Recent searches
Search options
Mozilla fires 60 people to “focus on bringing ‘trustworthy AI into Firefox.’”
Fuck you, Mozilla. No one is asking for AI in Firefox. Sadly, you’re the best we can hope for under capitalism. So if we want something better, we should look into alternative models.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/13/mozilla-downsizes-as-it-refocuses-on-firefox-and-ai-read-the-memo/
@noondlyt
I started tracing the company structure and funding.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/22/mozilla-launches-a-new-startup-focused-on-trustworthy-ai/
Yes— this is another for-profit branch of the non-profit parent company
![@ techcrunch.com TE = Mozilla Al Mozilla launched Mozilla.ai just around the time GPT-4 launched and the first Llama models became widely available. Surman described this as a "focusing moment" for the organization. "Mozilla Al, which had a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy Al opportunities and build a business around them. Quickly, Moez [Draief], who runs it, made it about how do we leverage the growing snowball of open source large language models and find a way to both accelerate that snowball but also make sure it rolls in a direction that matches our goals and matches our wallet belt." While Mozilla did do some press around launching its Al efforts, we haven't actually seen a lot of movement in that area from the organization since. Surman told me that the leadership team had been planning these efforts for almost a year,](https://media.mstdn.social/media_attachments/files/111/943/416/472/195/393/original/6f01b3a242573e61.png "@ techcrunch.com TE = Mozilla Al Mozilla launched Mozilla.ai just around the time GPT-4 launched and the first Llama models became widely available. Surman described this as a \"focusing moment\" for the organization. \"Mozilla Al, which had a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy Al opportunities and build a business around them. Quickly, Moez [Draief], who runs it, made it about how do we leverage the growing snowball of open source large language models and find a way to both accelerate that snowball but also make sure it rolls in a direction that matches our goals and matches our wallet belt.\" While Mozilla did do some press around launching its Al efforts, we haven't actually seen a lot of movement in that area from the organization since. Surman told me that the leadership team had been planning these efforts for almost a year,")
Oh my-
“The Mozilla Foundation’s president explains that creating trustworthy AI products not only is ethically urgent but can also pay off in company profit and customer value.”
Absolutely, and they jumped on this boat very early— establishing their Mozilla AI Corp last March.
And that McKinsey article where the Mozilla Foundation’s president says* that “trustworthy AI” can “pay off in company profit and customer value” was from Dec 2022.
*as summarized by the article’s author
(I’m still digging for more specifics btw)
I remember when Microstrategy, a then-respected analytics company that made one of the best data visualisation packages at the time, decided to go all-in on bitcoin. When the fad collapsed, it almost wiped them out, and very few analytics people take Microstrategy seriously any more.
Large companies like IBM or Facebook can get away with going in on bad tech. IBM bet heavily on blockchain and Facebook bet heavily on metaverse. Both survived the experience. Likewise, Microsoft will probably survive their bet on LLMs. Mozilla might not.
This is a problem because the world might not have needed Microstrategy, IMHO it does need Mozilla. Allowing Tableau to dominate doesn't harm the web itself; allowing Chrome to dominate does.
@passenger @dalfen @noondlyt The world doesn’t need Mozilla. The world needs an organisation that actually does what Mozilla says it does.
@aral @passenger @dalfen @noondlyt A non profit without the for profit part should work. Maybe something similar as the Wikipedia structure?
@zbrando @passenger @dalfen @noondlyt In other words, a non-profit.
@aral Yep! 
Hard to find them in tech world.