What's Next for Mozilla - and for Open Source AI? (techcrunch.com) 33
"For the last few years, Mozilla has started to look beyond Firefox," writes TechCrunch, citing startup investments like Mastodon's client Mammoth and the Fakespot browser extension that helps identify fake reviews. But Mozilla has also launched Mozilla.ai (added a bunch of new AI-focused members to its board).
In an interview with TechCrunch, Mozilla's president and executive director Mark Surman clarifies their plans, saying that Mozilla.ai "had a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy AI 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...." Right now, Surman argued, it remains hard to for most developers — and even more so for most consumers — to run their own models, even as more open source models seemingly launch every day. "What Mozilla.ai is focused on really is almost building a wrapper that you can put around any open source large language model to fine-tune it, to build data pipelines for it, to make it highly performant."
While much work is in stealth mode, TechCrunch predicts "we'll hear quite a bit more in the coming months." Meanwhile, the open source and AI communities are still figuring out what exactly open source AI is going to look like. Surman believes that no matter the details of that, though, the overall principles of transparency and freedom to study the code, modify it and redistribute it will remain key... "We probably lean towards that everything should be open source — at least in a spiritual sense. The licenses aren't perfect and we are going to do a bunch of work in the first half of next year with some of the other open source projects around clarifying some of those definitions and giving people some mental models...."
With a small group of very well-funded players currently dominating the AI market, he believes that the various open source groups will need to band together to collectively create alternatives. He likened it to the early era of open source — and especially the Linux movement — which aimed to create an alternative to Microsoft...
Surman seems to be optimistic about Mozilla's positioning in this new era of AI, though, and its ability to both use it to further its mission and create a sustainable business model around it. "All this that we are going to do is in the kind of service of our mission. And some of that, I think, will just have to be purely a public good," he said. "And you can pay for public goods in different kinds of way, from our own resources, from philanthropy, from people pooling resources. [...] It's a kind of a business model but it's not commercial, per se. And then, the stuff we're building around communal AI hopefully has a real enterprise value if we can help people take advantage of open source large language models, effectively and quickly, in a way that is valuable to them and is cheaper than using open AI. That's our hope."
And what about Firefox? "I think you'll see the browser evolve," says Mozilla's president. "In our case, that's to be more protective of you and more helpful to you.
"I think it's more that you use the predictive and synthesizing capabilities of those tools to make it easier and safer to move through the internet."
In an interview with TechCrunch, Mozilla's president and executive director Mark Surman clarifies their plans, saying that Mozilla.ai "had a broad mandate around finding open source, trustworthy AI 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...." Right now, Surman argued, it remains hard to for most developers — and even more so for most consumers — to run their own models, even as more open source models seemingly launch every day. "What Mozilla.ai is focused on really is almost building a wrapper that you can put around any open source large language model to fine-tune it, to build data pipelines for it, to make it highly performant."
While much work is in stealth mode, TechCrunch predicts "we'll hear quite a bit more in the coming months." Meanwhile, the open source and AI communities are still figuring out what exactly open source AI is going to look like. Surman believes that no matter the details of that, though, the overall principles of transparency and freedom to study the code, modify it and redistribute it will remain key... "We probably lean towards that everything should be open source — at least in a spiritual sense. The licenses aren't perfect and we are going to do a bunch of work in the first half of next year with some of the other open source projects around clarifying some of those definitions and giving people some mental models...."
With a small group of very well-funded players currently dominating the AI market, he believes that the various open source groups will need to band together to collectively create alternatives. He likened it to the early era of open source — and especially the Linux movement — which aimed to create an alternative to Microsoft...
Surman seems to be optimistic about Mozilla's positioning in this new era of AI, though, and its ability to both use it to further its mission and create a sustainable business model around it. "All this that we are going to do is in the kind of service of our mission. And some of that, I think, will just have to be purely a public good," he said. "And you can pay for public goods in different kinds of way, from our own resources, from philanthropy, from people pooling resources. [...] It's a kind of a business model but it's not commercial, per se. And then, the stuff we're building around communal AI hopefully has a real enterprise value if we can help people take advantage of open source large language models, effectively and quickly, in a way that is valuable to them and is cheaper than using open AI. That's our hope."
And what about Firefox? "I think you'll see the browser evolve," says Mozilla's president. "In our case, that's to be more protective of you and more helpful to you.
"I think it's more that you use the predictive and synthesizing capabilities of those tools to make it easier and safer to move through the internet."
Sure why not (Score:1)
Diversify into something more useful like a bidet.
Who gives a shit about Mozilla: what's next for US (Score:4, Interesting)
If Firefox disappears, it's gonna be a disaster of Chrome / Chromium monoculture, Google's monopoly will extend yet more, and the last thing the world needs is more Google.
I hope someone will step up to the plate and take over Firefox at some point. I really do. Otherwise we're quite literally in a pickle...
Re: (Score:1)
Firefox is little more than a footnote in browser share at this point. It's done.
Re:Who gives a shit about Mozilla: what's next for (Score:5, Informative)
It's still an option if you want to escape Google's clutches completely. When it's gone, like it or not, you'll be running Google code.
Re: (Score:2)
It's still an option if you want to escape Google's clutches completely. When it's gone, like it or not, you'll be running Google code.
Unless you're a Mac user.
Re: (Score:2)
Mac users choose to be under the control of their own preferred monopolistic big tech company. They don't count. I'm talking about people who strive to remain as free as possible from ALL big tech monopolies.
Re: (Score:2)
So no Windows users, no Mac users - you're confining yourself to a rather small subset of all computer users.
However even within that group, there are still Google-free possibilities. There are open-source browsers using WebKit (Gnome Web) and Goanna (K-Meleon, Pale Moon) for HTML rendering.
Re: (Score:2)
I run Chromium, the open source spin of Chrome, which should really be no surprise to you because Chrome started as KDE's KHTML/Konqueror (which became webkit, which became blink, which became open source Chromium). Kind of digusting that Google never credits where they got it from. The technical term for that is plagiarism. But that's Google's official culture: be evil.
Re: Who gives a shit about Mozilla: what's next fo (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Is the language âoeDoneâ?
Definitely a Firefox user.
Re: (Score:2)
Portuguese is the 5th language by native speakers, not exactly small.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:1)
Firefox is little more than a footnote in browser share at this point. It's done.
It's market share is minuscule, and Mozilla (as a viable company) exists only as long as it continues to send searches to Google (as 85%+ of total revenue of Mozilla depends on Google's search revenue payments).
However, its existence does seem to be somewhat in Google's interest as a way to show to regulators that Google/Chrome does have competition (even if the Firefox share continues to dwindle). ~$500M may be the cheapest way to keep regulators distracted.
Re: (Score:1)
I bet it's got a high or even dominant browser share on the Tor network. Of course many of the users might not want to stand up to be counted...
Not important enough for most of us maybe. But might be important to others: https://safety.rsf.org/tor-the... [rsf.org]
Governments, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), or other third parties may seek to track a journalist's online activity, either for data collection to sell to advertisers, or surveillance. Journalists should protect their data online by using secure browsers such as the browsing system "The Onion Router", better known under its acronym "Tor".
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If Firefox disappears, it's gonna be a disaster of Chrome / Chromium monoculture
Technically there is also Safari, if you want to live in the Apple (walled) garden.
Re: (Score:2)
Isn't Safari kind of Chromium based? IIRC, it was based on KHTML and later WebKit, which turned into Chromium. So even if Safari isn't fully based on Chromium, its underpinnings are close.
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Firefox needs a massive effort to rescue it, and much of the work will result in no visible improvement.
The code needs a huge cleanup. Massive refactoring. Then it will be in a state where people actually want to contribute to it.
Firefox needs full time developers working on keeping performance and features up to date. The web keeps evolving, with more complex CSS and heavier JavaScript. Being purely a community project isn't going to work.
Finally, Firefox needs a system of governance that both listens to u
Re: (Score:2)
I love Firefox and I dread a Google-managed internet, but there's something wrong at Mozilla and that needs to be addressed before anything else can be.
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Firefox needs a massive effort to rescue it
Good thing it's getting it then. Large parts of Firefox have now been reimplemented in Rust, and you can feel the solidity. Memory leaks are massively reduced for one thing.
Release a new "Phoenix" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
We need a brand new web browser like Phoenix. :(
Please, No! (Score:2)
Unspoken (Score:4, Interesting)
When FF was first being developed they called their image library code: libpr0n -- this was in ref to the quick-typing misspelling of "porn" as "pron." (Take me back: https://www-archive.mozilla.or... [mozilla.org]) This was in ref to the idea that a contributing factor of what drives the web is people's desire for dirty pictures. And that a browser needs to optimize for these most-intensive, highest-load, use-cases.
In the world of the web, it's immediately clear that this still holds, and will continue into AI land. But this fact tends to be unspoken or at least cordoned-off. Much of AI discourse is geared towards business interests. "Threats" and "guardrails" are weird keywords that don't tend to speak their assumptions. Meanwhile, there are massive "communities" of AI porn-enthusiasts. "Business" discourse can focus on biz; and "porn" discourse" can focus on pr0n. But general discourse – policy, theory, history – needs to openly discuss and incorporate pron. And we are not doing this.
So much of culture gets its start from raw sex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] - all films might well be a sublimation. Much less music, etc. etc.
Mozilla nannies blocked extensions (Score:2)
Fuck them.
Re: Mozilla nannies blocked extensions (Score:2)
Unbreak Firefox on Facebook and Instagram! (Score:2)
Open Source AI should attempt P2P training (Score:2)
The greatest effort for open source AI research should be put into backprop free localised training and minimising VRAM requirements (gated experts and LLM in a Flash). Nature proves backprop free works, it's an open question whether competitive results can be reached with less VRAM intensive methods, but LLM in a Flash does makes one hopeful.
If P2P training with moderate VRAM resources on nodes can be made to work, it truly democratises AI training.
How I Read the Headline (Score:3)
What's Next for Mozilla
"Hopefully not AI . . ."
- and for Open Source AI?
"FUCK!!"
why? (Score:2)
Mozilla sees the market share for Firefox dropping to record low and instead of making their browser loved by people back again, they divert resources in this adventure. Sounds like a good strategy... NOT.
FF for the win. Do things others won't let you (Score:2)
Example:
By default Click to remove the ads at the exact moment youtube allows you.
While looking at an item on Amazon, it should find the manufacturers direct homepage.
Apple/Google App store, suggest the free apps that does exactly what you want it to do, instead of the paid suggested once
Block ads and tracking by default (I think this is on)