Comment on Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox
spaduf@slrpnk.net 2 months agoTell me this is a good thing.
Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space (while still producing SOTA ML). All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility.
ALSO, the other half of this story is that Firefox is becoming the primary focus again. Everybody’s freaking out about the AI stuff but that’s because they’re only reading the headlines. The programs they’ve shut down are things like Hubs (Mozilla’s metaverse platform), the VPN, and the sensitive data scrubber (which was using a third party service anyway).
aidan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
As a software developer I am huge supporter of Mozilla’s developer initiatives from Manifest V2 implementation to MDN. But it’s also important to be realistic Mozilla has long had major money problems, and not the kind that giving them more would fix.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The Lunduke shit again?
Take a look at the other trash he posts on his reddit profile. That blog is not a trustworthy source, by any stretch, and it’s sweetly ignoring that he’s not looking at Mozilla’s spending alone, but of 3 separate entities.
aidan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I don’t know anything about him, but the criticism of them spending money on donating to other charities rather than focusing on making Mozilla’s core projects sustainable IMO is correct.
spaduf@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
I don’t think this is a money making move. The previous CEO was absolutely overly focused on monetization and this move is a step away from that.
ReveredOxygen@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Cloud AI is, but for local AI, they only need to incinerate enough money to train it. That’s none if they just end up using mixtral or something
aidan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I agree it’s probably not for money making, that’s my point, its instead that their management doesn’t know how to spend money.