It's pretty tone-deaf to criticize layoffs on the same article that acknowledges their historic dependence on Google's rapidly collapsing monopoly. Where is the money going to come from?

If you scroll up, you'll see the part of the article that mentions Mozilla wasting tens of millions of dollars on AI.

Where do you think that money comes from?

Scoot over and make room for me in that boat.

We're gonna need a bigger boat.

Ladybird is nice, but has a long way to go.

I personally think just tracking today's Web is useless. It's dying. It's a system that went from conscious development to malicious growth of standards for the purpose of capturing the field.

There's a need of at least search, payments, hosting and CDN (and pooling in there, and paying for a resource and selling a resource) being integrated into the system for the new Web-like thing. So that siloed services solving these problems weren't needed. I'm thinking lately of a system with some kind of "resource market", where it's seamless to globally sell and buy storage and computing resources, and transparent routing to those resources, with the market itself reminiscent of MMORPG markets, like in EVE. With search and payments being uniform, so that your client would aggregate results of many automatically retrieved indexers from a pool, without dependence on a single search engine.

I dunno if this looks stupid. Just - paying for things with ads seems to have been a bad idea retrospectively.

That's a feature, not a bug.

The author's timeline is off. The AI investment was in 2023, before most of the Google antitrust activity. They are also scaling back their AI programs.

It's not gonna get very far then lol

If firebox being bankrolled by Google didn't raise red flags for you before, I have some NFTs I'd like to sell you that I think you'll find interesting.

They had many years to develop alternative sources of income instead of relying solely on Google. But instead, they’ve been chasing every trend set by big corporations for no clear reason. I really dislike their CEO and the entire leadership team — they’re destroying Mozilla from the inside. Rather than implementing a recovery plan, which they could’ve done years ago, they allowed the company to remain dependent on Google.
From what I know, internal relationships among coworkers are poor. People either do whatever they want or nothing at all. If you try to bring new ideas to the CEO and you're not close to them, you're basically fucked up
With an organization being managed like this, there’s no path forward other than continued decline. Sadly, Mozilla is likely to die for all the reasons mentioned above

Today [October 28, 2024] Germ announces pre-seed funding from investors K5 Global via partner Daniel Marcotte, Mozilla Ventures, Gaingels, and angel investors including Nick Sullivan, Jessica Millstone of Copper Wire Ventures, and Adam Sah.

Germ Network raises pre-seed funding from K5 Global, Mozilla Ventures — Germ Network

Former Apple privacy engineer Mark Xue teams up with ex-Stanford social media scholar Tessa Brown to put people in control of what they share online

Germ Network (www.germnetwork.com)

Looks like a step in the right direction. E2EE messaging is a worthy venture under the Mozilla umbrella.

Not sure why you are posting about it in this thread about AI.

They had many years to develop alternative sources of income instead of relying solely on Google. But instead, they’ve been chasing every trend set by big corporations for no clear reason. I really dislike their CEO and the entire leadership team — they’re destroying Mozilla from the inside. Rather than implementing a recovery plan, which they could’ve done years ago, they allowed the company to remain dependent on Google.
From what I know, internal relationships among coworkers are poor. People either do whatever they want or nothing at all. If you try to bring new ideas to the CEO and you're not close to them, you're basically fucked up
With an organization being managed like this, there’s no path forward other than continued decline. Sadly, Mozilla is likely to die for all the reasons mentioned above

I know it's a 90% chance you don't care how Mozilla wastes its money and are just looking for an excuse to dismiss that one.

But maybe I'm wrong.

We went back to Convex to co-host our second Women and Nonbinary Founders Demo Day with WOMEN x AI (WxAI)! | Germ Network

We went back to Convex to co-host our second Women and Nonbinary Founders Demo Day with WOMEN x AI (WxAI)! It was such a blast gathering with other womxn founders in SF to share what we’ve been building. Our co-founder Tessa Brown welcomed the audience to the event, and founding engineer Anna M. demo’d Germ’s download-free, phone-number-free secure chat to a full house. The other founders we presented with are using AI and other computational tools to make it easier and more equitable to do everything from hiring to printing a children’s book. Thanks to everyone who came out to support and ask questions, co-hosts Jenny Kay Pollock Reut Lazo and Wayne Sutton, and especially to the presenters! 🎤 Deepti Srivastava, Snow Leopard 🎤 Malinda Johnson, Conversa 🎤 Dr Jessica Gold, Digital Wisdom 🎤 Emma Forman Ling, Convex 🎤 Uma Kelkar, Vivify.ai 🎤 Lucy L., TwinMind 🎤 Lindsey Witmer Collins, Scribbly 🎤 Miri Rodriguez, Empressa AI 📸 Kevin Mei (it's his birthday)

(www.linkedin.com)

You seem to be really stuck on this. You posted about a grant program that Mozilla is involved in for a startup to work on developing a secure chat on a more open protocol. Now you dug up a LinkedIn post about the same startup attending an unrelated AI technology conference.

No one is saying that Mozilla isn't involved in AI at all. The only thing I said is that the foundation is in trouble because Google antitrust actions are likely to harm their funding. As a result, they are cutting back in a lot of areas, including staffing, AI, and other side projects.

The original article ignorantly and irresponsibly overlooks the basic math of the situation.