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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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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t disagree with using unbiased data, but where is yours?
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.
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
So we’ve moved from “no tech-savvy people use AI!” to “lots of tech-savvy people use AI, but many of them fail to make it profitable!”
The Commerce Institute puts that 95% figure in perspective, about 65.3% of all businesses fail by their tenth year. That’s not focusing just on a particular industry that’s the most unknown and volatile one, that’s everything, including fields that have been well known and understood for decades. And I should also note, your source said 95% had yet to grow their revenue, not that 95% had failed - it’s only been a year or two for most.
Your own source provides some other bits of information that support my view, too. Just look past the bias in how it’s worded.
Previous tests show even the most advanced AI products successfully complete only about 30 percent of assigned office tasks.
Wow, only 30% of office tasks can be handled by AI? Clearly a useless technology, throw it away.
Or maybe 30% is actually quite an impressive number. Wouldn’t you like something that handles 30% of your routine work for you?
Gartner’s survey of 163 business executives found that half have abandoned plans to dramatically cut customer service staff by 2027.
So, half of them haven’t abandoned those plans.
Research from GoTo and Workplace Intelligence found that 62 percent of workers believe AI is “significantly overhyped.”
I don’t see a link to that research, but that means 38% don’t believe AI is significantly overhyped.
I never said everyone liked AI, just that lots of tech-savvy people did. I think 38% would count as null
Basically, you’re falling into the trap of assuming if something’s not perfect and not universally loved then it must be awful and universally hated. Communities like this reinforce that view, but the real world outside these digital walls is not like that.
AI “engineer” shill says what?
