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Mozilla is building an AI 'rebel alliance' to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

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Re: Mozilla is building an AI 'rebel alliance' to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

#101

Post by adrianN »

js8 wrote: post #89
madeofpalk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, I mean, I think we've seen first hand that generally one aspect of safety we want is to not produce sexualised images of children.

Is it even an attainable goal? It seems an NN with less than say 4 billion parameters will be able to do that. The cost of training will likely go down with more models being available. Unless we lock down the computing for majority of people, I don't see how we can prevent someone creating a CSAM model in their garage. I don't want to see CSAM created, but the totalitarian control required is too much for my taste (…

People can draw naked children with a stick and some dirt. I’m not sure that preventing the creation of fictional csam is the best use of our resources if we want to protect minors from abuse.

Re: Mozilla is building an AI 'rebel alliance' to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

#102

Post by timcobb »

Insanity wrote: post #91

So much negativity about Firefox in these threads. Could they be doing better? Absolutely, but without them we’d have almost no browser choice today. Even if you don’t care too much about FF itself, they also own the Gecko engine on top of which other browsers are built. Personally I’ve been using Zen for the past year and it’s been a pretty good experience. I should add a disclaimer that I’m not a frontend dev, so c…

> Could they be doing better? Absolutely, but without them we’d have almost no browser choice today.

They deserve it. The one thing people need from Mozilla is for it to fight browser monoculture, which is critical the free and open web. "They had one job." But, to the great detriment of humanity (I don't think I'm exaggerating), they're failing. That sucks.

> Personally I’ve been using Zen.

Thanks, I didn't know about Zen, I'll check that out. I'm on Brave, but would rather not be.

Re: Mozilla is building an AI 'rebel alliance' to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

#103

Post by observationist »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #98
observationist wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They want NGO grant money. They look at the latest and greatest buzzwords for government policy spending and tailor their efforts towards acquiring that money, 99% of which will go to salaries and bonuses, 1% of which will be spent on the mission du jour. Mozilla is a deeply corrupt and failed organization.

> Mozilla is a deeply corrupt and failed organization. Can you elaborate?

See: Firefox, management churn, alienation and discarding of community, etc.

Some of us who donated money and supported Mozilla and Firefox are deeply, deeply disappointed and disgusted.

Principles are meaningless to non-human corporate entities, and I'll never donate to a non-profit, charity, or other institution again for the rest of my life.

Re: Mozilla is building an AI 'rebel alliance' to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

#104

Post by pseudalopex »

csense wrote: post #66

I would rather Mozilla spend their money focusing on reducing Firefox's enormous memory usage or maintaining Thunderbird. They could build interesting protocols into Firefox like IPFS or ENS, or develop alternatives. $1.4 billion can accomplish a lot -- if you stay in your lane and don't yeet it into a capital intensive field with uncertain returns like AI.

In 2026, Mozilla will continue to invest and leverage our assets to help tip the balance of AI toward openness, agency and trust. We anticipate $~650M in expenditure across the portfolio to run our core businesses, generate revenue, drive mission impact, and grow new opportunities in 2026: Approximately 80% of expenditure on core products: Continued, substantial investment in core products like Firefox and Thunderbird.[1]

[1] https://stateof.mozilla.org/ledger/

Re: Mozilla is building an AI 'rebel alliance' to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

#106

Post by pseudalopex »

wolvoleo wrote: post #51
dralley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect a web browser is much more complicated than a desktop environment. Firefox is like 30 million lines of code, much of which is active attack surface. A high performance JIT JavaScript engine alone might be more complex than KDE. Random people can fix UI bugs and contribute to simple desktop apps in a way that they likely cannot in general do with the deep internals of a browser.

KDE includes a web browser. Which spawned Safari in fact.

KDE removed KHTML and KJS. Falkon is a QtWebEngine wrapper.

Re: Mozilla is building an AI 'rebel alliance' to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

#107

Post by pseudalopex »

rascul wrote: post #95
dralley wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect a web browser is much more complicated than a desktop environment. Firefox is like 30 million lines of code, much of which is active attack surface. A high performance JIT JavaScript engine alone might be more complex than KDE. Random people can fix UI bugs and contribute to simple desktop apps in a way that they likely cannot in general do with the deep internals of a browser.

KDE has already created a browser engine, a browser, and a JavaScript engine.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814523

Re: Mozilla is building an AI 'rebel alliance' to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

#108

Post by pseudalopex »

wolvoleo wrote: post #37
dralley wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that there is no way to make Firefox economically sustainable without Google (or some other search provider, but google won that war comprehensively). Browsers are fully commoditized and subsidized. Funding the browser with a combination of outside revenue sources and search deals is the way everyone does it.

It can, they just need to approach it not like a big corporation with a multi million dollar a year CEO but as a grassroots project. If something like KDE can build a whole desktop on a shoestring budget with some donations, Firefox can too. And I'd gladly donate to it. Problem is I can't because you can only donate to the foundation. And I don't want to fund their dogood distractions, just firefox. Besides, the sear…

I like KDE. But their small funding hurts development.

Re: Mozilla is building an AI 'rebel alliance' to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

#109

Post by smsm42 »

I think "reserves" and "extremely risky investment fund" are supposed to be different things?

Then again, given Mozilla Foundation's stellar record of taking on massive corporations and crushing them, and given that they themselves not owe their very financial existence not even a little bit solely to donations from a certain mega-corporation, maybe it's not that risky - more an assured success.

Re: Mozilla is building an AI 'rebel alliance' to take on OpenAI, Anthropic

#110

Post by wolvoleo »

pseudalopex wrote: post #106
wolvoleo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE includes a web browser. Which spawned Safari in fact.

KDE removed KHTML and KJS. Falkon is a QtWebEngine wrapper.

Yeah but they did make it. They just dropped maintaining it because it wasn't really being used.
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