Extensively discussed when first announced six months ago:<p><i>Introducing Mozilla.ai: Investing in trustworthy AI</i> (289 comments) <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259817">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35259817</a>
I love Mozilla's Firefox, but they've got a bad track record of funding things that matter over time. See Thunderbird having to become independent and roll up their own foundation. Mozilla could have had something like OpenAI long ago, but they didn't bother. Instead they bought out Pocket which a lot of loyal users didn't care for. They also stopped maintaining their password manager on iOS (and I'm guessing Android?) which is rather annoying to me, I've been using Firefox's built-in for years, and it was nice to have a PM on iOS. I would have gladly paid money to have it on iOS if it meant it would get funded. There's also their VPN, which is just Mullvad with a skin on it iirc.<p>Mozilla: It's okay to make products that you sell in order to actually fund your projects properly.<p>Whoever is managing Firefox (the open source org / corporation, I don't care which) is mismanaging Firefox, and they have been for too long. Mozilla has a lot of potential being burned away. I fear for the day MDN shuts down, since its an invaluable resource when doing front-end web development.
Just another wasted effort. It looks like Mozilla has completely lost its way.<p>I get that the AI is going to be important in the next decade but Mozilla has shown that despite having a clear competitive advantage in something it cannot continue to grow. I don't mean to devalue what Mozilla is doing but its browser is completely ususable on my Linux Mint 20 with a high end graphics card. Compare that to chrome which works like a breeze.<p>Although I champion open source & privacy at my org - I cannot but for the sake of my own productivity use any Mozilla product despite repeated attempts every quarter to try if it works better now...
> To start we will focus on developing tools to build <i>safety</i> [..]<p>Oh no. Why safety and not pioneering, innovation, or freedom?<p>Well, I nevertheless wish them all the best.
Well, there is lots of low hanging fruit in AI land that, IMO, isn't being taken advantage of.<p>I'm thinking of stuff like ML compiler integration or other smaller features (including safety features) in the already-popular frameworks being championed by lone hero devs. 2-3 paid ML devs could move mountains right now.<p>Somehow I'm skeptical, and suspect Mozilla will try to create yet-another-standalone-framework that no one really cares to use, among the pile of 10,000 other from-scratch ML frameworks.
At this point does it make sense to start a new Foundation that moves Blink forward without all the ad/spyware junk that Google and Microsoft distribute with their browsers?
> Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent.<p>This is great. It quite literally goes without saying that we all understand what this means. It is a boon for us all to celebrate this together now, the moment in which we can all appreciate the scope and details of this project.
" open source AI ecosystem"<p>Would be incredible, but almost sounds too good to be true. OpenAI and equivalents already have so much money and momentum behind them.<p>Fully support the idea though!
> Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being.<p>This has <i>nothing</i> to do with Mozilla's core mission. It's verging on abuse of the brand to use it to jump on the AI hype bandwagon like this. I just hope they don't do anything that is toxic to Firefox as it is desperately important that FireFox survive which itself is tenuous enough right now that they should be wholly focused on that in my opinion.
Oh, the negativity.<p>Look, Mozilla's far from perfect, but I absolutely do want to see them <i>trying</i> something with every new thing that comes out and will continue to throw a little money at them every time they do so.<p>It's just broadly important to remind the world that there are more ways than "typical capitalism" to do big things in tech.
"Mozilla has long championed [AI]..." - paraphrased<p>Corporations have a straight face saying this when essentially "long" is defined as "since OpenAI's ChatGPT3 blog post on November 30,2022."<p><a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=chatgpt&hl=en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...</a><p><a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=AI&hl=en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...</a><p>The first link shows the Google Trend for 'chatgpt' and the massive spike November 2022. The second link shows the Google Trend of a quiet gentle arc upward in AI until a noticeable spike in Nov 2020 followed by clear explosion ever since