What's next for Mozilla? | TechCrunch
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For the longest time, Mozilla was synonymous with the Firefox browser, but for the last few years, Mozilla has started to look beyond Firefox, especially
    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      I didn’t ask for it, but I’m lowkey happy to have them in this. I imagine, in a few years from now, all the start-ups will have run out of money or been acquired, and as per the usual, only big tech companies remain.

      Traditional search engines will basically be dead, completely swamped with AI-generated spam. And even non-techies will generally depend on generative AIs for information and communication.
      If those are exclusively controlled by big tech, we’ll have tons of censorship (e.g. if you want to export an LLM to China, it has to pretend to not know about the Uyghurs) and just generally no control.

      I don’t expect Mozilla to save the world here, they’re too small for that. But they’re already providing useful tools, raising the entrypoint for independent devs.

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          You should actually read the plans about their AI. It runs entirely locally, using your own data that never leaves your PC.

            • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              I’ve not heard about what you’re saying, so I’d like to learn more.

              Their AI system will collect zero data, though, and run entirely locally. And that’s what this is about.

              Like it or not, this is a hyped feature that people want. The cat’s out of the bag. It’s not a feature that I want, but it is one the market wants.

              It’s good to have a privacy-respecting option when we all know in a few years the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Apple will dominate the market. And we know that they won’t respect our privacy.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    91·
    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Over the last few years, Mozilla also started making startup investments, including into Mastodon’s client Mammoth, for example, and acquired Fakespot, a website and browser extension that helps users identify fake reviews.

    Indeed, when Mozilla launched its annual report a few weeks ago, it also used that moment to add a number of new members to its board — the majority of which focus on AI.

    Surman told me that the leadership team had been planning these efforts for almost a year, but as public interest in AI grew, he “pushed it out of the door.” But then Draief pretty much moved it right back into stealth mode to focus on what to do next.

    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.

    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.”

    Then, he noted, when the smartphone arrived, there were a few smaller projects that aimed to create alternatives, including Mozilla (and at its core, Android is obviously also open source, even as Google and others have built walled gardens around the actual user experience).

    The original article contains 1,252 words, the summary contains 229 words. Saved 82%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

        • TheGrandNagus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, the CEO is overpaid, but that’s the norm for tech companies. Seems weird to simp for Google, who has a vastly higher paid CEO, though. Which is what the above user is doing when they’re cheering on the prospect of browser engines that aren’t chromium dying.

          I don’t really see how they’re abandoning their values, either. This is about them having an AI system where they collect zero data and it’s done 100% on your own machine.