Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”

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  • circuscritic@lemmy.ca
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    27 days ago

    Their user base is almost exclusively tech savvy people, the same people who are most opposed to AI.

    I think this move signals that they believe we have nowhere else to go, and they’re daring us to go fuck ourselves, because fuck you, what are you going to do, use Chrome?

    Yes, yes I will, well Chromium forks.

    In general, I prefer the look and feel of chromium-based browsers, but I use Firefox and Firefox forks for the reasons that I’m sure everyone here is aware of.

    If those reasons go away, I’ll just switch to Vivaldi as my primary browser. I won’t be happy about it, but if Firefox becomes another AI slop project. I might as well go with the browser whose UX I prefer.

    • Supervisor194@lemmy.world
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      27 days ago

      Yes, yes I will, well Chromium forks.

      Yeah, I’m not going to switch to a Manifest V3 browser because Firefox puts in access to an optional AI agent. If Firefox makes it so you can’t turn it off, which I wouldn’t think is likely, I might switch to something like Librewolf, but Chromium? No.

    • Digit@lemmy.wtf
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      27 days ago

      Librewolf, or Ladybird, or dillo, or links2 or lynx, or heck, even brave!

      Luakit’s still a thing. Or vimb. Or qutebrowser. I miss uzbl. Uzbl was the best.

      No need to use proprietary wrapped Vivaldi.

    • DrDystopia@lemy.lol
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      27 days ago

      I did exactly this a while back. And as a self protection mechanism I’ve just completely written off Mozilla products as free falling in the enshittification process. I don’t care enough to be disappointed any more, it’s much nicer this way.

    • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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      27 days ago

      Why do you say that tech savvy people are “most opposed to AI?” Don’t conflate “the membership of this small social media bubble called ‘technology’” with tech-savvy people in general. Lots of tech savvy people are developing and using AI, where else do you think it’s coming from?

      The problem here is that we’ve got a small crowd with a strong opinion, constantly shouting their opinion to each other and making an unfriendly environment to anyone who doesn’t share that opinion. So of course it seems like “everyone” shares that opinion, you never see otherwise.

      • FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io
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        27 days ago

        Most people in tech that I know hate AI, including devs. I know one manager who is gung ho for it but everyone is annoyed by him and he was already well known for going apeshit over whatever the latest tech buzzword is before the whole AI craze kicked off.

        Anecdotal I suppose, but IMO, most people who are actually technical seem to treat AI with a good degree of skepticism if not outright disdain.

        • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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          27 days ago

          Most people in tech that I know hate AI

          Emphasis added. We all live inside social bubbles, if one wants to talk about what most people in general believe then one must use data from beyond that. Otherwise you’re going to get a very biased sample, since we generally choose to associate with people who share our own personal values.

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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              27 days ago

              Data for the claim that lots of tech-savvy people are developing and using AI? Some of the biggest tech companies in the world right now have an AI focus. NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, they’re all making massive use of AI. If you want to discount “corporate” tech-savvy people, This page indicates 15 million developers are using GitHub Copilot. Linus Torvalds has spoken in favor of using AI to maintain Linux, if you’d like someone specific and big-name as an example.

              • Jhex@lemmy.world
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                27 days ago

                the keyword word you missed was “unbiased”

                of course the AI peddlers will peddle it and their employees would probably be fired if they did not toe the company line

                on the otheer hand, that mit studyshowed 95v of them failed… I find it hard to believe people enjoy failing

              • baines@lemmy.cafe
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                27 days ago

                tech bros and their employees lmao

                and Linus has said some stupid shit over the years

                  • baines@lemmy.cafe
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                    27 days ago

                    tech bros are some of the least savvy anything

                    Linus loves to say stupid shit and walk it back later

    • darkkite@lemmy.ml
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      27 days ago

      the same people who are most opposed to AI.

      programmers almost exclusively use LLM

          • ThisSeriesIsFalse@lemmy.ca
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            27 days ago

            Not elitist to say that people who use what are essentially weighted random word generators for programming, a career that requires one to know exactly how their code works in case it breaks, are bad at their jobs. Just like how it’s not elitist to say that generated images are not art, and that flying a plane into a building doesn’t make you a good pilot.

            • darkkite@lemmy.ml
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              27 days ago

              a career that requires one to know exactly how their code works in case it breaks

              Using AI doesn’t mean that you lose the ability to reason, debug, or test generated code. All code merge should be peer-reviewed and tested

              We’re not discussing images, nor planes.

              The claim was tech savvy people, the same people who are most opposed to AI.

              There’s data that to suggest otherwise. people who are technically inclined engage with AI more and have a more positive reception compared to less experienced users.

              Unless you have additional data to support that they are in-fact “dog-shit programmers”, this appears to be an emotional claim colored by your own personal bias. Though if you’re a “pure” programmer who is better than the dog-shit developers I would love to see some of your work or writings.