Mozilla are leaning even more into AI, with the announcement today of Thunderbolt - their open-source and self-hostable AI client.
Self hostable is nice; less privacy risk and more power to the individual. Open source is kind of amazing. This is the way.
I’m so tired, man
You’re not required to use it.
I see your account is just here to troll/harass people who don’t love AI too, but we’re witnessing Mozilla burning goodwill and capital for no apparent reason.
Please don’t tell people to stick their heads in the sand.
People, please stop shooting the messenger. Please.
With that out of the way: I wish Mozilla didn’t waste so much money on chasing the latest trend of the season, and instead used it for its main products. Including Thunderbird. The one asking for donations.
Some years from now Thunderbolt will likely pop up in this list, of abandoned Mozilla products. Because it isn’t the result of Mozilla finding a niche to create an AI product to benefit users; it’s simply execs chasing the latest trend.
*Beehaw users are likely not seeing this, but this post has a bunch of downvotes.
Neither your comment nor the post have a lot of down votes and I’m not on beehaw
Beehaw has downvotes disabled, so they don’t federate. Any downvotes you see are from your own instance.
My comment doesn’t, but the OP does. Four downvotes in Beehaw is quite a lot, given the local users don’t downvote. Same thread is in the negatives in one of the cross-posts even if it’s on-topic.
And, like. I get why people would react negatively towards the product itself, but I don’t think it’s good tone to react like this towards the news being shared, you know?
Totally agree. Downvote button is for marking low quality posts, not to express disagreement. For disagreements there is a comment section.
The bad news: MZLA (Thunderbird’s maker) is all-in on AI.
The good news: They aren’t using your Thunderbird donations to build this. It’s funded by the Mozilla Foundation, which has been throwing money at every random AI startup it sees. Including one that wants to help electricians wire your home.
Edit: Mozilla is so untrustworthy these days that they had to cite themselves in the testimonial
Mozilla is so untrustworthy these days that they had to cite themselves in the testimonial
okay, that’s kinda funny and ironic.
And it’s their only testimonial on the website. From the screenshot I thought it’d be one of multiple.
Given it’s a new product, not too surprising though, I guess. I wonder if they had any testing/cooperation partners.
I started to update my post before realizing you have a much better version of the link, thank you for providing it. Must have been too flabbergasted to even describe the website
From the README (emphasis mine):
⚠️ We are excited about the amount of interest Thunderbolt has been getting and want to clarify that it is still early and under active development. Currently, we are targeting enterprise customers that want to deploy it on-prem. We encourage you to self-host it and try it out, but there are a few caveats we are still working on:
So I read there article and all I can think is…
Run AI with their choice of models: as long as it’s on our approved list and you pay for it.
Connect to systems and data: Uses your data to train our system so we can sell your knowledge to your competitors.
Automate workflows and recurring tasks: Completely removes your ability to make decisions and understand what is happening.
Work seamlessly across devices with native applications for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android: Until we decide it doesn’t, or maybe it will only be window. Either way you’ve lost control.
Maintain security with self-hosted deployment, optional end-to-end encryption, and device-level access controls: While allowing us to monitor your whole work flow remotely and monetize everything you know.
Where are you getting these limitations from? They’re not in that article, and I went to the project’s page to double check and they’re not there either.
Connect any ACP-compatible agent or any model with an OpenAI-compatible API
At this point that’s basically anything. Including all the popular open frameworks fro running local AIs.
Automate workflows and recurring tasks: Completely removes your ability to make decisions and understand what is happening.
What? This is like setting a cron job. Does cron remove your ability to make decisions or understand what is happening?
Work seamlessly across devices with native applications for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android: Until we decide it doesn’t, or maybe it will only be window.
It’s open source, like the other projects Mozilla maintains. Do you apply this “they could take it away from us at any time!” Concern to Firefox as well?
Maintain security with self-hosted deployment, optional end-to-end encryption, and device-level access controls: While allowing us to monitor your whole work flow remotely and monetize everything you know.
Any source for this? Seriously, I know there’s a lot of anti-AI sentiment around here but you’re hallucinating worse than Gemini.
