@Rusty from what I understand about the ToS incident is that's the "the most incompetent language ever" option, not malevolence. It's still sad, and most of what you say still stands. Also, if AI is changing the world (I think it could), having Mozilla on the people side could help.

@nitot I've said it a couple times in this thread and I'm a little bummed this post is getting a lot of attention devoid of that context because yeah, I generally agree. My issue with Mozilla isn't that I think their ToS is evil or that them getting involved with LLMs is somehow morally awful, it's just that I think their management is a bit incompetent. The ToS rollout was really dumb, and I think this push towards AI is a bad idea because they're trying to push into an already saturated market with fairly limited resources. Mozilla has done this a ton of times where they chase a trend with no hope of getting any kind of market position with it, make a slightly worse product than the competition, then offer some nebulous reason on why it's actually better than the competition. They need a revenue stream for sure, but I don't think the leadership at Mozilla is capable of finding one.

@nitot To be honest, I wish Mozilla wasn't an American company. They would do better being funded by grants which is something Europe is much better about with things like the Sovereign Tech Fund. It'd also be nice if they could get corporate partners like they had back when they were working on Quantum with Samsung.

It'd also be nice if the DoJ forced Google to divest from Chromium too and the administrative structure actually got punted to an open consortium, but I doubt that's gonna happen I think Mozilla really needs to position themselves as the underdog taking on big tech (even if they're largely funded by Google) since that's becoming an increasingly popular position.