• LWD@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    11 months ago

    I ask once again: who asked for this? Can anybody point to a large community outcry for Mozilla to invest in this? They only have finite time and money, after all, and it appears they are still maintaining their last shiny object, VR worlds.

    • Ephera@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      11 months ago

      I didn’t ask for it, but I’m lowkey happy to have them in this. I imagine, in a few years from now, all the start-ups will have run out of money or been acquired, and as per the usual, only big tech companies remain.

      Traditional search engines will basically be dead, completely swamped with AI-generated spam. And even non-techies will generally depend on generative AIs for information and communication.
      If those are exclusively controlled by big tech, we’ll have tons of censorship (e.g. if you want to export an LLM to China, it has to pretend to not know about the Uyghurs) and just generally no control.

      I don’t expect Mozilla to save the world here, they’re too small for that. But they’re already providing useful tools, raising the entrypoint for independent devs.

      • LWD@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        0
        ·
        11 months ago

        That’s a huge “if” for how the future pans out, though. If Mozilla is gambling correctly, then their investment might pay off for the average person.

        Unfortunately, 2023 marked their purchase of private user data, and they gave themselves the right to purchase and resell it – location data, browser history, usernames, full profiles.

        So if Mozilla wants to be the “privacy AI” company, they skipped the privacy.