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Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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Let me share some fun Mozilla facts about their previous CEO who has now stepped down to “executive chairwoman” last week.
She received 6.9 million dollars in 2022 and 5 million in 2021, 3 million in 2020.
Her replacement is an executive from AirBnB and eBay. We will find out how much both of these are earning in 2025 when they release their financial statements.
They fired 60 staff and are adding AI to their flagship program to earn more money.
Tell me this is a good thing.
Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space (while still producing SOTA ML). All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility.
ALSO, the other half of this story is that Firefox is becoming the primary focus again. Everybody's freaking out about the AI stuff but that's because they're only reading the headlines. The programs they've shut down are things like Hubs (Mozilla's metaverse platform), the VPN, and the sensitive data scrubber (which was using a third party service anyway).
As a software developer I am huge supporter of Mozilla's developer initiatives from Manifest V2 implementation to MDN. But it's also important to be realistic Mozilla has long had major money problems, and not the kind that giving them more would fix.
The Lunduke shit again? The one that takes offense to money being donated to support "politics" i.e abortion rights?
Take a look at the other trash he posts on his reddit profile. That blog is not a trustworthy source, by any stretch, and it's sweetly ignoring that he's not looking at Mozilla's spending alone, but of 3 separate entities that exist under the umbrella of the Mozilla Foundation.
I don't know anything about him, but the criticism of them spending money on donating to other charities rather than focusing on making Mozilla's core projects sustainable IMO is correct.
I don't think this is a money making move. The previous CEO was absolutely overly focused on monetization and this move is a step away from that. I should've addressed this more explicitly in the above comment but even for the players who actively monetize, AI is a money incinerator.
Cloud AI is, but for local AI, they only need to incinerate enough money to train it. That's none if they just end up using mixtral or something
I agree it's probably not for money making, that's my point, its instead that their management doesn't know how to spend money.