Memo details layoffs, "strategic corrections," and a desire for "trustworthy" AI.
  • rnd@beehaw.org
    41·
    9 months ago

    Okay, the responses here are kinda disappointing because folks here seem to be unaware that (1) Mozilla has already added “AI” info Firefox a few versions ago (to provide machine translations of pages), and (2) the way they did it is very responsible (the whole thing is 100% local, no info is sent to other servers).

    I understand that we’re all tired of this whole trend of language models being put where they don’t belong, but from what I see, Mozilla is actually the company I’d trust the most to do it right. (AFAIK, one area where the FOSS world is severely lacking and where Mozilla works to solve it is speech recognition with the Common Voice project, and if they start working on an LLM-based program to do that, I’d welcome it.)

    • luciole (he/him)@beehaw.org
      19·
      9 months ago

      I wish I shared your confidence. Mozilla jumped on the VR hype, then the Metaverse hype and now they’re specifically betting on generative AI. It’s leaving me feeling as suspicious as the article’s author about Mozilla’s latest ventures.

    • bevan@lemmy.nz
      9·
      9 months ago

      If it is totally local, (and able to be disabled easily) then great.

  • The Baldness@beehaw.org
    39·
    9 months ago

    FFS lay off the artificial intelligence bullshit. I don’t want or need machine learning in my fucking browser. I tell it where to go, and it goes there. This is not a problem that needs solving. There had better be a way to turn this garbage off.

  • V ‎ ‎ @beehaw.orgEnglish
    14·
    9 months ago

    Unfortunately the problem lies with the foundation. The one thing they made worth a damn in the past decade was Rust, and they promptly fired the whole Rust team. Servo is maintained by the Linux foundation now ffs. What does the foundation do besides zombie walk and eat Googles money?

  • tuckerm@supermeter.social
    4·
    9 months ago

    Always sucks to have more tech layoffs.

    The article mentions they’re “decreasing their investment” in Firefox Relay, which is a service for creating burner email addresses that get forwarded to your real email address. It’s honestly the best spam-prevention method I’ve ever used. If Mozilla decides to axe that project, I hope the Thunderbird team can somehow pick it up. Seems like it could be an opportunity for some recurring income for them.

    • hedge@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      I like and use Relay as well. Probably a very naive thought, but couldn’t Mozilla just ask for donations the way Wikipedia does?

      • tuckerm@supermeter.social
        2·
        9 months ago

        I don’t think I’ve ever seen them ask for donations as visibly as Wikipedia does. Sometimes there’s a small banner at the top of their website with a donate button. Currently, if you go to https://mozilla.org and scroll all the way down, there’s a “Donate” link in their footer.

        Seems like they’re always kind of subtle about asking for donations – I wonder if they think that if they pushed for donations harder, it would just make more people use Chrome. (On the other hand, there is no real alternative to Wikipedia, so they can do the big banner once a year.)

    • Hirom@beehaw.org
      1·
      9 months ago

      Firefox Monitor is great as well. The premium version looks nice, you can pay to have it go remove your data from many data brokers. It seems mostly focused on US brokers, I’d pay for it worked with more european data collection companies.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

    Click here to see the summary

    A TechCrunch report has a company memo that followed these layoffs, detailing one product shutdown and a “scaling back” of a few others.

    reads the very top of the page; it then goes on to detail a lot of projects that aren’t in line with Mozilla’s core work of making a browser.

    These non-browser projects could be seen as a search for a less vulnerable revenue stream, but none have put a huge dent in the bottom line.

    TechCrunch managed to get an internal company memo that details a few “strategic corrections” for the myriad Mozilla products.

    Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed.

    Mozilla paid an undisclosed sum in 2023 to buy a company called Fakespot, which uses AI to identify fake product reviews.

    Saved 81% of original text.