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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Their user base is almost exclusively tech savvy people, the same people who are most opposed to AI.
I think this move signals that they believe we have nowhere else to go, and they’re daring us to go fuck ourselves, because fuck you, what are you going to do, use Chrome?
Yes, yes I will, well Chromium forks.
In general, I prefer the look and feel of chromium-based browsers, but I use Firefox and Firefox forks for the reasons that I’m sure everyone here is aware of.
If those reasons go away, I’ll just switch to Vivaldi as my primary browser. I won’t be happy about it, but if Firefox becomes another AI slop project. I might as well go with the browser whose UX I prefer.
Librewolf, or Ladybird, or dillo, or links2 or lynx, or heck, even brave!
Luakit’s still a thing. Or vimb. Or qutebrowser. I miss uzbl. Uzbl was the best.
No need to use proprietary wrapped Vivaldi.
Yeah, I’m not going to switch to a Manifest V3 browser because Firefox puts in access to an optional AI agent. If Firefox makes it so you can’t turn it off, which I wouldn’t think is likely, I might switch to something like Librewolf, but Chromium? No.
I would use a Firefox fork over Vivaldi simfly because of extensions (including uBO)
Just like everything in North America it’s about aquisition not retention.
Vivaldi is like the only tech company in the world that has come out and stated definitively “we will not use AI”.
I did exactly this a while back. And as a self protection mechanism I’ve just completely written off Mozilla products as free falling in the enshittification process. I don’t care enough to be disappointed any more, it’s much nicer this way.
Why do you say that tech savvy people are “most opposed to AI?” Don’t conflate “the membership of this small social media bubble called ‘technology’” with tech-savvy people in general. Lots of tech savvy people are developing and using AI, where else do you think it’s coming from?
The problem here is that we’ve got a small crowd with a strong opinion, constantly shouting their opinion to each other and making an unfriendly environment to anyone who doesn’t share that opinion. So of course it seems like “everyone” shares that opinion, you never see otherwise.
AI “engineer” shill says what?
Most people in tech that I know hate AI, including devs. I know one manager who is gung ho for it but everyone is annoyed by him and he was already well known for going apeshit over whatever the latest tech buzzword is before the whole AI craze kicked off.
Anecdotal I suppose, but IMO, most people who are actually technical seem to treat AI with a good degree of skepticism if not outright disdain.
proving their point
Emphasis added. We all live inside social bubbles, if one wants to talk about what most people in general believe then one must use data from beyond that. Otherwise you’re going to get a very biased sample, since we generally choose to associate with people who share our own personal values.
Removed by mod
I don’t disagree with using unbiased data, but where is yours?
Data for the claim that lots of tech-savvy people are developing and using AI? Some of the biggest tech companies in the world right now have an AI focus. NVIDIA, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, they’re all making massive use of AI. If you want to discount “corporate” tech-savvy people, This page indicates 15 million developers are using GitHub Copilot. Linus Torvalds has spoken in favor of using AI to maintain Linux, if you’d like someone specific and big-name as an example.
the keyword word you missed was “unbiased”
of course the AI peddlers will peddle it and their employees would probably be fired if they did not toe the company line
on the otheer hand, that mit studyshowed 95v of them failed… I find it hard to believe people enjoy failing
So we’ve moved from “no tech-savvy people use AI!” to “lots of tech-savvy people use AI, but many of them fail to make it profitable!”
The Commerce Institute puts that 95% figure in perspective, about 65.3% of all businesses fail by their tenth year. That’s not focusing just on a particular industry that’s the most unknown and volatile one, that’s everything, including fields that have been well known and understood for decades. And I should also note, your source said 95% had yet to grow their revenue, not that 95% had failed - it’s only been a year or two for most.
Your own source provides some other bits of information that support my view, too. Just look past the bias in how it’s worded.
Wow, only 30% of office tasks can be handled by AI? Clearly a useless technology, throw it away.
Or maybe 30% is actually quite an impressive number. Wouldn’t you like something that handles 30% of your routine work for you?
So, half of them haven’t abandoned those plans.
I don’t see a link to that research, but that means 38% don’t believe AI is significantly overhyped.
I never said everyone liked AI, just that lots of tech-savvy people did. I think 38% would count as null
Basically, you’re falling into the trap of assuming if something’s not perfect and not universally loved then it must be awful and universally hated. Communities like this reinforce that view, but the real world outside these digital walls is not like that.
In the US, the number of adults using ChatGPT has been increasing, whether for work, learning something new, or entertainment.
And what’s most interesting is that those who use ChatGPT the most are people with postgraduate degrees, followed by those with bachelor’s degrees, college, and high school (who use it the least).
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/25/34-of-us-adults-have-used-chatgpt-about-double-the-share-in-2023/
No, we are trying to tease out if “tech savvy people” use AI at gun point or not because if it is at gun point, it disarms your argument
These are not new business (not all at least, these are already viable businesses trying to reap the promises of AI and failing miserably. You can interpret however you want but I interpret that as “most of these business bought the snake oil and it did not cure their hiccups”
Again, what is the expectation being sold out there? 30 % increase in preformance? or “we WOn’T nEEd progRAmMers iN 3 yEars”?
Meaning what? sunk cost fallacy? deeper pockets to hold on and see if they can fix it? deeper pockets and being able to hide the huge mistake this was? I can speculate in the opposite direction you are, just as easily
If my job depends on saying you are correct… Mr. FaceDeer you are always correct, the most correct ever.
This ties to my previous comment that we need to find unbiased sources and that would include people that use AI because they want to, not because their livelihood depends on it
Not even close… what I am seeing is that AI peddlers promised elephants but they are delivering something that looks like a large dog with no cool trunk
tech bros and their employees lmao
and Linus has said some stupid shit over the years
AKA, tech-savvy people.
tech bros are some of the least savvy anything
Linus loves to say stupid shit and walk it back later
Those are blatantly not people, they aren’t even human.
Here in Lemmy, in my experience, this goes nowhere. You put it very clearly on your second paragraph. The small crowd with a strong opinion that thinks all AI is terrible in Lemmy is a bigger or at least more active group than the opposite. And with no ability to consider opposite points of view.
As a developer, most others I know of actually like the ai technology and use it as a way to analyze big amount of data quickly or as a starting point, while at the same time basically all hate the corporate AI side of things, specially idiotic managers and ceo-like asshats that keep pushing AI for all the wrong reasons and in all the wrong ways.
Fortunately the one saving grace of the Fediverse in this regard is that you can see both the upvote and downvote totals for a comment, not just the net difference between them. So even though it’s clear what the majority view is - “AI bad, everyone hates it, and you’re bad for suggesting it could possibly be otherwise!” - I can still see that there are a minority who appreciate my perspective as well. So I continue rolling that boulder up the hill, for the benefit of those who might otherwise only see the “nobody wants AI!” messaging and think it might be true.
Yeah, lemmy is really a hell of an echo chamber on certain topics. I see both pros and cons to AI, and that balanced view makes me literally the most anti-AI person in my social circle.
programmers almost exclusively use LLM
Only ever dealt with dog-shit programmers, huh?
an elitist response.
here’s actual data https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ai
half use AI tools daily
Not elitist to say that people who use what are essentially weighted random word generators for programming, a career that requires one to know exactly how their code works in case it breaks, are bad at their jobs. Just like how it’s not elitist to say that generated images are not art, and that flying a plane into a building doesn’t make you a good pilot.
Using AI doesn’t mean that you lose the ability to reason, debug, or test generated code. All code merge should be peer-reviewed and tested
We’re not discussing images, nor planes.
The claim was
tech savvy people, the same people who are most opposed to AI.There’s data that to suggest otherwise. people who are technically inclined engage with AI more and have a more positive reception compared to less experienced users.
Unless you have additional data to support that they are in-fact “dog-shit programmers”, this appears to be an emotional claim colored by your own personal bias. Though if you’re a “pure” programmer who is better than the dog-shit developers I would love to see some of your work or writings.
Oh I get it now- you ARE one of those dog-shit AI vibe programmers.
if that makes you feel better, but i wish you responded to the original claim with data vs ad hominem. but if you’re so good can i view your github to learn how you program?
Lol, no- because I’m not a programmer. I do server admin work- so I closely work with our programmers. I work with people that actually can do their job.
And for your data: https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/
If it degrades brains with use in writing Essays, it will do the same in writing code.
While AI use doesn’t guarantee loss of cognitive abilities there is growing research showing that it is likely.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-art-of-critical-thinking/202512/is-generative-ai-rewiring-our-brains-heres-how-it-happens
I posted a response in another reply but thats for sharing something. still does not support the claim of dog-shit developers