly what happened when Opera entered the generative AI space in 2023.
For starters, as mentioned earlier, Opera is now a multi-LLM surfing app.
Last week, Opera axed the log-in requirement for Aria.
Joanna Czajka, Product Director at Opera and Lead of the Opera Desktop Browser, also unveiled a preview of R2, a major update of its flagship product Opera One.(Image credit: Opera)
“Webelieve this service will be an integral part of the web client,” he told me.
That’s why accountless is important."
AI training has been one of the most contentious privacy issues since the boom of generative AI.
The company held the Opera Browser Days between Bath and Bristol on September 26-29, 2024.(Image credit: Opera)
ChatGPT-like tools need data lots of data to carry out their functions.
How does Aria process people’s data?
The best example of this is how AI can assist with tab management.
At the conference, there were laptops where you could test Opera One R2 and Opera GX’s new functionalities.(Image credit: Opera)
Imagine starting your morning browsing routine with all your tabs open from the day before.
As Czajka put it, we should think of Aria as preparing a recipe.
It’s the web client that locally detects your YouTube tabs and executes the action.
Arjan Van Leeuwen, Product Engineering Lead at Opera, engaged in live demos right from the stage to give us a feeling of what to expect from new Opera One R2 features ahead of being fully released.(Image credit: Opera)
But, imagine how better it would be if none of your data left your machine.
This is what Opera is currently working on, large language models that are completely local.
“It’s the ultimate privacy because nothing is going out from your machine.”
Opera invited tech journalists and creators from all over the world to attend its UK event.(Image credit: Opera)
The goal is ambitious, LLMs are notoriously big software that potentially not all computers could support without crashing.
The question now is, how ready are current devices for local AI?
“This is definitely the future,” said Van Leeuwen.
“From our benchmark, we see that even all the laptops with GP parts are absolutely capable of running smaller local large language models,” Krystian Kolondra, EVP of Desktop & Gaming at Opera, told me.
This is why the provider said to be ready to experiment with a hybrid approach.
But, for some things, we still need cloud processing.
This means the heavy lifting is done in the cloud, while your data remains locally.
Hans Metsoja, Information Security Manager at Opera, confirmed that privacy and security are always at the core of everything that Opera does.
You won’t need to wait too long to see this hybrid AI approach working in practice either.
Some new features are expected to come to Aria very soon and they will already use this hybrid mode.
All Opera browsers (besides Opera Mini) also come with a built-invirtual private networkservice.
It’s official Opera VPN never records your activitiesand data, boosting even more your online privacy when browsing.
I still hear it now as I write the last sentence Kolondra told me.
We don’t believe it is useful for us in any way.
We only need the data to make our products better."
I don’t know why many companies are not doing this way," he added.
The best way to achieve privacy is not to create room for abuse, mistake, or leak.
So, by not asking or giving away the data in the first place.
Local AI is promising exactly that and I cannot wait to see it working.
