#Why do some people dislike the notion of Mozilla working to support Open Source AI?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

fallow cradle
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Curious about some of the responses to https://x.com/mozhacks/status/1795702470586606056

I understand some folks will blanket reject anything LLM/gen-ai related but I thought it might be good to have an open (and civil) discussion about the deeper reasoning there.

Certainly, the failures and risks of these technologies shouldn't be ignored so I can understand being cautious about their use in production. There is also a viewpoint that Mozilla should be investing everything into Firefox but I wonder how an investment in emerging open-source tech like this is not a future investment in Firefox.

Clearly, some major issues and risks need to be addressed with generative AI technologies, but shouldn't we be working towards addressing those issues transparently so we can collectively advance open source, accountability, and competition in AI?

Seeing a lot of the negativity from that post, I thought it would be a great opportunity to discuss some of these issues more openly and deeply here (rather than shallow posts on X or ignoring it altogether). 🙂

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Mozilla Developer 👩🏾‍💻 (@mozhacks) on X

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Twitter ·
lapis whale
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I think it might be because of the Firefox userbase, Firefox is what Mozilla is known for, I only recently came to the understanding Mozilla has a foot in AI at all. I do think it is a bit odd many people are hating on that tweet in particular, just seems probably the overall userbase, I last used Firefox when it was v1.5 many many years ago. People interested and involved in AI like myself, we all use Chrome or Brave typically. Just my two cents, hopefully you guys can break through the haters and get llamafile more known. Just my two cents 🍻

chilly pier
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I suspect it’s similar to that, and that people don’t grok just how much mozdev has done over the decades to help the internet… and our world(s?) at large find standards rooted in open involvement and collaborative intent vs closed diction script and verse from $acmeMegacorp.

combine this lack of context with the layperson’s overall misunderstanding of the ai space and the problems being faced…
then view all this through a ‘what i see is all there is’ lens …. with all the general overhype on ‘AI’ in myriad directions there’s a lot of dangerously ignorant conflation at work

solid osprey
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36859275

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When a shirt is dirty, one stain doesn't stand out much.When a shirt is white and clean, the smallest stain stands out.Mozilla is one of the rare companies with a mostly white clean shirt.It is been judged harshly, while we should rejoice that they have been doing amazing things for 20 years despite the competition being terrible people playing ...

Hacker News ·
fallow cradle
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ah yes, I remember that orange site thread!

Interesting that a lot of the activity on the above MozHacks post seems to be bots (several people here have pointed this out to me.)

tawdry parcel
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some people are anti-mozilla, some people are anti-AI, some people are anti-open-source so its not totally surprising if there is an intersection that is anti-mozilla-open-source-AI 🤓. But their motivations may be quite diverse: from potential economic interests (it is after all a gold-rush type mania and widely available, open source, "local" AI will certainly complicate some busines models) all the way to FOSS purists that are always concerned and opinionated about how meagre resources are allocated. Just my two cents of reasoning, no particular insights or connections to the people expressing such opinions 😐 . Personally I think many important open source projects (from libreoffice productivity type tools, to the linux desktop environments and many key apps therein, file managers, editors, desktop search etc) have totally missed the boat of "AI", where AI stands not just for LLM but for the deep integration of data science / ML type algorithms. Replicating the features of commercial platforms with a lag has been a decent strategy for decades but is now being disrupted in real time. So I see what mozilla is doing as a sort of wake-up call for the broader open source world.