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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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[-] circuscritic@lemmy.ca 75 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 29 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] yyprum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] FaceDeer@fedia.io 3 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 hours ago

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.

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this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2025
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