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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I feel like mozilla could switch to making all their decisions by flipping a coin and do better than they’re doing in recent years
mozilla is nothing more than an extension of GOOGLE, since they recieved most of thier funding from them. they are essentially google shills, and probably using thier AI too. i wouldnt be surprise if google tries to buy them down the line.
They aren’t using their AI. They currently use open source ondevice models and have perplexity as a search option.
But how else would the CEO justify her $7 million dollar salary (in ‘22) that’s going up by a million or two every year since she returned, starting at $3 million in 2020.
At least she didn’t cut every interesting program in Mozilla’s portfolio when every other company was laying off employees. She wasn’t great, but she was operating in a bad economy.
This new guy tho, he sounds like good news if you’re the CEO of Google.
Anthony is a she?
Oh shit they literally changed CEO a few hours ago. My bad.
Doubt the wage issue will change though.
I get missing it in the title, but you didn’t read the article or even the summary blurb either?
No, because I wasn’t commenting on the article. I was commenting on the other users comment about the last few years of Mozilla, something I’m already well aware of.