Mozilla has 1.4 BILLION dollars that they are spending on some AI bullshit.
That's billion with a B. So if you held out hope that filling out surveys or shitposting through it might turn this ship around, no. That much money has an event horizon.
Mozilla is cooked.
@jwz I honestly thought you might have been exaggerating, but then I clicked through to the article...and jesus effing christ, the whole board need to be launched into the sun.
@jwz My read is that Google—Mozilla's main funding source these days—have *ordered* them to spend money on AI (meanwhile supplying the money to do so). No mainstream browser may remain uncompromised by the grift. amirite?
@cstross @jwz I'm not so sure it's that. Mozilla view The Goog as a liability, and want to diversify revenue away from the disastrously single-sourced search royalties. They have concluded that the best way to do so is pursuing AI, while under the guise of "liberating" AI from corporate control. The latter is of course a joke, since uhhhh where exactly do those foundation models come from, even the "open" ones?
We all need to remember where Google's money comes from... #PrinceBonesaw and Chris Hohn.
https://www.businessinsider.com/saudi-arabia-crown-prince-visits-apple-google-2018-4
We need more reporting on why the fossil fuel industry is suddenly so desperate to get AI into every aspect of tech & everyone's personal life
Browsers, robots, vehicles, farm tractors, home appliances, laptops, cloud services, IOT medical devices, news, content creation...
@oblomov @cstross @jwz Consider that Mozilla being cooked has a few decades of history.
Back around 2007ish, I was working with a few folk who either came from or later went to Mozilla. Anyhow, some of them were involved with the XHTML 2.0 spec.
Which was finished.
But then got ditched.
Because Googleites insisted a "living spec" was the right thing, which can only be implemented by whoever throws the most money at it, and we now have HTML5 and a browser engine monopoly.
And Mozilla?
@jwz
Meanwhile the AI companies are burning the planet to build browsers from scratch as a benchmark.
https://cursor.com/blog/scaling-agents
This is how we all lose.
