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.”
To be honest, it’s nice that he’s focusing on trust and points out that AI should be optional. My main concern here is the fuzzy language around data use and the proximity to talk of revenue.
Sure, bolt on a bunch of features I don’t use if you think people want it, but if you try to leverage the trust built on the Mozilla brand for data mining, we’re gonna have words.