one passage of note:
Where does all of this leave the Firefox browser. Surman argued that the organization is very judicious about rolling AI into the browser — but he also believes that AI will become part of everything Mozilla does. “We want to implement AI in a way that’s trustworthy and benefits people,” he said. Fakespot is one example of this, but the overall vision is larger. “I think that’s what you’ll see from us, over the course of the next year, is how do you use the browser as the thing that represents you and how do you build AI into the browser that’s basically on your side as you move through the internet?” He noted that an Edge-like chatbot in a sidebar could be one way of doing this, but he seems to be thinking more in terms of an assistant that helps you summarize articles and maybe notify you proactively. “I think you’ll see the browser evolve. 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.”
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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).
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Higher exec salaries.
Pretty much… Mitchell baker gets paid 7 million.
That being said though, just to play devils advocate, she was there since the beginning apparently (at Netscape). So, she actually seems to somewhat deserve it. And she’s well educated too and I get the impression she’s also a good person too
Whereas, you look at the Oracle CEO, and she’s what you expect (donates a lot of money to the right wing, banker, etc)
You’re welcome.
By the way, not sure if you’re a linux user, but if you were wondering why Redhat is locking down the source code a bit, its probably thanks to oracle too. Oracle Unbreakable Linux was basically just a rebrand of Redhat (I’m guessing they just charge less for support to undercut redhat). It’s not because Redhat are bad for the community or greedy, but because they can’t compete if Oracle screws them that way
So Oracle is also screwing over Linux now too.
What an absolute shitshow this is going to be. If I want a digital assistant, I’ll get one. Keeping concerns separate is what has always worked. This reads like Elon wanting X to be the “everything app”. That ship has already sailed. The web is the everything app. Back when the web was new, you had AOL and Yahoo wanting to be the “gateway” to everything. How did that work out? My gateway to everything is my bookmarks folder. I don’t want AI in anything I use locally unless I explicitly enable it and ask for assistance. IMHO, this is the reason so many digital assistants have failed (especially Microsoft’s); because they tried to anticipate your needs rather than STFU and stay out of the way.
I’m old.
/rant
My feeling is that AI is the new solution looking for too many problems to solve. I had the same feeling with microservices, big data, block chain, NoSQL databases and all those other hype driven development things. Different products and solutions exist to solve their respective problems. I notice that AI (notably since ChatGPT and related) are pushed in all directions.
How else would we know what niche to exploit with it other than brute forcing it into everything!
The Gartner hype cycle strikes again.
Isn’t Firefox generally quite good at letting you turn off features you don’t want?
Say it with me now: local AI, local AI… or fuck off.
That being said, ARM laptops and probably even workstations are the future, and so is RISC-V. I suspect we’ll see more tensor cores or AI related processing built-in to the SoC’s.
If it’s then only a question of hardware enablement and a software companion to go along with it, I’m all for it.
Go Mozilla…! But again: local AI, or fuck off.
I’ve been hopeful for an external hardware device, something akin to MythicAI’s analog hardware. It essentially offloads the heavy duty work done by the GPU, with far lower power consumption and about 98-99% accuracy, then sends the output data back to the computer to be digitized. Adding more tensor cores is just making more power consumption which is already an issue.
That company in particular was using this method for real time AI tracking in cameras but I feel like it could be easily adapted to effectively eliminate the work in AI that NVIDIA is doing for GPU’s. Why brute force AI with power and tensor cores when a couple wires and some voltage can sift through the same or larger models at the same.or faster speeds with, well okay about 98-99% accuracy. It could be a simple hardware attachment via PCIe or hell even USB with a small bottleneck for conversion times. I just used an app to upscale a photo locally on my phone, took about 14m (Xperia 1IV), I could easily have offloaded that work to an analog AI device. We are nearly to the point where we can just run “AI*” on a phone at nearly PC speeds.
All this to say - local AI indeed. The only way AI works is when everyone has access to it. Give full, free access to everybody and the fear of corporate interference drops drastically. There are plenty of models available online not made by Google or Microsoft pushing whatever or harvesting data back (remember to firewall your programs if you run them locally). Ideally tagsets could be open sourced but in the capitalist world I could also see independent artists selling models of their work under a license
/* Of course, AI as a broad spectrum term encompassing model based projects, LLM’s for assistants & generative imaging, and not the actual AI as a semi-autonomous intelligence
Neuromorphic hardware seems to be best suited as an extension of RAM storage. It doesn’t need to use the DAC/ADC approach of Mythic AI, some versions are compatible with a CMOS process, and could be either integrated directly into the processor, maybe as an extension of the cache or a dedicated neural processing module, or into RAM modules.
It’s pretty clear that current NN processing solutions, by repurposing existing hardware, are bound to get replaced by dedicated hardware with a fraction of the power requirements and orders of magnitude larger processing capabilities.
Once some popular use cases for large NNs have been successfully proven, we can expect future hardware to come with support for them, so it also makes sense to make plans for software that can use them. And yes, local AI… and possibly trainable locally.
Local by default, option to go remote. Even the privacy-first types might want to offload that to a more powerful local machine.
They could even sell access to a Mozilla provided AI server like they do with the VPN service.
Bro, Mozilla needs to die. They don’t deserve all the money they are getting.
Yes, let’s let Google have complete control over the web, that will show them!
The majority of the opensource community won’t rally behind any browser other than Firefox or one of its soft forks. Firefox is alive by virtue of being the only fully opensource alternative to Chromium with a different webengine. If Firefox and Mozilla died, these are the possible outcomes I see:
- Majority of FF users jump to Chromium and never jump back, Chromium becomes the only opensource browser the majority knows of
- government does absolutely nothing and that’s that
- government (most likely EU) decides to do something like
- start developing their own browser
- fund a firefox fork or another opensource alternative
- take away chromium from google due to the marketshare (now a monopoly)
- FF users and devs disperse to either
- pick some Firefox soft fork to make that the new FF, a new foundation is established focused solely on the browser
- start a new browser from scratch with a new foundation focused solely on the browser
- a new browser is started that Google then pays to act as the new excuse not to have Chromium taken away from them due to being a monopoly (aka we’re back at square 1)
Except the first option where the government does fuck all and a new Mozilla+Firefox clone, it sounds like a win to me. No?
