For a long time, Mozilla was synonymous with the Firefox browser, but in recent years, Mozilla has begun to look beyond Firefox, especially as the importance of its browser continues to decline. In recent years, Mozilla has also begun making investments, including Mastodon client Mammoth, for example, and acquiring Fakespot, a website and browser extension that helps users identify fake reviews. The organization also launched Mozilla.ai to bring more of its open source ethos to the AI space. It's no surprise that the organization is focusing on AI right now. In fact, when Mozilla released its annual report a few weeks ago, it also took advantage of that moment to add several new members to its Board of Directors, most of which focus on AI.
Mozilla President and CEO Mark Surman commented, “Over the last year and a half, we've been focused on making a pretty dramatic change at Mozilla: making it not just more than the browser, but also more than just our type of browser. activist personality and build a kind of portfolio that prepares us, and prepares others, to go and carry our values into the age of AI or the next era of the Internet, whatever you want to call it.”
Mozilla AI
Mozilla released Mozilla.ai right around the time GPT-4 was released and the first Llama models became widely available. Surman described this as a “moment of focus” for the organization “towards AI in Mozilla, which had a broad mandate to find trustworthy, open source AI opportunities and build a business around them. Quickly, Moez who runs it, talked about how to take advantage of the growing snowball of large open source language models and find a way to accelerate that snowball but also make sure that it moves in a direction that matches our goals and our pocket.
While Mozilla did put some pressure on the launch of its AI efforts, there hasn't really been much movement in that area from the organization since then. Surman said the leadership team had been planning these efforts for almost a year, but as public interest in AI grew, they "pulled it out the door."
After that Draief practically put him back into mode secretive to focus on what to do next. “From a general standpoint, where we are positioning ourselves to make it easy to use any of the big open source language models in a reliable, privacy-sensitive and affordable way.”
Right now, Surman argued, it remains difficult for most developers, and even more so for most consumers, to run their own models, even as more open source models are seemingly released every day. "What Mozilla.ai is really focused on is almost building a container that you can put around any large open source language model to wrap it around, build data pipelines for it, and make it high performance."
What exactly this will look like remains to be seen, but it looks like we'll be hearing quite a bit more in the coming months. Meanwhile, the open source communities and AI are still figuring out what exactly open source AI will look like. Surman believes that regardless of the details, the general principles of transparency and freedom to study the code, modify it and redistribute it will remain key.
“Is it just the freedom to redistribute the finished model? Is it the ability to study what's inside? Is it to know what the weights are, to see what the data was? I think we're still working through all of those questions. We're probably leaning towards everything being open source, at least in a spiritual sense. The licenses are not perfect and we are going to do a lot of work in the first half of next year with some of the others open source projects to clarify some of those definitions and give people some mental models.”
Surman believes that open source AI is a necessary component to making the next era of the Internet open and accessible to all, but alone it is not enough.
With a small group of very well-funded players currently dominating the AI market, he believes the various open source groups will need to come together to collectively create alternatives. He compared it to the early open source era – and especially the Linux movement – which aimed to create an alternative to Microsoft. Then, he noted, when the smartphone arrived, there were some smaller projects aiming to create alternatives, including Mozilla, and in essence, Android is obviously open source as well, even as Google and others have built walled gardens around the real user and experience. However, those efforts were not as successful.
However, Surman appears to be optimistic about Mozilla's positioning in this new era of AI and its ability to use it to further its mission and create a sustainable business model around it. “All this we are going to do is in the type of service of our mission. And I think part of that will have to be purely a public good,” he said. “And public goods can be paid for in different ways, with our own resources, with philanthropy or with people who pool resources. […] It is a kind of business model, but it is not commercial per se. And then what we're building around community AI will hopefully have real business value if we can help people leverage great open source language models, effectively and quickly, in a way that's valuable to them and cheaper than using open source AI. That is our hope.”
So what's next for Firefox
Where does all this leave the Firefox browser? Surman argued that the organization is very responsible for bringing AI to the browser, but he also believes that AI will become part of everything Mozilla does. “We want to implement AI in a way that is reliable and benefits people,” he said. Fakespot is an example of this, but the bigger picture is broader. "I think that's what you'll see from us, over the course of the next year, is how to use the browser as something that represents you and how to build AI into the browser that's basically on your side as you move." via Internet?" He noted that an Edge-like chatbot in a sidebar could be one way to do this, but he seems to be thinking more in terms of an assistant that helps you summarize articles and perhaps notifies you proactively. “I think we will see the browser evolve. In our case, that is to protect you more and help you more. “I think it's more about using the predictive and synthesis capabilities of those tools to make moving around the Internet easier and safer.”
In the early days of Firefox, people stayed away from other browsers because Firefox was much better at blocking annoying pop-up ads. Now, Surman maintains, Mozilla needs to think about what the equivalent of pop-up blocking is for today's users. “The question we ask ourselves now is: What is the pop-up blocker in the age of AI? What will people really want to defend them and improve their Internet experience?
