Mozilla's open source AI strategy

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-open-source-ai-strategy/

by nalinidash • 6 months ago

192 198 6 months ago

blog.mozilla.org

oidar• 6 months ago

That sounds admirable. But it doesn't sound like a fast browser.

everyday77323• 6 months ago

That's because the article isn't about a browser - it's a tech stack for running ai.

fooqux• 6 months ago

Well it does say that compute is a current bottleneck, but I doubt that'll stay that way forever. There's a ton of resources going into making AI run locally, quickly. It's already gotten loads better just last year.

striking2• 6 months ago

Maybe, but I would argue that some of these features are genuinely useful and important. Take translation, for example. It's not great to have to send off a page that potentially contains identifying content to Google, but it is the easiest way to handle the matter. Firefox uses local AI to perform a decent translation relatively quickly, and I'd like them to work on improving that capability.

bondarchuk• 6 months ago

Many things that are not browsers are genuinely useful and important, this alone doesn't mean Mozilla should be doing them.

bluebarbet• 6 months ago

Agreed on all counts. Right now there's not even a keyboard shortcut implemented (fiddly context menu only), and the translations are sometimes dodgy too, but I still use it. It's such peace of mind to know that the translation is happening entirely locally.

LunaSea7• 6 months ago

I'm really not optimistic about this initiative.

- Mozilla.ai agent platform: No link with the browser. Just a closed-source SaaS competitor to the many existing agentic platforms like LangChain / LangGraph.

- Mozilla Data Collective: It's been made clear now that sadly data licensing doesn't matter and if you use less data than your competitor, your model will be inferior.

- Real deployments: Basically getting into the public contracts and consulting grift with no priori experience. Probably banking on EU open source funding & co.

- Mozilla Ventures: Redistributing a token amount of the money they are already not making (gift from Google) to fund Open Source research.

- Newsletter

everyday77323• 6 months ago

Looks like the Mozilla.ai platform is Saas but the tools themselves are open source, so you could just use them elsewhere.

LunaSea7• 6 months ago

Indeed, but LangChain / LangGraph tools are also Open Source so its not really Mozilla bringing their Open Source culture as a differentiating factor from their competitors.

drnick16• 6 months ago

Mozilla has stopped being relevant to open source long ago. It's are every bit as corporate as Google these days.

cubefox• 6 months ago

That's completely false!

pacman1337• 6 months ago

You probably like watching ads because Firefox is only browser you will have a true ad free experience. Unfortunately Firefox is slower than chrome has less support for audio, copy pasting is broken etc. So I use both depending what I am doing.

marczellm• 6 months ago

What's a hyperscn/laller?

realberkeaslan• 6 months ago

Hyperscalers (e.g., Azure, Google Cloud, AWS)

nusl2• 6 months ago

I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.

rzmmm2• 6 months ago

I'm hopeful. The open source AI ecosystem could benefit from large players like Mozilla making moves.

wolvoleo3• 6 months ago

In what world is Mozilla large?

Larrikin• 6 months ago

There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect. Sometimes with valid complaints. But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome and justifies it over Firefox for a very shallow or outdated reason. Firefox would do well to listen to some of the criticism about the browser and ignore the noise about anything else

There's also the cohort of bad web developers that only test on Chrome

pjmlp3• 6 months ago

Including everyone that ships Chrome with their application as "native" app.

VSCode gets a pass, because apparently it is the only programmer's editor that many only care about providing plugins nowadays.

morcus2• 6 months ago

As someone that uses Firefox as my main browser on desktop and mobile, I am curious here - what exactly are the complaints with Firefox?

I'm using 3+ year old hardware that was mid-range even when it was new and it seems to do everything I would want with reasonable performance.

wolvoleo3• 6 months ago

I use Firefox almost exclusively on desktop and android and I'm still pretty critical of it.

Especially because I know I'm one of very few people that uses it that much.

EvanAnderson• 6 months ago

There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.

I don't have a problem w/ Firefox not being perfect. I have a problem with the Mozilla Foundation spending money on seemingly random other stuff and not on Firefox.

account42• 6 months ago

But if you dig deeper nearly always the commenter is using a version of Chrome

Pure cope

lamontcg3• 6 months ago

It really seems like all the complaints about firefox are mostly ego-deflection.

People know it is wrong to stay on Chrome and empower Google to the extent that it is, but they're stuck on that workflow and don't want to change, so they find nits to pick about firefox and get very LOUD about that. Then it becomes Mozill's fault that they're still using Chrome, and you can't blame them for anything.

pessimizer2• 6 months ago

There is always a pile on on Firebox for not being perfect.

Nobody has ever complained about anything not being perfect. That's just something dishonest people say when they want to avoid mentioning specific criticisms.

giancarlostoro7• 6 months ago

The other problem is, they will eventually axe this initiative if it doesn't produce anything meaningful to them, and will have been wasted resources that could have gone to Firefox itself.

mmooss2• 6 months ago

I guess replies on this thread are evident that Mozilla has lost much of the trust and goodwill it once enjoyed. Admittedly I am also very skeptical that Mozilla has the ability or genuine interest to make this work.

That reverses cause and effect to a great degree. Many are very skeptical because they read everyone slamming it. It's a mob psychology.

Yoric10• 6 months ago

I feel that, at some point around the Brendan Eich-gate, the Internet decided that Mozilla was always wrong. Change the shape of tabs? We received rape threats. Change it back? Bomb threats. Bringing in new APIs for add-ons that make Firefox faster, more secure, more stable and doesn't break all the time? No, we want addon $X, we don't care about security.

I'm not going to claim that everything Mozilla has done is right, but the bad will of the tech crowd is a bit exhausting.

Writing this as a former Firefox contributor.

steveklabnik3• 6 months ago

I never worked on Firefox, and am often critical of Mozilla, but I can second this sentiment. It's seemed like everything Mozilla does makes everyone mad, all the time. It's frustrating.

encom5• 6 months ago

As a former Firefox user, I got fed up with the constant change for the sake of change. Why change the tabs? They were fine the way they were. People got mad about the addon situation since it broke their workflows because of vague technical reasons. And Mozilla usually ignored user protests while pointing at telemetry, and did whatever they wanted to, users be damned.

At least that's how it looked from this side. I switched to Vivaldi some 4-5 years ago, and it looks and works pretty much the same since I started using it. New features and changes have happened, but they've been able to be ignored/disabled/hidden without doing CSS brain surgery.

If/when the Google Adblockerblocker changes trickles down to Vivaldi I may have to crawl back to Firefox, but I dread the prospect.

ofrzeta• 6 months ago

It's the "vocal minority", right? Sure it's not fun to receive threats but it's a known fact that communicating over the Internet makes people unhinged. Maybe there's stuff to complain about but I am a happy Firefox user for .. what? over two decades! :) so, thanks for that.

ACCount37• 6 months ago

If no one is sending you stupid threats online, are you even alive?

nusl2• 6 months ago

I get that. Somehow this feels different. Mozilla recently changing the privacy policy I think caused a bunch of it, and then leaning heavily into AI initiatives at a time where I think people just don't want it, contributes too.

It feels deeper somehow than just raging at UI changes or something, since the FAQ change basically betrays what Mozilla has been touting all along, so the trust in their future promises is hurt a lot too. Willingness to change this indicates some kind of internal change that doesn't bode well.

Sure, it's probable that their intent was not the way it was interpreted but we only have what they say to go on. We don't read into things like lawyers or give companies the benefit of the doubt; almost every time this happens it hurts the user.

philipallstar• 6 months ago

Mozilla was born to change this, and Firefox succeeded beyond what most people thought possible — dropping Internet Explorer’s market share to 55% in just a few years and ushering in the Web 2.0 era.

Is this true? I can see from here[0] that its peak was 32%, as IE was really on the back burner but before Chrome had fully risen to dominance, but I wouldn't claim that it was responsible for IE's market share drop.

[0] https://mspoweruser.com/firefox-statistics

codebyaditya• 6 months ago

You’re right on the numbers....Firefox never had majority share. The stronger claim is causal influence, not dominance. I recently read somewhere that the Firefox (and later Chrome) forced standards compliance and broke IE’s de-facto monopoly mindset. IE’s decline was gradual and multi-factor, but Firefox clearly shifted developer and user expectations.

angoragoats• 6 months ago

No one is claiming, here or in the article, that Firefox ever had a majority share.

I don’t know if the 55% number for IE is 100% correct but it sounds like the right ballpark to me. The browser market was a lot more fragmented 15+ years ago, so saying that IE had 55% market share and Firefox had 32%, leaving 13% for other browsers, sounds completely right to me.

diffeomorphism• 6 months ago

When do you think the "web 2.0 era" was?

Web 2.0 is around 2003 or so and chrome would not even exist for another few years. Giving Firefox/phoenix/Netscape the majority credit for the first fall of IE seems accurate.

The rise of chrome happened afterwards and by then IE also fell much deeper than 55%.

freedomben3• 6 months ago

Yeah, my anecdotal memories aren't worth much, but in that era it was all IE or Firefox. Even once Chrome came along it still took quite some time before I noticed it popping up on normie people's systems.

LamaOfRuin• 6 months ago

Opera was also essential at this point, not in terms of market share, but of innovation in the browser space with features that would eventually spread to everything else.

linuxftw• 6 months ago

I think this is a good initiative. Having major software components be part of foundations, rather than single-vendor backed, is always a good thing. TBD if this succeeds or not, but I think they are doing a good thing here.

maxdo• 6 months ago

A render css company will try to change the future of ai

brainless• 6 months ago

I like the high level points but unless Mozilla finds revenue from this, are they not doing too much with mostly donation based revenue?

conartist6• 6 months ago

Being the agent of the user isn't particularly profitable. For example: companies want the users to be shown ads, and users generally don't want to be shown ads. But profit, which is to say money you make without having to directly work for it, comes from selling the user's interests away. Like, perhaps, choosing to take a bribe to cement Google's search monopoly, a fundamentally anticompetitive behavior which, even as it makes cash for Mozilla, costs the web far, far more.

They've lost their way completely as an independent entity, and a post like this that doesn't reaaally seem to grasp that weight of that conundrum comes no closer to convincing me that they can find their way back to the light.

glenstein16• 6 months ago

I think you're right but I suspect that's the point. AI may be eating into search, and that could threaten their search licensing deal. Apple just struck a deal with Google to use Gemini, though it sounds like Apple paying Google for the privilege. Ominous if you're a browser company looking to sell a license for a preferred AI tool.

whinvik• 6 months ago

I will be honest. I love that post, makes me want to go see what they are doing.

However, I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.

bigbadfeline• 6 months ago

I'll be honest, when I see another "Hate Firefox" fest, I ask only one question "Quo bono?"

I haven't seen anything from Mozilla in recent years that makes me trust this has a future.

As opposed to what? Chrome? What's the future there?

The various Firefox derivatives will die a quick death if Firefox dies. The strings attached to Chrome derivatives make them pointless. So, what's left? What are we discussing here? There's no alternative, it's that simple.

On the other hand, joining the hate-fest on various forums cannot and does not help Mozilla to find a better way. One is peeved by this, another by that, go figure... I'd call it childish if it wasn't so damaging.

pjmlp3• 6 months ago

What I care about is the non-existent Firefox strategy, but Mozilla is making me not care to fully embrace ChromeOS Platform.

rafterydj• 6 months ago

I'll be contrarian to the thread sentiment and say: Mozilla has misstepped in the past, and will continue to do so, and they're partially funded by competitors for antitrust reasons, etc.

That said, I can't really disagree with anything in this. As a developer (and socially conscious human) I want to move in the direction of openness.

giancarlostoro7• 6 months ago

I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!

I would love for there to be a world where Mozilla maintains Firefox and can make for product projects that provide higher value. I also have a pipe dream of one day someone like (and if they read this, and anyone who reads this will think I'm crazy) CloudFlare just buys Firefox itself from Mozilla so it can finally be funded correctly. CloudFlare has an interesting talent pool and I'm sure there's people who work with Rust / have worked with Rust who can help fund something like Firefox. Then I would like to see them create a true open foundation whose entire bottom line goes towards Firefox, not to anything else.

Free the fox from corporate shennanigans. By my own corporate shennanigans. And CF could be swapped out with any company bold enough to free the fox.

dralley3• 6 months ago

I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser, we see the things they do outside of Mozilla, I mean it was so bad Thunderbird had to become its own foundation due to lack of funding!

And then people simultaneously complain that Mozilla is reliant on Google for funding. There are not many good revenue options available for a browser other than selling search defaults - and AI may start choking off that revenue as well - but Mozilla also can't touch AI without being screamed at.

I mean, even literally this one sentence is self-contradictory. Thunderbird is not their browser. You complain that they "invest more effort into everything other than their browser" and then complain that they don't invest enough in Thunderbird.

No win situation for them in terms of public opinion.

* They can't get diversify their revenue to be less dependent on Google without doing things that people view as "distractions"

* They don't get credit when the "distractions" are for the public good, like LetsEncrypt, Rust, Opus / AV1, etc.

* They get punished for de-prioritizing "distractions" like Thunderbird and Servo and Rust because those distractions are popular.

* For years they were simultaneously being dragged for dropping the XUL extension ecosystem, and also dragged for low performance and lack of multiprocessing and a bunch of other things which were being kneecapped hard by the XUL extension ecosystem.

It's not like I love their management or anything, certainly they've made mistakes, but the narcissism of small differences hits them with full force relative to every other competitor in the space.

shafyy• 6 months ago

Sure, it's not like CloudFare centralizes enough of the internet infrastructure, let's also give them one of the few (more or less) independent browsers.

Vinnl3• 6 months ago

At the same time, Firefox last year gained tab groups, vertical tabs, a user-friendly profile switcher. Split view and tab notes are under development. It sometimes feels like it's moving faster than ever, and that's disregarding all AI features.

(Disclosure: I work at Mozilla, but not on Firefox.)

glenstein16• 6 months ago

I think the problem many of us have is it feels like Mozilla invests more effort into everything other than its browser,

Unfortunately the side bets are disproportionately visible relative to the vast majority of what they actually do, which is ship millions of lines of code in browser improvements every quarter, keeping pace with Google despite a fraction of Google's resources.

I certainly think a better strategic partner than Google would be ideal. Yahoo had a strategically promising moment that slipped through its fingers that I think will always be a what-if. Cloudflare is interesting because they're very much a create-a-blue-ocean kind of company, and the problem with browsers has always been that the browser space simply isn't a revenue driver, it's something you subsidize from other businesses.

Firefox is, remarkably, the most successful self funded browser engine in the history of the world, but many great companies have come and gone in this space (e.g. Opera) and still fell behind. They invest more in the browser now than they ever have, they have shipped more production Rust code than anybody. But that's not louder than the noise in the modern internet.

I think you're right that someone like Cloudflare would be an interesting partner and I can't think of a better one off the top of my head. And if AI is eclipsing search, that threatens search licensing they're currently relying on. I don't know what AI in the browser is, what new norms, what new expectations, what core concepts are going to matter the most. But something is going to change and you have to get out ahead of that now, to be relevant tomorrow.

pcmaffey• 6 months ago

It’s an interesting choice to frame this initiative around “open AI”. That’s quite a battle to pick right out of the gate.

drnick16• 6 months ago

The open source community will start taking Firefox seriously again when all the AI shit is removed for good and real improvements to performance and privacy are made.

Despite all the posturing about "respecting your privacy and freedom," the stock configuration of Firefox is trivially fingerprintable. At the very least, a privacy-focused browser should adopt the Tor patches and report standardized spoofed values for hardware components and disable by default all privacy invasive anti-features like WebGL. This isn't difficult to do, but illustrates the gap between empty promises and what is actually delivered.

plagiarist• 6 months ago

I am going with the Waterfox / Librewolf forks

freedomben3• 6 months ago

I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people (aka, "why doesn't this site work in FF, FF sucks!" because they don't know they have to enable something). If Firefox becomes a browser that is harder to use then it will only ever be used by the extremely small niche of people that care about that. That will only further lead to more "not tested on Firefox" web development. I already have to have Chrome available on my machine because of sites like Ramp.com and Mailgun that don't work on Firefox, and that would only get worse.

drnick16• 6 months ago

I'd definitely love to see them take some steps, but at the points where a minor increase in privacy leads to a much worse UX for average people

Disabling Javascript or even just third party scripts does lead to major breakage, but reporting spoofed values for identifiers like Tor does not. The Arkenfox user.js does all of this and more, but these options are not enabled by default. This shows that Firefox does not care much about privacy in practice.

The only "breakage" that I have encountered with such a hardened configuration is related to the spoofing of the time zone. But the fundamental issue is that Javascript/browsers should have not been designed to allow websites to extract this kind of personal information in the first place. But even that is not enough and users are still fingerprintable. In an ideal world, the only thing a website should see is the originating IP and nothing else.

If anything, Brave has done more to harden Chromium than Mozilla has with Firefox, even though Brave comes with its own set of problems (scammy crypto integrations, AI, VPN and other stuff).

encom5• 6 months ago

only ever be used by the extremely small niche[...]

Isn't that pretty much the current situation?

fwip• 6 months ago

Unfortunately, the guys in charge at Mozilla are clearly enamored with AI. They like it so much (and value users so little), that they'll let it write the whole damn PR blog post about company strategy.

sfink• 6 months ago

Yes, it's the stock configuration to be not broken. If you are ok with breakage in exchange for less fingerprinting, the config setting privacy.resistFingerprinting is right there: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/resist-fingerprinting

It is an uplift from Tor, and I believe Tor just enables it in their build, though it doesn't end up being quite the same. Tor is always going to be better for this.

But turning it on in the stock Firefox configuration would be suicide in terms of market share. When "I want maximal privacy" fights "I want this site to work", guess which one wins?

Yoric10• 6 months ago

It's a really hard line to walk.

If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.

On the other hand, if you return spoofed values, it means that Firefox developers cannot debug platform/hardware-specific crashes. If you disable Telemetry, improving performance becomes impossible, because you're suddenly unable to determine where your users suffer. If you remove WebGL, plenty of websites suddenly stop working, and people assume that Firefox is broken.

encom5• 6 months ago

Sure, but then don't go grandstanding about privacy. You can't have both.

And saying that improving performance is impossible without it is hyperbolic. Developers did that before every major application turned into actual spyware. Profilers still work without it.

drnick16• 6 months ago

If you put too much in your Telemetry/crash reports, yeah, users become fingerprintable.

It's not only what gets send to Mozilla as telemetry or crash reports that is a problem. That can be turned off (many Linux distros do), or firewalled.

The main issue is that websites can more or less accurately identify users uniquely by extracting information that they should not have access to if the browser was designed with privacy in mind.

This includes, but is not limited to, fonts installed, system language, time zone, window size, browser version, hardware information (number of cores, device memory), canvas fingerprint, and many others attributes. When you combine all of that with the originating IP address, you can reliably determine who visited a website, because that information is shared and correlated with services where people identify themselves (Google accounts, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) Even masking your IP may not be enough because typically there is enough information in the other data points to track you already.

catapart• 6 months ago

So: Are you in?

Nope! Very happy to be entirely out, thanks.

mentalgear• 6 months ago

Like many here on HN, I’m skeptical, also about Mozilla, but the blog post is compelling in its plan plus there’s a new CEO in town.

So I think what we can do is give them the benefit of the doubt and approach this with cautious optimism for now instead of just negativity.

vuggamie• 6 months ago

The new CEO centered AI ("It's Time to Evolve Firefox Into an AI Browser") in his first communication to the community. Spawned at least three new forks and introduced people to LibreWolf.

His first communication reduced trust: "It is a privilege to lead an organization with a long history of standing up for people and building technology that puts them first."

Now let's put people first by making Firefox an AI first browser. Enzor-Demeo would have made an excellent Microsoft product manager. Too bad he didn't get the job.

NelsonMinar• 6 months ago

New CTO too. This post is written by Raffi Krikorian who joined in September. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozilla-welco...

tomcam2• 6 months ago

How about finishing Servo?

fyrn_• 6 months ago

They've fully disowned Servo. On the plus side that means you can donate to Servo directly, and the project actually has a decent amount of contributors now

tomcam2• 6 months ago

Duly donated $100. Thanks.

PedroBatista• 6 months ago

Good decision for a change, now looking at execution track record and ability to stick with it..

yeah, that's where the bad news start.

They have a tendency to go from trend to trend and always a "me too, I'm here" player. Deliver first and stick with it, Mozilla's goodwill fund is long gone to be excited about "mission statements".

rubyfan• 6 months ago

Now AI is becoming the new intermediary. It’s what I’ve started calling “Layer 8” — the agentic layer that mediates between you and everything else on the internet. These systems will negotiate on our behalf, filter our information, shape our recommendations, and increasingly determine how we interact with the entire digital world.

This is a sad statement. It reminds me of Wall-E. Big tech created the environmental ruins of today’s internet through perverse incentives. Now we need robots to go sift through the garbage and think for us so we don’t have to be exposed to the toxic internet.

It feels like we have lost so much.

zb3• 6 months ago

So: Are you in?

No, I just want Mozilla to focus on Firefox, the browser.

TomMasz• 6 months ago

As a long-time Firefox user, I don't want them to have an "AI strategy", I want them to have a browser improvement strategy.

luisgvv• 6 months ago

Agree, I'm not the kind of guy that has 100 tabs open (10 at the time I'm typing this), but when I came back 2 years ago I noticed that it isn't as snappy and fast as it used to be 15 years ago before I switched to Chrome.

culi2• 6 months ago

Firefox has improved significantly. It's improvement strategy is mostly focused on what developers ask them to focus on. They've had great performance on the yearly interops

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2021

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2022

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2023

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2024

https://wpt.fyi/interop-2025

knowitnone32• 6 months ago

what developers do they still have. their dev console is so bad compared to Chrome. Mozilla abandoned their user base and the users have moved on.

283042834092342• 6 months ago

Please let me pay for Firefox and have the proceed fund Firefox directly. This is not 1999 anymore. We are all wealthy grown ups now.

pmontra• 6 months ago

Yes, but how large is the subset of Firefox users that are willing to pay for a browser? Take that number and multiply it either by 10 o by 100 and you get the order of magnitude.

I googled this https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1mhks3h/firefoxs_w...

Let's say we are at 100 million users. If only 1 out of 100 pay, it's 10 to 100 million dollars per year. A lot of money or a puny amount, it depends.

rpastuszak• 6 months ago

a) It’s insane how little we pay for browsers given their utility. b) Many people would be happy to pay extra for a browser to support free access for others (The Guardian was a decent example of that IIRC).

283042834092342• 6 months ago

And they claim to have at least 200 million users. If 1% pays a yearly fee of 10 dollars, surely that's enough to fund development.

AuthAuth2• 6 months ago

Agreed, I subscript to random Mozilla products like VPN and Relay to pay them but I dont need those and would hate to have them waste extra development time on improving those services. I would rather fund the browser directly.

glenstein16• 6 months ago

Even the most successful online annual fundraising drive that exists, Wikipedia, raises less than half of what Mozilla gets annually from search licensing. And Mozilla in a best case scenario probably can't match Wikipedia's fundraising for a number of reasons.

It would feel good and I certainly wouldn't mind it, but it's much closer to a drop in the bucket than a panacea.

mkroman3• 6 months ago

I don't understand how they expect offline LLM models to work in a meaningful capacity for users.. Isn't there a single multilingual person working at Mozilla?

All of the small LLM models break down as soon as you try to do something that isn't written in English, because - surprise - they're just too small.

There would need to be a hardware breakthrough, or they would have to somehow solve the heavy cost of switching the models between pages.

Instead of useful AI stuff that is a clear improvement to accessibility, they're insistent on ham-fisting LLM solutions that no one have even asked for.

Off the top of my head, they could instead:

1. Integrate something like whisper to add automatic captions to videos or transcribe audio

2. Integrate one of the many really great text to speech models to read articles or text out loud

capitainenemo3• 6 months ago

Mozilla did integrate TTS into Firefox - in fact, one of the better FOSS TTS AI models out their was their initiative. https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

mkroman3• 6 months ago

Ah yeah, there's this: https://github.com/mozilla/TTS

I can't seem to find anything that mentions a Firefox integration though?

b10854362• 6 months ago

I genuinely don't understand the "permissioned data" assumption. Presumably, all the current models that were trained on illegitimate scraping of vastly larger sources will always have the upper hand (in terms of raw power, obviously at the cost of regurgitating evil stuff too), because they just have absorbed way more diverse data in their training. So the models trained on ethical datasets only will not be able to compete, unless they too rely on a common base of "foundational sin" data and just add those datasets as an ethical layer to cover the rotten roots.

Is it really possible to start training from scratch at this stage and compete with the existing models, using only ethical datasets? Hasn't it been established that without the stolen data, those models could not exist or compete?

jd172• 6 months ago

Personally I would rather use a 'bad' ai that's trained ethically and runs locally than a good ai trained on stolen data that requires me to surrender my thoughts to the cloud.

whether or not it's possible to compete I guess we'll see but I am hopeful and appreciative that Mozilla is trying, as I am getting tired of big tech trying to force everyone to hand over even more unhinged amounts of data than what they're already taking from us.

b10854362• 6 months ago

I strongly suspect that it is absolutely impossible to have an even remotely usable/useful "AI" trained on tiny datasets, and that instead of training only on ethical data, companies that want to sound ethical will use an extra post-training step for dirty foundation models to behave more ethically as if they'd only learned from ethical sources. I'd hate for this to become the norm, but I fear this is logically what annoucements like this one really mean. The difference in scale is so vast -- taking whatever you want from the entire internet -- vs hand-curated datasets with explicit authorisation and free to use. It's like trying to make a grain of sand gravitate around a marble in the playground, to mimic the moon around the Earth – won't work.

bingemaker• 6 months ago

Small models have gotten remarkably good. 1 to 8 billion parameters, tuned for specific tasks

What models is Mozilla talking about?

internet_points• 6 months ago

Firefox does offline translation and offline tts. It is quite amazing. Unfortunately half the tech crowd is like "BURN anything that has been in the same room as AI" and the other half is yoloing agentic browsers and uploading all their pron history to the datalakes

yogthos• 6 months ago

In my view, this is the exact right approach. LLMs aren’t going anywhere, these tools are here to stay. The only question is how they will be developed going forward, and who controls them. Boycotting AI is a really naive idea that’s just a way for people to signal group membership.

Saying I hate AI and I’m not going to use it is really trending and makes people feel like they’re doing something meaningful, but it’s just another version of trying to vote the problem away. It doesn’t work. The real solution is to roll up the sleeves and built an a version of this technology that’s open, transparent, and community driven.

josh-sematic• 6 months ago

Strange to me that they don’t mention HuggingFace, which I think of as a pretty leading player in open{source|weight|data} AI.

nilshauk• 6 months ago

I detest AI on the grounds that it causes an overuse of our planet's resources as well as stealing IP and exploiting underpaid data workers.

However, if Mozilla can launch something capable that steals the thunder from all the closed source AI alternatives that might make the bubble pop finally.

Stock markets shook when Deepseek came on the scene and proved that clever coding might make up for using older hardware. The market leaders' moat suddenly didn't seem so impenetrable. In that same vein Mozilla might make a real dent by truly commodifying AI. AI stocks are highly valued currently because there's an idea that the leaders have something no one can copy.

johnea• 6 months ago

Has mozilla ever hired a CEO on the premise of "Our top priority is resolving the long standing bugs in our web and email clients"?

I'm still bitching, years later, about thunderbird failing to update IMAP folder contents (i.e. sync with server) until I click on the folder.

While it may still reign as the "capital of the industry", there's a certain kind of technical brain damage that comes from being located in the bay area.

Let's just call it "proximity to venture capital"...

dieselgate• 6 months ago

I've been using Waterfox the past month or two and it's great.

countWSS• 6 months ago

This has the feeling of corporate feel-good PR release: its essentially content-less AI-generated rehashing "our models are freer/more open-source" which seems silly since they don't develop anything unlike DeepSeek/GLM/Qwen the real open-source giants. Mozilla is a middle-man that could use open-source agents, but it pretending to be the "gatekeeper" of "open AI". Their key motivation is exposed in the middle of text: "The Mozilla Data Collective is building a marketplace for data that is properly licensed, clearly sourced, and aligned with the values of the communities it comes from."

This is far away from Firefox roots, whatever corporate stewards are at helm of mozilla now think exclusively in terms of marketplaces and "economics of data".. Futher reading "so we’re deepening our engagement with governments and enterprises adopting sovereign, auditable AI systems. These engagements are the feedback loops that tell us where the stack breaks and where openness needs reinforcement." Hard pass.

Mozilla's open source AI strategy

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