Author here. The reason I joined the Mozilla ecosystem, and the reason I want to help Mozilla's mission succeed in the era of AI, is identical to the reason I supported Mozilla in my teens and college years during the early browser wars. Then, we had MSFT coming in to create a single point of failure (and control) for your access to the Internet via IE - Firefox combatted that. We're in the same situation now, with your access to the Internet - commerce, social networking, information - going through a walled garden of Gemini or OAI or Ant or Perplexity.
Mozilla is nowhere near large enough to solve this problem on its own, but: (i) Mozilla AI, which I'm leading, is pushing to solve this at the infra and maybe platform layer by providing developers the ability to choose to use their own AI tooling and (ii) Mozilla writ large is a big enough machine that it can create a community and alliance across dozens or hundreds of players to create a viable alternative to a bleaker, non-open Internet. That's my hope!
> We're in the same situation now, with your access to the Internet - commerce, social networking, information - going through a walled garden of Gemini or OAI or Ant or Perplexity.
Really? I'm still using the internet, and I don't touch any of that stuff.
> by providing developers the ability to choose to use their own AI tooling
Wait, what does that have to do with any of what you said before? That doesn't sound like "access to the Internet."
> create a viable alternative to a bleaker, non-open Internet.
And now you've switched back to talking about the open (or not) Internet, which has nothing to do with "developers [choosing] their own AI tooling".
It sounds like you're just pursuing your own pet project while trying justify it using the language of internet freedom.
very well said, and I have been rooting for the team big time!
if you have an alliance hub for discussions with those also building open infrastructure tooling, please let me know!
have already been in the Mozilla AI discord since last year and had a great time being one of the 2 external participants during the name brainstorming for renaming any-llm ^_^
Mozilla is nowhere near large enough to solve this problem on its own, but: (i) Mozilla AI, which I'm leading, is pushing to solve this at the infra and maybe platform layer by providing developers the ability to choose to use their own AI tooling and (ii) Mozilla writ large is a big enough machine that it can create a community and alliance across dozens or hundreds of players to create a viable alternative to a bleaker, non-open Internet. That's my hope!