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Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI: Read the memo (techcrunch.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml
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[–] 27 points 2 years ago (2 children)

AI in Firefox? Damn, guess it's time to use a fork

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  • [–] 62 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It's not just about AI in Firefox, but rather making an open-sourced AI in general. The world is absolutely heading towards AI integrations being normal; personally I'm glad we've got Mozilla working on an AI rather than being limited to closed-source AIs made by for-profit companies.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    This is basically how I see it. Whether we like it or not, its happening. Claiming it won't at this point is just as silly as all the people who claimed the internet was just a fad.

    Better to have options, long as it's optional I don't have many issues with it.

    Now if it's rammed down our throats, that's an entirely different story.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    See ya in two years when AI is dead and mozilla is pivoting to "focus on the fundamentals" and only works on the browser

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    • [–] 20 points 2 years ago

    "right-sizing the team" 🤮

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    [–] 17 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    What is it with all this AI bollocks 🤷🏻‍♂️

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Heh. I noticed in the article that Mozilla is regretting betting heavily on VR. Good thing they're moving those resources into something sure to win, like AI.

    "Since early 2023, we have experienced a shift in the market for 3D virtual worlds. With the exception of gaming, education, and a handful of niche use cases, demand has moved away from 3D virtual worlds. "

    Who could have predicted that AI VR, while potentially compelling in the long term, was, in the current form, just a fad, in 2024 2014?

    A bunch of us did, but we were told we didn't understand how truly revolutionary the technology was.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    LLM AI is a fad, but not the same kind of fad as VR. It doesn't need to be integrated into everything, but the technology has genuine utility and will not be going away.

    I think the trend for "AI in everything" is stupid, yet I'm running a Vscode plugin that integrates local LLM models and it's very useful.

    This is the same sort of thing that can be useful in a browser too. The web is so spammy these days that feeding it to an LLM to summarize and filter it is a legitimate use case.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago*

    So, the consumer tech industry relies on hyping up technologies and blanket applying them EVERYWHERE in order to get investor funds. That's literally the reason why. There's investor money in AI and there's also money to be made by lying to people and having them pay for AI-based services.

    The answer, as always, is capitalism.

    When we're off this AI hype train, keep an eye out for what the "next big thing" is according to techbros and examine it very critically.

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  • [–] -5 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    It is where the future is headed. Companies either hop on the bandwagon or get left behind.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    They said that about Virtual Reality in 2014.

    I'm still regretting how left behind I am, personally, by Virtual Reality. /s

    Edit: Although, honestly, my Gameboy 3DS still absolutely rocks. It was worth the hype, and still is, today.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    I already use AI for a lot of stuff including my job. Still waiting vr and crypto to change the world :|

    They're not the same

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I couldn't find any kind of history of tech bubbles that wasn't pro-bubble. Going backwards: "AI", VR, Blockchain/Crypto, ..., Dot Com bubble? I feel like there have to be more examples in there that I'm missing.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    The dotcom bubble is a good example of a bubble that's different from VR and crypto.

    Massive investments, lots of dumb projects, the underlying tech (the web) still finds widespread use and past the bubble, the dotcom projects that survived are still a massive industry

    People think bubbles necessarily collapse to zero because that's what web3 did. It just means the market is inflated

    Most of the times they have some value under the hype

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    • [+] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)
    [removed by mod]
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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago*

    Brave isn't trustworthy at all. They have all that scammy crypto shit, replace ads with their own ads instead (which is trash because they were misleading people and pretending it was helping folks) and used to append Amazon links with their own referral code automatically.

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    • [–] [B] 5 points 2 years ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    After installing a new interim CEO earlier this month, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is making some major changes to its product strategy, TechCrunch has learned.

    Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago.

    Going forward, the company said in an internal memo, Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml.

    Mozilla started expanding its product portfolio in recent years, all while its flagship product, Firefox, kept losing market share.

    And while the organization was often sharply criticized for this, its leadership argued that diversifying its product portfolio beyond Firefox was necessary to ensure Mozilla’s survival in the long run.

    Firefox, after all, provided the vast majority of Mozilla’s income, but it also meant the organization was essentially dependent on Google to continue this deal.

    The original article contains 234 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 29%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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    [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Right-sizing the People Team

    Sounds like mckinsey speaking

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    [+] -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago)
    [deleted]
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