> You must be able to attend both the in person Kick Off starting on Sep 12, 2024 as well as the in person Demo Day on Dec 5, 2024.
They have the right idea with local AI, but I assume this other kind of local is going to be an unfortunate barrier to a number and diversity of capable people.
Is this an issue if you get $100k? That should more than cover flight tickets and hotel stay.
If you're not even willing to do two travel days, why are you even participating in a 3-month accelerator? Doesn't sound like you want that kind of commitment.
I also have no idea. Your post seems very informative to me - I originally assumed everything is online without checking. This is extremely surprising to me and even a bit out of character for Mozilla. And I can't even find information where is the kickoff happening! I assume it's in California because obviously, but this whole thing could be communicated better.
Why stop there? They should expand it to blockchain, 3d printing, VR and quantum computing to make sure it really tickles the executives' imagination...
I get that we're skeptical of every little company doing "AI" projects, and we should be, but local AI for browsers already has several obvious applications - translating text without sending it off to a third party like Google, automatically generating subtitles / transcripts for arbitrary audio / video, etc.
Firefox like most independent browsers is also reliant on search engine revenues. If AI threatens search, then it also threatens Mozilla.
Plus Chrome, Brave, Safari, and Edge are already doing the same kinds of research, for the same reasons.
But I don't understand why people think AI can be lumped into the same category as VR/3D printing/blockchain/etc. It's clearly going to change the world, and in 200 years we'll look back on it the same way we saw the invention of electricity. (You know, assuming we're still around as a species).
To me, it's so weird to watch people dunk on AI for hallucinating a bit or because some CEOs hack it into their product in unfulfilling ways. Look how bad image generation was just a year ago (fuzzy and mushy), and now we have movie clips that are almost studio quality (but generated in minutes).
I agree that AI/ML is overhyped right now. There are however some practical applications for machine learning, even for web browsers. The most obvious one to me is translating content in foreign languages. Another would be tools that make poorly designed websites more accessible for the visually impaired.
As someone who is fluently bilingual I have tested the exact thing people say AI in the browser would be good for, translations and subtitle generation and it was abysmal. It produced sentences that absolutely look correct but the meaning has fundamentally changed. Someone fluent in both languages would know what it intended to say but for those people we wouldn't need the translation anyway.
It was deemed far too much work to be viable at this point seening as we would still need to employ someone to double check the translations anyway so the project was canned.
Yeah, it’s not really enable new projects in the language arts unless it’s cases where accuracy and the truth don’t matter compared to volume (and those are mostly things that are harmful to society).
You can now write a non-fiction book with a subject matter expert and an editor, skipping the ghost writer. Saves one whole salary, right? No, because it’ll take a lot more time from both the SME and editor to reach the same quality level as before. You can dial the quality down a little—worse presentation of material, more repetition, more inaccuracies—and save some money, which was harder to reliably do before, so there’s that I guess, but now we’re back at “it saves money if you’re trying to make junk”.
I don't know how you can say that. We passed the Turing test within the past year, and nobody even noticed because that now seems like such a low bar for where we'll be in a few years.
ML is an important component of AI, but it's not a simple "rebrand". I get that it's easy to think of it as marketing hype, because there's a lot of people (the same people who got on the blockchain bandwagon) shilling crap. But what we're seeing isn't overhyped; it's severely underhyped.
> I don't know how you can say that. We passed the Turing test within the past year
Easy: Remember OpenAIs claims regarding the bar exam and did you read the news the last couple of days how it was all bollocks?
Great... it's another hype. It's "just" statistics, very impressive, but as soon as it will run out of training data, it will plateau... and it will run out by GPT-5 or GPT-6 :)
Then it can learn from its predecessor's hallucinations maybe :D
> But what we're seeing isn't overhyped; it's severely underhyped.
I don't know if passing the turing test is really that much of an accomplishment. Some would argue we create software that passed the turing test when Eliza was made, which was developed in the 60s. I mean, Eliza really kind of shows that the turing test isn't actually much of a test. Your testing more of how easy it is to fool a person and exactly how intelligent or smart an artificial system is.
Agreed, which is why the next part of my sentence went on to say "nobody even noticed because that now seems like such a low bar for where we'll be in a few years"
All the while there are numerous issues with Firefox on M1. They simply ignore or close them as “works for me” [1] while I personally have encountered at least half of these issues as of last month.
IMO they should first focus on being a good cross platform browser that works well on desktop arm before doing anything else.
Thanks for this link. Firefox has been getting worse for me stability-wise on my Mac M1, even with tab discarding it consumes huge amounts of power, and at least two or three times a day it will just stop loading webpages and show errors in the network tab and need to be restarted. I spend a couple of hours every few weeks trying to track down the issues and Firefox and even in the bug tracker can't find answers.
I also have a bizarre problem where any Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Brave, Edge) are extremely slow to load any page since upgrading to Sonoma, where Firefox or Safari are near-instant - like taking 60 seconds to even start DNS lookup. After a couple of minutes it will eventually fully load a page. I've seen other people mention the same issue online, but no fixes. I have spent hours trying to debug and track down problems for that too.
It's discouraging how much it feels like every software tool I use on every device has gone to shit, especially things as fundamental as a web browser.
Yeah, I stopped reading when I saw the focus on AI. And I could probably cobble together a good proposal, but I'm not willing to lump it in with that sociodigital fatberg.
"Locations to be determined", but when I worked there it was mostly Mountain View. I believe they've shut down most (all?) of their offices, though, so I'm not sure if they have a physical presence anywhere.
Browser royalties to Mozilla Corporation are around $500 million. Donations to Mozilla Foundation are around $10 million. The browser doesn't need donations. And donating to Mozilla Corporation would not be tax deductible.
I was one of the first fellows of their WebFWD program back in 2013 [1]. I'm sure a lot has changed in the last decade but it was refreshing to find partners who were not venture capitalists for our for-profit open source company.
Sadly, the other partner wound down last year. The Shuttleworth Foundation - funded by Mark - was super critical for us. they provided almost $1m in funding.
Both provided contacts for legal, marketing, etc.
I wish we had more of these initiatives which weren't so focused on profit.
They have the right idea with local AI, but I assume this other kind of local is going to be an unfortunate barrier to a number and diversity of capable people.