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Mozilla's open source AI strategy

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#181

Post by blibble »

glenstein wrote: post #160
blibble wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults if they had set up an endowment instead of blowing it on unrelated pointless crap for decades they would have been self-funded indefinitely they were pulling in over $500 MILLION a year

>if they had set up an endowment Mozilla has had an endowment for, I think, ~15 years now, and they have invested it and grown it from around $90 million to around $1.2 billion and counting. Which now is a firewall in case of emergency, as well as a resource that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue.

> that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue

oh for fucks sake, that's even worse than blowing it on stupid ideas

JUST USE THE MONEY FOR THE BROWSER

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#182

Post by glenstein »

blibble wrote: post #181
glenstein wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if they had set up an endowment Mozilla has had an endowment for, I think, ~15 years now, and they have invested it and grown it from around $90 million to around $1.2 billion and counting. Which now is a firewall in case of emergency, as well as a resource that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue.

> that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue oh for fucks sake, that's even worse than blowing it on stupid ideas JUST USE THE MONEY FOR THE BROWSER

They already spend more on developing the browser now than at any point in the entire history of Firefox, and that's after adjusting for inflation. They ship millions of lines of new code every year and apply thousands of patches. It's probably one of the biggest and most active open source projects in the entire world.

And just so we're clear, are you suggesting they shouldn't have an endowment at all, or that they shouldn't use the endowment to create any lines of long term revenue, or that they should but spending a fraction of a percent of it on a VC fund would not be successful? Whichever one you pick, there's at least one person who's exactly as upset at Mozilla for the opposite reason.

Edit: I would go so far as to say I think the VC fund is the single best idea Mozilla has ever had for long term financial independence. It builds on the success they've had thus far (such as it is) raising money from search licensing, and then using that search licensing money to stand up the endowment. Now, the VC fund leverages the endowment in a way that's the most serious path to financial independence they've ever had.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#183

Post by gitaarik »

encom wrote: post #115
Yoric wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security. I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is ri…

As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned. At least that's how it looked from this side. I…

I don't know but I've been using Firefox since forever and I can't even recall the tabs changing at all. Of course they have changed many times over the course of years, but that happens in every browser. I don't know what happened to tabs that affected you so badly? I feel like it's an excuse for some people sometime that if some little thing in the UI changes that they claim their whole flow is now compromised so that is the reason they are now using this other software, where the same stuff happens as far as I can see.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#184

Post by wolvoleo »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #162
steveklabnik wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure Mozilla has shipped more Rust code than anybody, FWIW. The obviously have a lot, but so have other companies as well.

CloudFlare relies on it in key projects, which is why I feel like if I had to pick any tech company to consider taking a hold of Firefox, they'd be my top pick. I know some people are skeptical of them, but they have not goofed yet. Maybe if the CEO ever steps down I'll change my views on CF.

Cloudflare hates Firefox though. I get a lot more captchas on Cloudflare sites with Firefox.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#185

Post by b1085436 »

jd172 wrote: post #177
b1085436 wrote: post #118

I genuinely don't understand the "permissioned data" assumption. Presumably, all the current models that were trained on illegitimate scraping of vastly larger sources will always have the upper hand (in terms of raw power, obviously at the cost of regurgitating evil stuff too), because they just have absorbed way more diverse data in their training. So the models trained on ethical datasets only will not be able to…

Personally I would rather use a 'bad' ai that's trained ethically and runs locally than a good ai trained on stolen data that requires me to surrender my thoughts to the cloud. whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're al…

I strongly suspect that it is absolutely impossible to have an even remotely usable/useful "AI" trained on tiny datasets, and that instead of training only on ethical data, companies that want to sound ethical will use an extra post-training step for dirty foundation models to behave more ethically as if they'd only learned from ethical sources. I'd hate for this to become the norm, but I fear this is logically what annoucements like this one really mean. The difference in scale is so vast -- taking whatever you want from the entire internet -- vs hand-curated datasets with explicit authorisation and free to use. It's like trying to make a grain of sand gravitate around a marble in the playground, to mimic the moon around the Earth – won't work.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#186

Post by evilduck »

Yoric wrote: post #105
evilduck wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My primary complaint is that they have a bunch of ad placements on the product out of the box when it's opened for the first time and any time I set up a new system I have to go configure Firefox to not be annoying by default. It makes the Firefox experience feel subversive and untrustworthy because this freshly installed application is obviously bedfellows with advertisers. I know I can't trust advertisers with my d…

> Additionally, my perception (from posts and discussions like these, I'm not a financial analyst and I have no meaningful insights into their business) is also that they probably receive enough funding through non-advertising means that they don't actually need to do this if they were to pare back the nonsense spending they're so greatly known for. Last time I checked, Mozilla received 90%+ of its funding from Googl…

I don’t actually mind their money from Google but why is charging money for a quality product an unfathomable business model? Ads or bust it seems.

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#187

Post by blibble »

glenstein wrote: post #182
blibble wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's helping to stand up a VC fund which is one of their most interesting pathways to diversifying revenue oh for fucks sake, that's even worse than blowing it on stupid ideas JUST USE THE MONEY FOR THE BROWSER

They already spend more on developing the browser now than at any point in the entire history of Firefox, and that's after adjusting for inflation. They ship millions of lines of new code every year and apply thousands of patches. It's probably one of the biggest and most active open source projects in the entire world. And just so we're clear, are you suggesting they shouldn't have an endowment at all, or that they…

> And just so we're clear, are you suggesting they shouldn't have an endowment at all

did you read my comments in this chain?

> I would go so far as to say I think the VC fund is the single best idea Mozilla has ever had for long term financial independence.

do you look at Mozilla and see it as an example of an organisation that selected good investments over its existence?

would have it done better putting that money into treasuries? almost certainly

the point of an endowment for a foundation is to ensure the organisation continues to exist forever

not to gamble its future on 1 in 100 bets

and for a fund to have the possibility to have selected that 1 in 100: it has to be of significant size

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#188

Post by subsection1h »

encom wrote: post #115
Yoric wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security. I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is ri…

As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned. At least that's how it looked from this side. I…

> broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons

> I switched to Vivaldi

You refer to important security improvements as "vague technical reasons" and you switched to Vivaldi, a browser that is based[1] on extended stable Chromium, which is not "recommended for any team where security is a primary concern"[2].

It seems you don't care about security.

[1] https://help.vivaldi.com/android/android-privacy/security-fa...

[2] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/p...

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#189

Post by spartanatreyu »

wolvoleo wrote: post #184
giancarlostoro wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CloudFlare relies on it in key projects, which is why I feel like if I had to pick any tech company to consider taking a hold of Firefox, they'd be my top pick. I know some people are skeptical of them, but they have not goofed yet. Maybe if the CEO ever steps down I'll change my views on CF.

Cloudflare hates Firefox though. I get a lot more captchas on Cloudflare sites with Firefox.

Yeah, but if they controlled firefox, there'd probably be less captchas to complete

Re: Mozilla's open source AI strategy

#190

Post by culi »

knowitnone3 wrote: post #179
culi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has improved significantly. It's improvement strategy is mostly focused on what developers ask them to focus on. They've had great performance on the yearly interops https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024 https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025

what developers do they still have. their dev console is so bad compared to Chrome. Mozilla abandoned their user base and the users have moved on.

I'm surprised to hear that. I was under the assumption that it was generally acknowledged that the Firefox dev tools were far and away the best of the major browsers. I always find myself missing them when having to use Chrome devtools at least.

I feel like nowadays they both have basically the same featureset so maybe it's more about how well you know how to use them

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