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Mozilla.ai: Investing in Trustworthy AI

444 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

dannyw 4y ago
The recent wave of AI came from launches (Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT). Has Moez contributed to launching anything, or just talking about it?
nitinreddy88 4y ago
Another diversion for Mozilla and further degraded Firefox delivery in my opinion.
- orra 4y ago
  Mozilla's mission is 'a better internet'. Democraticising AI fits right it. Mozilla gets slated for not innovating, and Mozilla gets slated for innovating. Mozilla gets slated when Google and Apple and Microsoft's anticompetitive practices marginalise Firefox, especially on mobile. Some folks are just never happy.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    Problem is this is not innovation. It's a political statement and a system that will never accomplish anything. Seriously, Read this article again and look at the way they phrase themselves. They don't say they're going to innovate, they say they're making a space for other people to join them and then innovate. They are not funding a project, they are making an initial investment, implying that they expect others to follow up on what they've started. Ineffective, lazy, and devoid of self-confidence Cool, You've promoted AI transparency, you've provided this generic framework for it, but at the end of the day none of the players in the field are going to adopt it, and you're not a leading AI company that can force its adoption in at least some small form. Take the hours spent on this "innovation" and instead implement a feature that Chrome has which Firefox doesn't.
    - orra 4y ago
      > Problem is this is not innovation. I'm objecting to undue criticism, compared to any other AI startup. > It's a political statement and a system that will never accomplish anything. You're speaking with undue certainty. > They are not funding a project, they are making an initial investment £30 million is more than tokenistic funding. > lazy A completely unwarranted descriptor on day one. > Take the hours spent on this "innovation" and instead implement a feature that Chrome has which Firefox doesn't. Developer skills aren't completely fungible like that. Besides, what if Chrome starts integrating with Bard?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - wokwokwok 4y ago
      I mean, what do you want? It’s so easy to be critical. Ok; you play then. What should they be doing? If they don’t, who is going to invest in open AI models? OpenAI? Ha! Let’s say you’re in charge then. What’s your product strategy? I personally think this is better than doing nothing, even if it isn’t perfect.
      - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
        >what should they be doing? If they want to make money while "making the internet a better place" they should develop their own LLM alternative with competitive cloud prices to GPT while releasing the model to everyone. If you tell me it's impossible to be competitive with GPT offering then they should not be wasting money on this endeavor
        wokwokwok 4y ago
        How is investing in open AI models different from what you just asked for? Have you run the 65B llama model? It’s shit. The refined 7B model is significantly better. The problem isn’t making a big model and open sourcing it. Those already exist Specially, bloom and llama. Tooling around it and refinement tooling seems like it’s a pretty good investment right now. “Make a GPT4” is an incredibly trivial and narrow view of this space.
  - gamjQZnHT53AMa 4y ago
    This site just hates Mozilla for all kinds of reasons. I agree completely with your point though. Mozilla would be sorely missed were they to disappear, and moves like these are absolutely in line with their goals. Mozilla != Firefox
    - orra 4y ago
      TBF the disdain for Mozilla is not a universal sentiment, but it's absurdly pervasive. There's the same nonsense on reddit at /r/linux.
    - dns_snek 4y ago
      How is Mozilla != Firefox when that's the only product keeping them relevant?
      - orra 4y ago
        Firefox is by far their biggest success. That's precisely why it's absurd to criticise them for branching out.
        Adraghast 4y ago
        Can you elaborate? Sounds like a non sequitur to me.
    - computerfriend 4y ago
      Moves like this are in line with them disappearing. Which I do think may be one of their goals.
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      What has Mozilla done that isn't Firefox or a PR fluff piece? Even Thunderbird was spun out.
    - vasco 4y ago
      Mozilla you remember has disappeared long ago. One look at their financials tells you all you need to know about what they care about nowadays, which seems to be to pay leadership large salaries.
  - mjhay 4y ago
    The best way Mozilla can help make a better internet is to pour more resources into Firefox. The monopoly of Chrome is a huge threat to the open internet, and Firefox is uniquely placed to combat that.
- lcnmrn 4y ago
  What is Firefox? Mozilla took Netscape stripped it to bare components and made them better. Why not do that again? Take Chromium, strip it to bare components and make them better. We need a hard fork of Chromium today or it will happen in the future anyway.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    Even stripping down Chromium and hard forking will cause significantly more problems than it resolves. Google will always be pushing updates, and filtering which ones to incorporate and which ones to leave out will become a nightmare over time as the ones left out become increasingly more integrated. Plus Google will pull stupid shit like their anti-adblocker push. Hard forking Netscape worked when there was a much lower floor of behaviors and entrenched, anticompetitive conglomerates.
  - vorticalbox 4y ago
    There is actually an argument to be made here for a single browser base that all browsers are built from. for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue. I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date.
    - sfink 4y ago
      > There is actually an argument to be made here for a single browser base that all browsers are built from. Yeah, but the argument is a really bad one. > for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue. Yes, because it's no longer even a concern. Your single implementation will have bugs, because every implementation of a new feature has always had cross-compatibility bugs. Only now they're not bugs, they're backwards compatibility land mines that can never be fixed. > I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date. Why? What would be the motivation to innovate on browser features when you've already won? It would enable new things to be done on the web, which would be good for the people doing those things, but would increase the revenue of the browser makers by $0. If you owned a business and could pay someone $200K to do something that makes $0, or instead pay them $200K to do something else that makes $50K-$5M, which would you choose?
jraph 4y ago
A startup? why not a team inside Mozilla? Will this startup build open source stuff?
- orra 4y ago
  > Will this startup build open source stuff? It's right there, in the exact same subheading that mentions being a startup: > A startup — and a community — building a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem Presumably being a startup may allow them more financial freedom, or less bureaucracy.
  - jraph 4y ago
    > open-source AI ecosystem Ah, right, I must have skipped this. I don't know how, I was looking for it. I hope it says like this though, the fact that it is an independent startup does not inspire me much confidence. OpenAI started as a non-profit committed to open source, this failed miserably.
    - orra 4y ago
      I mean, I understand your scepticism given OpenAI. OpenAI was misleading from the start, even before they changed from non-profit to "capped" for profit. Hopefully being spawned from Mozilla gives this new outfit a better ethos.
- input_sh 4y ago
  Mozilla has a somewhat unique structure in which they have companies fully owned by a foundation. Internally, they refer to them as MoFo (Mozilla Foundation) and MoCo (Mozilla Corporation). They can't monetize a product as a foundation, but they also can't accept donations as a company. So they came up with this clusterfuck in which a foundation has subsidiaries, but all the profit from them goes back to the foundation. (IANAL, I have no clue how this works.) I'm guessing this is gonna be another corporation under the foundation, separate from MoCo (which makes Firefox). Therefore, Firefox and others won't be impacted by what happens to this.
- deleted 4y ago
lordswork 4y ago
I appreciate the sentiment behind the mission, but Mozilla resources are already spread thin IMO. Maybe 30M isn't a lot for Mozilla though, it's hard for me to judge.
juliushuijnk 4y ago
Cool. I would like them to aim for a future where you can fully own your AI, so it can be your personal coach. Perhaps a 'general engine' can be swapped out and hosted somewhere, but then your personal information and your conversations on your device or hosted somewhere you decide. Then when a new version of the AI is available, you'd feed it your personal history and data, let it train on your own device/server, so the new updated general AI becomes aware of you and you can continue to use it. Mozilla could build version 0.1 of this right into the Firefox browser as a plugin. Data would be the RSS feeds you follow. First use case is just single button "what's new?" and it gives a summary of what is going on in the RSS feeds you follow. Privacy-wise not much is happening, so easy to start with from that perspective.
- skybrian 4y ago
  This sounds much like loading data from a prompt. If your data is written in plain text, you can edit it however you like, keep your own backups, and when you switch to another engine, it should understand it. For now, prompts need to be pretty short and hand-writing them based on what you really want probably gives better results, though. What instructions would you have for a personal coach? That should be your prompt.
- classified 4y ago
  I admire your optimism. But I would be very surprised if trained machines didn't become subscription-based copyrighted cash cows with total surveillance and zero privacy.
endisneigh 4y ago
mozilla is so distracted lol. how exactly are they going to make: > Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. restrictions? the underlying algorithms are pretty well understood. don't see the value add they can possibly have here.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Restrictions are obviously the first thing that came to mind. When I read "safer" I don't hear "better".
- polski-g 4y ago
  "Safer AI" just means more dumb and censorious.
  - lannisterstark 4y ago
    [flagged]
nmcela 4y ago
Just as I was complaining about the worst monopolies taking the lead on AI - Mozilla comes to the rescue by announcing independent open-source AI ecosystem. This is great news!
- wallaBBB 4y ago
  Not really, this is how they got in the current situation with justified existential fears. Branching out into popular fields and spending a shit load of resources (in relative terms to Mozilla size) although they're late to the party. Meanwhile neglecting the core product.
  - gregman1 4y ago
    Well at least they did not jump on blockchain bandwagon which is a very good sign!
    - wussboy 4y ago
      Don’t give them ideas!
    - blululu 4y ago
      They tried accepting blockchain donations, but were given a lot of public ridicule for the idea: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22870787/mozilla-pauses-crypto-donations-backlash-jwz https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22870787/mozilla-pauses-cr...
      - creatonez 4y ago
        They started accepting bitcoin donations in 2014, and then got lots of public ridicule for the idea in late 2021, and then stopped in 2022 due to environmental concerns. There were signs that cryptocurrencies were inherently troublesome from the very beginning, but regardless, accepting bitcoin donations in 2014-2019 isn't exactly the same as participating in the NFT craze of 2021.
AlbertoGP 4y ago
GPT models have been shown to get significantly more truthful when trained on the right data set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM&t=7m42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM&t=7m42s The 30 million they are investing should be enough to reproduce that. Looking forward to it!
rvz 4y ago
Yet another sign of desperation from an already distracted Mozilla. This is why Firefox is probably going to be less of a priority to be competitive against Chrome and its derivatives.
causi 4y ago
Maybe if this really takes off, in a couple of decades they'll have enough money to dedicate a research team into finding a way for Firefox Mobile users to change their UserAgent. How does Mozilla seem to have the time and money to do literally anything except give their users what they want?
- wussboy 4y ago
  I’m still waiting for the opportunity to pay them for a freemium version of Firefox. I don’t want Pocket. I don’t want a VPN. I just want to pay for Firefox.
  - causi 4y ago
    I'd gladly do the same if I could get all my extensions. It's so annoying to have to pull my laptop out when I need to capture an embedded video from a page or want to download all the pictures or capture a screenshot of the whole web page
    - Zuiii 4y ago
      > want to download all the pictures or capture a screenshot of the whole web page This so much. A few sites I use don't offer a way to download invoices, so I rely on screenshots to save a copy.. except for firefox on android (I either take multiple screenshots using android's native screenshot functionality or avoid using firefox completely)
      - causi 4y ago
        Honestly I switched to Vivaldi for most of my browsing. It's leagues more responsive and its adblocking is good enough for 90% of my browsing. These days I only use Firefox Mobile for porn and piracy.
  - Brometheus 4y ago
    Insane, that that's not possible
  - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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seydor 4y ago
So instead of building a product that will compete with closed corporate models, mozilla will invest on Safety? I guess their donors are happy with that Safety is a corporate concern (because they want to sell it in a cloud) What we want are fully-open-source models that we can download and use as we please. I guess we ll need to stick with pirates for that https://twitter.com/nicholasadeleon/status/1638359262572474368 https://twitter.com/nicholasadeleon/status/16383592625724743...
- huslage 4y ago
  There already are tons of open source models. Some of them good. Check out Huggingface. BLOOM comes to mind as a decent starting point.
  - oefrha 4y ago
    They are good but not ChatGPT/GPT-4 good which is the standard of good that really blew up lately. Meanwhile Mozilla is investing in… AI ethicists? The most useless segment of the AI landscape? (Information is scarce so maybe this interpretation is wrong.) Well, at least it does align with their other activism.
    - Melatonic 4y ago
      Somebody has to do it - do we really trust big corporations to hire their own AI ethicists to police themselves? A part of me hopes they are able to use money Google gives them for some of this - although that may be reserved for just Firefox.
      - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
        and with the recent firing of all the ai ethics teams from Google and Microsoft...
  - Trapais 4y ago
    [flagged]
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
This is great. The only safe and good for the public AI is open source. We are still very very far from AGI but it's good we are getting these open source initiatives now.
asicsp 4y ago
Related: "Responsible AI Challenge" https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-launches-responsible-ai-challenge/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-launches-respons... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35169072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35169072
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
Frankly Mozilla already lost that and people demanding Mozilla stay firefox focused are telling the company to death spiral. Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share. And even if they did the company has no real way to monetize. In fact it almost never had a chance, especially in the current environment where anticompetitive moves are no longer really pushed back on by the govt. I say this as a person where Firefox has always been my daily driver. I would rather Mozilla keep trying things that keeps it afloat.
- thrown123098 4y ago
  Crazy idea: make a browser which adds features with new versions instead of how they are currently removing them.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    I don’t know of any features that would improve Firefox’s market share to any significant effect. Tbh I haven’t even noticed any feature removals, but that’s just my day to day use cases: I bookmark things, I have multiple windows with tabs open, I install privacy add one and ad blockers, I sometimes open the console and mess around with websites. I don’t think the vast majority of the market even does a portion of what I do, much less any more obscure features. So I’m not inclined to believe that any removals changes Firefox’s market share to any significant effect. They just have no realistic way to monetize a browser. I doubt safari or chrome are money makers either, but they have anticompetitive conglomerates using those browsers as customer lock in and not a core product. Completely different needs there.
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      No single removal changed Firefox's market share to any significant effect, but it's death of a thousand cuts. Eventually, they're going to have to start doing things again that gain them users rather than lose them. (Happy Waterfox user; my "one feature" was multirow tabs, and the general betrayal of the Quantum rewrite. "We will add these features back as extensions" my unsupported ass. Bring back UI modding. PS: Same goes for Firefox Android, which I've thankfully found an old APK for.)
this_user 4y ago
Great, another way for Mozilla to burn money on some also-ran project where they have no expertise. Meanwhile, FF Mobile is still largely broken, and the desktop versions seems to be getting slower with each version.
- Xunjin 4y ago
  I want to avoid being the “jerk one”, but do you have any bench/topics which support your claim? I won't deny that FF Mobile is way slower than chrome when it needs to deal with tons of ads that uBlock Origin solves greatly.
  - beeboop 4y ago
    Unlikely, parent commenter has a history of stating facts without any substance
  - Melatonic 4y ago
    I have found the total opposite - Chrome Mobile slows to a hault with tons of tabs open
- waboremo 4y ago
  This gets repeated so much without anyone ever backing it up, it might as well have been a bot post.
- tirpen 4y ago
  I use Firefox mobile every day and have had no problems with it at all, what makes you call it "largely broken"?
  - datkam 4y ago
    They block most extensions by default.
    - kome 4y ago
      so what. the other mobile browsers don't even have extensions... just thanks to firefox you can have a sane web experience on an android. because it supports ublock origin.
asim 4y ago
Oh to have enough money to sink $30m into a landing page and an announcement. Heckling aside, I think it's good that the likes of Mozilla are investing in this space. We need diversification from the bigger players and Mozilla has a reputation of trying to create a sense of openness unlike the other Open labelled entities. Will be interesting to see what _actually_ comes out of this though.
dusted 4y ago
Hopefully they divert some resources away from firefox so I don't have to lose all my tabs when it decides to force an update on me all the time.. or constantly change nonsense around in the UI..
- pr0zac 4y ago
  Settings => General => Startup => Open previous windows and tabs That setting should solve the restart losing tabs/windows problem you're experiencing.
  - dusted 4y ago
    yeah, except it does not, lots of lost state in various tabs and I don't want to have the browser dicatate when it gets to restart.
janalsncm 4y ago
> Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being This all sounds well and good (and makes for a fine press release) but where the rubber meets the road will be how these things are defined. What does it really mean for AI to be “safe”? What is the bigger danger, being insulted by a computer or having entire industries gutted, putting millions out of a job? You can’t pay rent but hey, at least the AI was nice about it. What does it mean to have “people-centric” recommendation systems? It’s such an irritatingly corporate and meaningless term. Under one definition, collaborative filtering is already exactly that, but CF led to filter bubbles because it turns out a person’s beliefs aren’t normally distributed. What does it mean that a system doesn’t misinform? You’re going to need some arbiter of truth. Misleading journalism has been an issue since journalism was born, I don’t think $30 million from Mozilla is going to change that, however high-minded their intentions. And that isn’t even getting into technical issues with generative models. I think anyone who has played around with statistical language models like ChatGPT knows that they don’t have a knowledge graph. They are not expert systems. The problem of squaring GOFAI with deep learning is a problem several orders of magnitude larger than Moz has pledged. I’ll bet anything the smartest Google engineers wished they knew how to create an AI that doesn’t misinform before their stock tanked 10%. But this will be a great resume pad for their VP of whatever to have led.
phailhaus 4y ago
> people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being X to Doubt. Recommendation systems are already people-centric, but it turns out that people will gladly misinform themselves if it Sounds Right. The solution is something companies are not willing to admit: we must deprioritize "recommendation systems". You have to let humans rank, tag, and organize content themselves. You can still have recommendations on the side for exploration, but it can't be the whole thing. It's boring, but it's the only long-term solution that doesn't eat itself.
ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
"This new company [mozilla.ai] will be led by Managing Director Moez Draief." And they link Mr. Draief's name to LinkedIn which hits you in the face with a login wall as hard as narrow AI will hit the jobs market. The way LinkedIn puts a login wall for reading public information and then hijacks the back button should warrant corporate death penalty. Better links for Mr. Draief [1] [2]. [1] https://www.lse.ac.uk/statistics/people/moez-draief https://www.lse.ac.uk/statistics/people/moez-draief [2] https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=7zG0FQsAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=7zG0FQsAAAAJ&hl=...
laserbeam 4y ago
I know that mozilla has a decent track record of sticking to their ethical principles. Despite that, OpenAI started in the same spot. Let's make ethical AI (and you can define ethics in multiple ways... Based on trust, privacy, open source-ness... Whatever). And even they turned 180. Will this be any different in the middle of an AI arms race because money can be made? I dunno... Doubts are strong.
human_shield 4y ago
> Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being. Safer? What is so unsafe ATM? Transparent? Are you finna open-source it or nah? People-centric recommendation systems? What? Aren't recommendation systems usually non-people-centric? What does that even mean? What does "misinforming your well-being" even mean? Such much BS.
- sfink 4y ago
  Transparency doesn't begin or end with open-sourcing. Where does the input come from? What sources did it draw upon for an output? How much is the core model vs the more ephemeral learning on top? etc. > What does "misinforming your well-being" even mean? It means you're struggling a bit with English grammar. Would phrasing it as "[systems] that don't misinform us or undermine our well-being" help?
  - human_shield 4y ago
    I understand what the grammar is, but what exactly are we being misinformed or underminded requires some kind of an arbiter of truth which is a slippery slope. Ofc, open-sourcing isn't enough, but its better than not. It's just sad that another company is going into this in a wrong "Safe AI" way. Perhaps irony is going to happen.
afefers 4y ago
I would love to see this money ($30M) being given to Andreas Kling and others behind Ladybird (the browser from SerenityOS). I'm pretty sure in 1-2 years they would have a better browser than the current Firefox.
- godplsnoretards 4y ago
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stuckinhell 4y ago
Trustworthy means something different to businesses. My firm wants to go all in on using some companies AI as a service, but we can't because we can't have them change a model that works for us on the fly. Trustworthiness is missing from the AI as a service at the business level. So we are now heavily investing money to make our own. Data providers who can provide huge amounts data for AI training, its probably your time to shine soon.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
photochemsyn 4y ago
This could use some explanation: > "Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being." 1) What kind of tool is that? More 'transparent' - are we talking about a map of the training corpus, snapshots of the AI's internal state, or what? And what does 'safer' mean - a filter on the output of some kind? Will that be a transparent filter? Will there be a secretive committee that decides what's safe and what's not? Will it take recommendations from the Department of Homeland Security on that question, as Twitter was doing? 2) What is a people-centric recommendation system, exactly? Does that mean people get control of the knobs and dials on the recommendation system? For example, I'd like an 'inverted' option, the ability to grab a random selection of the content that the system thinks I wouldn't care about. I'd like the option to make different lists of channels and randomly grab content just from those lists. Also, a list of channels I never want to see any content from, period. I suspect, however, that the result will be more in the flavor of "Big Brother knows what's good for you, and what's not". As far as whether I'd be 'misinformed' or 'well-being destabilized' by AI output, please stop being so paternalistic. If you're afraid people can't distinguish between fact and fiction, invest in better public education and teach skepticism and critical analysis skills to young people, instead of training them to be obedient little zombies who have absolute faith in institutional authorities.
timtom39 4y ago
Why is Mozilla qualified to have an opinion on this? Have they released anything significant in the field?
- lvl102 4y ago
  You ever heard of Rust?
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    What does that have to do with AI?
aliljet 4y ago
It's probably way too late to get my two pennies into this discussion, but this is FANTASTIC news. Individual developers that want access to OPEN models for their building purposes shouldn't be beholden to a new corporate overlord. Here's hoping that Mozilla can rally the makers in the community with real dollars to spend toward models that all people can use.
alainbex 4y ago
Mozilla should focus on Firefox extensions, including mobile. This is where Chrome and Safari will not make progress.
- Zuiii 4y ago
  Yep. Mozilla's key to gaining back its market share is in doing things that other techgiants don't want to do. Enabling web extensions on mobile is a big one and will give them a very strong advantage over their competitors for free (since firefox already supports extension but mozilla goes out of their way disable them for mobile). TBH, I don't think mozilla really wants to regain market share so I doubt they will.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    > TBH, I don't think mozilla really wants to regain market share so I doubt they will. They certainly aren’t making any contrary movements. It feels like a bunch of people who are really interested in social justice took over a tech company and are just annoyed they keep having to make a thing.
ineedasername 4y ago
I’d like to hear more about how it will hopefully put in more governance guardrails to prevent another OpenAI-like defection away from principles of being open. And how they will monetize it, which would tie into that as well. I have a bit more trust of Mozilla on these matters, but that trust is still a bit small when they could, if successful, be leaving $billions on the table.
PheeThav1zae7fi 4y ago
[dead]
rllearneratwork 4y ago
yeah, time to give up on Firefox because Mozilla can't seem to focus.
pjmlp 4y ago
Bye Firefox, we will miss you.
fooker 4y ago
Mozilla: Investing in anything but Firefox.
nashashmi 4y ago
How is it possible for AI to be "trustworthy"? I don't think Mozilla understands what AI should be doing nor their position as "barons who advance the web" could be doing with AI. AI is not a web browser or a web service or a web utility. Interactive AI is a mixer masher of info and works. As others have said, this is another way Mozilla is trying to stay relevant after losing the browser market.
markdog12 4y ago
Tangent: Header is 2MB png: https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1638529320435195905 https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1638529320435195905
tommica 4y ago
Good luck with the project!
dahwolf 4y ago
People obsessing over AI safety in how it affects our "well-being" truly do not get it. That's not the safety issue at all. The actual safety issue is that it's coming for our jobs. Not that it spits out a micro aggression or bias. Social media spit out about 50 billion messages a day that offend in one way or another. The sum of humanity's digital labor is taken without permission or compensation and then centralized into a collective intelligence under the control of 2 companies. Giving them unique power in monetization, information narratives, being at the steering wheel of wiping out entire industries. The only way to make this inevitable revolution more fair is to decentralize. Make training data, models, weights and tools free, downloadable and super easy to use locally. As easy as using a smartphone app. This could even spin up a (commercial) ecosystem of ready-to-go models. Next, make them pluggable into every common tech stack. Freedom is the answer, not safety. Yes, somebody is going to train a Nazi model but those motivated to do so can and will do that anyway.
not_enoch_wise 4y ago
Being trustworthy might be the current largest weakness in what we call “AI.” But the description sounds investment-worthy, so ship it!
garfieldnate 4y ago
>Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being. Honestly, I don't see the selling point here. At least for me, I don't want it to be safer. I want the people using it to be safe, sure, but making the AI safe just means building in censorship based on the values of somebody with a lot of money that think they can tell others what to do and think. I would be much happier if they developed powerful models, made them truly open to usage by all, and then worked on education for people using them or potentially used by them.
propogandist 4y ago
80% or so of their revenues are still from Google Search. The only money they have to invest is from selling out their users to the top bidder; this is not a group positioned to invest in Trustworthy AI

444 points by Amorymeltzer 4y ago

The recent wave of AI came from launches (Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT). Has Moez contributed to launching anything, or just talking about it?

nitinreddy88 4y ago

Another diversion for Mozilla and further degraded Firefox delivery in my opinion.

orra 4y ago
Mozilla's mission is 'a better internet'. Democraticising AI fits right it. Mozilla gets slated for not innovating, and Mozilla gets slated for innovating. Mozilla gets slated when Google and Apple and Microsoft's anticompetitive practices marginalise Firefox, especially on mobile. Some folks are just never happy.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  Problem is this is not innovation. It's a political statement and a system that will never accomplish anything. Seriously, Read this article again and look at the way they phrase themselves. They don't say they're going to innovate, they say they're making a space for other people to join them and then innovate. They are not funding a project, they are making an initial investment, implying that they expect others to follow up on what they've started. Ineffective, lazy, and devoid of self-confidence Cool, You've promoted AI transparency, you've provided this generic framework for it, but at the end of the day none of the players in the field are going to adopt it, and you're not a leading AI company that can force its adoption in at least some small form. Take the hours spent on this "innovation" and instead implement a feature that Chrome has which Firefox doesn't.
  - orra 4y ago
    > Problem is this is not innovation. I'm objecting to undue criticism, compared to any other AI startup. > It's a political statement and a system that will never accomplish anything. You're speaking with undue certainty. > They are not funding a project, they are making an initial investment £30 million is more than tokenistic funding. > lazy A completely unwarranted descriptor on day one. > Take the hours spent on this "innovation" and instead implement a feature that Chrome has which Firefox doesn't. Developer skills aren't completely fungible like that. Besides, what if Chrome starts integrating with Bard?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - wokwokwok 4y ago
    I mean, what do you want? It’s so easy to be critical. Ok; you play then. What should they be doing? If they don’t, who is going to invest in open AI models? OpenAI? Ha! Let’s say you’re in charge then. What’s your product strategy? I personally think this is better than doing nothing, even if it isn’t perfect.
    - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
      >what should they be doing? If they want to make money while "making the internet a better place" they should develop their own LLM alternative with competitive cloud prices to GPT while releasing the model to everyone. If you tell me it's impossible to be competitive with GPT offering then they should not be wasting money on this endeavor
      - wokwokwok 4y ago
        How is investing in open AI models different from what you just asked for? Have you run the 65B llama model? It’s shit. The refined 7B model is significantly better. The problem isn’t making a big model and open sourcing it. Those already exist Specially, bloom and llama. Tooling around it and refinement tooling seems like it’s a pretty good investment right now. “Make a GPT4” is an incredibly trivial and narrow view of this space.
- gamjQZnHT53AMa 4y ago
  This site just hates Mozilla for all kinds of reasons. I agree completely with your point though. Mozilla would be sorely missed were they to disappear, and moves like these are absolutely in line with their goals. Mozilla != Firefox
  - orra 4y ago
    TBF the disdain for Mozilla is not a universal sentiment, but it's absurdly pervasive. There's the same nonsense on reddit at /r/linux.
  - dns_snek 4y ago
    How is Mozilla != Firefox when that's the only product keeping them relevant?
    - orra 4y ago
      Firefox is by far their biggest success. That's precisely why it's absurd to criticise them for branching out.
      - Adraghast 4y ago
        Can you elaborate? Sounds like a non sequitur to me.
  - computerfriend 4y ago
    Moves like this are in line with them disappearing. Which I do think may be one of their goals.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    What has Mozilla done that isn't Firefox or a PR fluff piece? Even Thunderbird was spun out.
  - vasco 4y ago
    Mozilla you remember has disappeared long ago. One look at their financials tells you all you need to know about what they care about nowadays, which seems to be to pay leadership large salaries.
- mjhay 4y ago
  The best way Mozilla can help make a better internet is to pour more resources into Firefox. The monopoly of Chrome is a huge threat to the open internet, and Firefox is uniquely placed to combat that.
lcnmrn 4y ago
What is Firefox? Mozilla took Netscape stripped it to bare components and made them better. Why not do that again? Take Chromium, strip it to bare components and make them better. We need a hard fork of Chromium today or it will happen in the future anyway.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  Even stripping down Chromium and hard forking will cause significantly more problems than it resolves. Google will always be pushing updates, and filtering which ones to incorporate and which ones to leave out will become a nightmare over time as the ones left out become increasingly more integrated. Plus Google will pull stupid shit like their anti-adblocker push. Hard forking Netscape worked when there was a much lower floor of behaviors and entrenched, anticompetitive conglomerates.
- vorticalbox 4y ago
  There is actually an argument to be made here for a single browser base that all browsers are built from. for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue. I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date.
  - sfink 4y ago
    > There is actually an argument to be made here for a single browser base that all browsers are built from. Yeah, but the argument is a really bad one. > for one if we only have one rendering engine then compatibility is no longer an issue. Yes, because it's no longer even a concern. Your single implementation will have bugs, because every implementation of a new feature has always had cross-compatibility bugs. Only now they're not bugs, they're backwards compatibility land mines that can never be fixed. > I would mean that browsers could focus of innovation of browser features rather than keeping ones engine up to date. Why? What would be the motivation to innovate on browser features when you've already won? It would enable new things to be done on the web, which would be good for the people doing those things, but would increase the revenue of the browser makers by $0. If you owned a business and could pay someone $200K to do something that makes $0, or instead pay them $200K to do something else that makes $50K-$5M, which would you choose?

jraph 4y ago

A startup? why not a team inside Mozilla? Will this startup build open source stuff?

orra 4y ago
> Will this startup build open source stuff? It's right there, in the exact same subheading that mentions being a startup: > A startup — and a community — building a trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem Presumably being a startup may allow them more financial freedom, or less bureaucracy.
- jraph 4y ago
  > open-source AI ecosystem Ah, right, I must have skipped this. I don't know how, I was looking for it. I hope it says like this though, the fact that it is an independent startup does not inspire me much confidence. OpenAI started as a non-profit committed to open source, this failed miserably.
  - orra 4y ago
    I mean, I understand your scepticism given OpenAI. OpenAI was misleading from the start, even before they changed from non-profit to "capped" for profit. Hopefully being spawned from Mozilla gives this new outfit a better ethos.
input_sh 4y ago
Mozilla has a somewhat unique structure in which they have companies fully owned by a foundation. Internally, they refer to them as MoFo (Mozilla Foundation) and MoCo (Mozilla Corporation). They can't monetize a product as a foundation, but they also can't accept donations as a company. So they came up with this clusterfuck in which a foundation has subsidiaries, but all the profit from them goes back to the foundation. (IANAL, I have no clue how this works.) I'm guessing this is gonna be another corporation under the foundation, separate from MoCo (which makes Firefox). Therefore, Firefox and others won't be impacted by what happens to this.
deleted 4y ago

lordswork 4y ago

I appreciate the sentiment behind the mission, but Mozilla resources are already spread thin IMO. Maybe 30M isn't a lot for Mozilla though, it's hard for me to judge.

juliushuijnk 4y ago

Cool. I would like them to aim for a future where you can fully own your AI, so it can be your personal coach. Perhaps a 'general engine' can be swapped out and hosted somewhere, but then your personal information and your conversations on your device or hosted somewhere you decide. Then when a new version of the AI is available, you'd feed it your personal history and data, let it train on your own device/server, so the new updated general AI becomes aware of you and you can continue to use it. Mozilla could build version 0.1 of this right into the Firefox browser as a plugin. Data would be the RSS feeds you follow. First use case is just single button "what's new?" and it gives a summary of what is going on in the RSS feeds you follow. Privacy-wise not much is happening, so easy to start with from that perspective.

skybrian 4y ago
This sounds much like loading data from a prompt. If your data is written in plain text, you can edit it however you like, keep your own backups, and when you switch to another engine, it should understand it. For now, prompts need to be pretty short and hand-writing them based on what you really want probably gives better results, though. What instructions would you have for a personal coach? That should be your prompt.
classified 4y ago
I admire your optimism. But I would be very surprised if trained machines didn't become subscription-based copyrighted cash cows with total surveillance and zero privacy.

endisneigh 4y ago

mozilla is so distracted lol. how exactly are they going to make: > Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. restrictions? the underlying algorithms are pretty well understood. don't see the value add they can possibly have here.

SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
Restrictions are obviously the first thing that came to mind. When I read "safer" I don't hear "better".
polski-g 4y ago
"Safer AI" just means more dumb and censorious.
- lannisterstark 4y ago
  [flagged]

nmcela 4y ago

Just as I was complaining about the worst monopolies taking the lead on AI - Mozilla comes to the rescue by announcing independent open-source AI ecosystem. This is great news!

wallaBBB 4y ago
Not really, this is how they got in the current situation with justified existential fears. Branching out into popular fields and spending a shit load of resources (in relative terms to Mozilla size) although they're late to the party. Meanwhile neglecting the core product.
- gregman1 4y ago
  Well at least they did not jump on blockchain bandwagon which is a very good sign!
  - wussboy 4y ago
    Don’t give them ideas!
  - blululu 4y ago
    They tried accepting blockchain donations, but were given a lot of public ridicule for the idea: https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22870787/mozilla-pauses-crypto-donations-backlash-jwz https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/6/22870787/mozilla-pauses-cr...
    - creatonez 4y ago
      They started accepting bitcoin donations in 2014, and then got lots of public ridicule for the idea in late 2021, and then stopped in 2022 due to environmental concerns. There were signs that cryptocurrencies were inherently troublesome from the very beginning, but regardless, accepting bitcoin donations in 2014-2019 isn't exactly the same as participating in the NFT craze of 2021.

AlbertoGP 4y ago

GPT models have been shown to get significantly more truthful when trained on the right data set: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM&t=7m42s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efPrtcLdcdM&t=7m42s The 30 million they are investing should be enough to reproduce that. Looking forward to it!

rvz 4y ago

Yet another sign of desperation from an already distracted Mozilla. This is why Firefox is probably going to be less of a priority to be competitive against Chrome and its derivatives.

causi 4y ago

Maybe if this really takes off, in a couple of decades they'll have enough money to dedicate a research team into finding a way for Firefox Mobile users to change their UserAgent. How does Mozilla seem to have the time and money to do literally anything except give their users what they want?

wussboy 4y ago
I’m still waiting for the opportunity to pay them for a freemium version of Firefox. I don’t want Pocket. I don’t want a VPN. I just want to pay for Firefox.
- causi 4y ago
  I'd gladly do the same if I could get all my extensions. It's so annoying to have to pull my laptop out when I need to capture an embedded video from a page or want to download all the pictures or capture a screenshot of the whole web page
  - Zuiii 4y ago
    > want to download all the pictures or capture a screenshot of the whole web page This so much. A few sites I use don't offer a way to download invoices, so I rely on screenshots to save a copy.. except for firefox on android (I either take multiple screenshots using android's native screenshot functionality or avoid using firefox completely)
    - causi 4y ago
      Honestly I switched to Vivaldi for most of my browsing. It's leagues more responsive and its adblocking is good enough for 90% of my browsing. These days I only use Firefox Mobile for porn and piracy.
- Brometheus 4y ago
  Insane, that that's not possible
- 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

seydor 4y ago

So instead of building a product that will compete with closed corporate models, mozilla will invest on Safety? I guess their donors are happy with that Safety is a corporate concern (because they want to sell it in a cloud) What we want are fully-open-source models that we can download and use as we please. I guess we ll need to stick with pirates for that https://twitter.com/nicholasadeleon/status/1638359262572474368 https://twitter.com/nicholasadeleon/status/16383592625724743...

huslage 4y ago
There already are tons of open source models. Some of them good. Check out Huggingface. BLOOM comes to mind as a decent starting point.
- oefrha 4y ago
  They are good but not ChatGPT/GPT-4 good which is the standard of good that really blew up lately. Meanwhile Mozilla is investing in… AI ethicists? The most useless segment of the AI landscape? (Information is scarce so maybe this interpretation is wrong.) Well, at least it does align with their other activism.
  - Melatonic 4y ago
    Somebody has to do it - do we really trust big corporations to hire their own AI ethicists to police themselves? A part of me hopes they are able to use money Google gives them for some of this - although that may be reserved for just Firefox.
    - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
      and with the recent firing of all the ai ethics teams from Google and Microsoft...
- Trapais 4y ago
  [flagged]

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

This is great. The only safe and good for the public AI is open source. We are still very very far from AGI but it's good we are getting these open source initiatives now.

asicsp 4y ago

Related: "Responsible AI Challenge" https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-launches-responsible-ai-challenge/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-launches-respons... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35169072 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35169072

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago

Frankly Mozilla already lost that and people demanding Mozilla stay firefox focused are telling the company to death spiral. Firefox has no path, literally none, in getting a significant marketing share. And even if they did the company has no real way to monetize. In fact it almost never had a chance, especially in the current environment where anticompetitive moves are no longer really pushed back on by the govt. I say this as a person where Firefox has always been my daily driver. I would rather Mozilla keep trying things that keeps it afloat.

thrown123098 4y ago
Crazy idea: make a browser which adds features with new versions instead of how they are currently removing them.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  I don’t know of any features that would improve Firefox’s market share to any significant effect. Tbh I haven’t even noticed any feature removals, but that’s just my day to day use cases: I bookmark things, I have multiple windows with tabs open, I install privacy add one and ad blockers, I sometimes open the console and mess around with websites. I don’t think the vast majority of the market even does a portion of what I do, much less any more obscure features. So I’m not inclined to believe that any removals changes Firefox’s market share to any significant effect. They just have no realistic way to monetize a browser. I doubt safari or chrome are money makers either, but they have anticompetitive conglomerates using those browsers as customer lock in and not a core product. Completely different needs there.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    No single removal changed Firefox's market share to any significant effect, but it's death of a thousand cuts. Eventually, they're going to have to start doing things again that gain them users rather than lose them. (Happy Waterfox user; my "one feature" was multirow tabs, and the general betrayal of the Quantum rewrite. "We will add these features back as extensions" my unsupported ass. Bring back UI modding. PS: Same goes for Firefox Android, which I've thankfully found an old APK for.)

this_user 4y ago

Great, another way for Mozilla to burn money on some also-ran project where they have no expertise. Meanwhile, FF Mobile is still largely broken, and the desktop versions seems to be getting slower with each version.

Xunjin 4y ago
I want to avoid being the “jerk one”, but do you have any bench/topics which support your claim? I won't deny that FF Mobile is way slower than chrome when it needs to deal with tons of ads that uBlock Origin solves greatly.
- beeboop 4y ago
  Unlikely, parent commenter has a history of stating facts without any substance
- Melatonic 4y ago
  I have found the total opposite - Chrome Mobile slows to a hault with tons of tabs open
waboremo 4y ago
This gets repeated so much without anyone ever backing it up, it might as well have been a bot post.
tirpen 4y ago
I use Firefox mobile every day and have had no problems with it at all, what makes you call it "largely broken"?
- datkam 4y ago
  They block most extensions by default.
  - kome 4y ago
    so what. the other mobile browsers don't even have extensions... just thanks to firefox you can have a sane web experience on an android. because it supports ublock origin.

asim 4y ago

Oh to have enough money to sink $30m into a landing page and an announcement. Heckling aside, I think it's good that the likes of Mozilla are investing in this space. We need diversification from the bigger players and Mozilla has a reputation of trying to create a sense of openness unlike the other Open labelled entities. Will be interesting to see what _actually_ comes out of this though.

dusted 4y ago

Hopefully they divert some resources away from firefox so I don't have to lose all my tabs when it decides to force an update on me all the time.. or constantly change nonsense around in the UI..

pr0zac 4y ago
Settings => General => Startup => Open previous windows and tabs That setting should solve the restart losing tabs/windows problem you're experiencing.
- dusted 4y ago
  yeah, except it does not, lots of lost state in various tabs and I don't want to have the browser dicatate when it gets to restart.

janalsncm 4y ago

> Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being This all sounds well and good (and makes for a fine press release) but where the rubber meets the road will be how these things are defined. What does it really mean for AI to be “safe”? What is the bigger danger, being insulted by a computer or having entire industries gutted, putting millions out of a job? You can’t pay rent but hey, at least the AI was nice about it. What does it mean to have “people-centric” recommendation systems? It’s such an irritatingly corporate and meaningless term. Under one definition, collaborative filtering is already exactly that, but CF led to filter bubbles because it turns out a person’s beliefs aren’t normally distributed. What does it mean that a system doesn’t misinform? You’re going to need some arbiter of truth. Misleading journalism has been an issue since journalism was born, I don’t think $30 million from Mozilla is going to change that, however high-minded their intentions. And that isn’t even getting into technical issues with generative models. I think anyone who has played around with statistical language models like ChatGPT knows that they don’t have a knowledge graph. They are not expert systems. The problem of squaring GOFAI with deep learning is a problem several orders of magnitude larger than Moz has pledged. I’ll bet anything the smartest Google engineers wished they knew how to create an AI that doesn’t misinform before their stock tanked 10%. But this will be a great resume pad for their VP of whatever to have led.

phailhaus 4y ago

> people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being X to Doubt. Recommendation systems are already people-centric, but it turns out that people will gladly misinform themselves if it Sounds Right. The solution is something companies are not willing to admit: we must deprioritize "recommendation systems". You have to let humans rank, tag, and organize content themselves. You can still have recommendations on the side for exploration, but it can't be the whole thing. It's boring, but it's the only long-term solution that doesn't eat itself.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

"This new company [mozilla.ai] will be led by Managing Director Moez Draief." And they link Mr. Draief's name to LinkedIn which hits you in the face with a login wall as hard as narrow AI will hit the jobs market. The way LinkedIn puts a login wall for reading public information and then hijacks the back button should warrant corporate death penalty. Better links for Mr. Draief [1] [2]. [1] https://www.lse.ac.uk/statistics/people/moez-draief https://www.lse.ac.uk/statistics/people/moez-draief [2] https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=7zG0FQsAAAAJ&hl=en https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=7zG0FQsAAAAJ&hl=...

laserbeam 4y ago

I know that mozilla has a decent track record of sticking to their ethical principles. Despite that, OpenAI started in the same spot. Let's make ethical AI (and you can define ethics in multiple ways... Based on trust, privacy, open source-ness... Whatever). And even they turned 180. Will this be any different in the middle of an AI arms race because money can be made? I dunno... Doubts are strong.

human_shield 4y ago

> Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being. Safer? What is so unsafe ATM? Transparent? Are you finna open-source it or nah? People-centric recommendation systems? What? Aren't recommendation systems usually non-people-centric? What does that even mean? What does "misinforming your well-being" even mean? Such much BS.

sfink 4y ago
Transparency doesn't begin or end with open-sourcing. Where does the input come from? What sources did it draw upon for an output? How much is the core model vs the more ephemeral learning on top? etc. > What does "misinforming your well-being" even mean? It means you're struggling a bit with English grammar. Would phrasing it as "[systems] that don't misinform us or undermine our well-being" help?
- human_shield 4y ago
  I understand what the grammar is, but what exactly are we being misinformed or underminded requires some kind of an arbiter of truth which is a slippery slope. Ofc, open-sourcing isn't enough, but its better than not. It's just sad that another company is going into this in a wrong "Safe AI" way. Perhaps irony is going to happen.

afefers 4y ago

I would love to see this money ($30M) being given to Andreas Kling and others behind Ladybird (the browser from SerenityOS). I'm pretty sure in 1-2 years they would have a better browser than the current Firefox.

godplsnoretards 4y ago
[dead]

stuckinhell 4y ago

Trustworthy means something different to businesses. My firm wants to go all in on using some companies AI as a service, but we can't because we can't have them change a model that works for us on the fly. Trustworthiness is missing from the AI as a service at the business level. So we are now heavily investing money to make our own. Data providers who can provide huge amounts data for AI training, its probably your time to shine soon.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

photochemsyn 4y ago

This could use some explanation: > "Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being." 1) What kind of tool is that? More 'transparent' - are we talking about a map of the training corpus, snapshots of the AI's internal state, or what? And what does 'safer' mean - a filter on the output of some kind? Will that be a transparent filter? Will there be a secretive committee that decides what's safe and what's not? Will it take recommendations from the Department of Homeland Security on that question, as Twitter was doing? 2) What is a people-centric recommendation system, exactly? Does that mean people get control of the knobs and dials on the recommendation system? For example, I'd like an 'inverted' option, the ability to grab a random selection of the content that the system thinks I wouldn't care about. I'd like the option to make different lists of channels and randomly grab content just from those lists. Also, a list of channels I never want to see any content from, period. I suspect, however, that the result will be more in the flavor of "Big Brother knows what's good for you, and what's not". As far as whether I'd be 'misinformed' or 'well-being destabilized' by AI output, please stop being so paternalistic. If you're afraid people can't distinguish between fact and fiction, invest in better public education and teach skepticism and critical analysis skills to young people, instead of training them to be obedient little zombies who have absolute faith in institutional authorities.

timtom39 4y ago

Why is Mozilla qualified to have an opinion on this? Have they released anything significant in the field?

lvl102 4y ago
You ever heard of Rust?
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  What does that have to do with AI?

aliljet 4y ago

It's probably way too late to get my two pennies into this discussion, but this is FANTASTIC news. Individual developers that want access to OPEN models for their building purposes shouldn't be beholden to a new corporate overlord. Here's hoping that Mozilla can rally the makers in the community with real dollars to spend toward models that all people can use.

alainbex 4y ago

Mozilla should focus on Firefox extensions, including mobile. This is where Chrome and Safari will not make progress.

Zuiii 4y ago
Yep. Mozilla's key to gaining back its market share is in doing things that other techgiants don't want to do. Enabling web extensions on mobile is a big one and will give them a very strong advantage over their competitors for free (since firefox already supports extension but mozilla goes out of their way disable them for mobile). TBH, I don't think mozilla really wants to regain market share so I doubt they will.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  > TBH, I don't think mozilla really wants to regain market share so I doubt they will. They certainly aren’t making any contrary movements. It feels like a bunch of people who are really interested in social justice took over a tech company and are just annoyed they keep having to make a thing.

ineedasername 4y ago

I’d like to hear more about how it will hopefully put in more governance guardrails to prevent another OpenAI-like defection away from principles of being open. And how they will monetize it, which would tie into that as well. I have a bit more trust of Mozilla on these matters, but that trust is still a bit small when they could, if successful, be leaving $billions on the table.

PheeThav1zae7fi 4y ago

[dead]

rllearneratwork 4y ago

yeah, time to give up on Firefox because Mozilla can't seem to focus.

pjmlp 4y ago

Bye Firefox, we will miss you.

fooker 4y ago

Mozilla: Investing in anything but Firefox.

nashashmi 4y ago

How is it possible for AI to be "trustworthy"? I don't think Mozilla understands what AI should be doing nor their position as "barons who advance the web" could be doing with AI. AI is not a web browser or a web service or a web utility. Interactive AI is a mixer masher of info and works. As others have said, this is another way Mozilla is trying to stay relevant after losing the browser market.

markdog12 4y ago

Tangent: Header is 2MB png: https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1638529320435195905 https://twitter.com/jaffathecake/status/1638529320435195905

tommica 4y ago

Good luck with the project!

dahwolf 4y ago

People obsessing over AI safety in how it affects our "well-being" truly do not get it. That's not the safety issue at all. The actual safety issue is that it's coming for our jobs. Not that it spits out a micro aggression or bias. Social media spit out about 50 billion messages a day that offend in one way or another. The sum of humanity's digital labor is taken without permission or compensation and then centralized into a collective intelligence under the control of 2 companies. Giving them unique power in monetization, information narratives, being at the steering wheel of wiping out entire industries. The only way to make this inevitable revolution more fair is to decentralize. Make training data, models, weights and tools free, downloadable and super easy to use locally. As easy as using a smartphone app. This could even spin up a (commercial) ecosystem of ready-to-go models. Next, make them pluggable into every common tech stack. Freedom is the answer, not safety. Yes, somebody is going to train a Nazi model but those motivated to do so can and will do that anyway.

not_enoch_wise 4y ago

Being trustworthy might be the current largest weakness in what we call “AI.” But the description sounds investment-worthy, so ship it!

garfieldnate 4y ago

>Mozilla.ai’s initial focus? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And, people-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or undermine our well-being. Honestly, I don't see the selling point here. At least for me, I don't want it to be safer. I want the people using it to be safe, sure, but making the AI safe just means building in censorship based on the values of somebody with a lot of money that think they can tell others what to do and think. I would be much happier if they developed powerful models, made them truly open to usage by all, and then worked on education for people using them or potentially used by them.

propogandist 4y ago

80% or so of their revenues are still from Google Search. The only money they have to invest is from selling out their users to the top bidder; this is not a group positioned to invest in Trustworthy AI