RetroFed
Mozilla Wants to Build a ‘Rebel Alliance’ for Open-Source AI
sanitationhttps://time.com/article/2026/07/13/open-source-ai-mozilla-rebel-alliance/
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Even open source AI used for needless purposes contributes to wasteful resource usage that harms the environment just as much.
ArghblargAgreed. The energy use in training and running, its stochastic nature which causes hallucinations and wrong results, and the deeply harmful long-term psychological effects on users who abdicate their own reasoning to LLMs, is ultimately more harmful than useful. Doesn’t matter if the models are ’open weight’, OSS, and totally ‘free’.
And, please, everyone, stop calling it ‘AI’. It’s not Intelligent. It’s a probabilistic regurgitator. Maybe some (human-written!) reasoning systems on top of that, but it isn’t intelligent or sentient.
Who decides what is needless?
Ideally, the end user by not partaking in shitty AI products, but I don’t have much faith in the average consumer’s aversion to slop.
AI is being injected into everything without any consideration for its necessity, privacy implications, or environmental impact.
On top of that, there aren’t many AI based consumer-faced products that have really proven successful yet. It’s not only about necessity.
What is your measure of success? Profit?
What I meant was useful products that people actually like to use. So far I mostly see chat interfaces, agentic stuff that only works when controlled tightly by a human, and a lot of slop generators. Most of it is using AI because of it being AI. There is no real killer product built on top of AI, it’s all just imitations of existing things. Reinvention of existing things, but worse.
ItsComplicatedaccording to Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s chief technology officer, “I want us to each have an AGI that’s truly on our side, not on someone else’s side.”
Therein lies the my issue with all these companies forcing AI into every crevice of our lives, They want.
My issue is that this dumbass is talking about AGI like it’s an actual thing. It’s not going to happen with our current or near-future tech and clowns like Krikorian are either misinformed or gaslighting. Either way, this is not a serious person and should be treated as such.
Whats funny is I think there should be good local ai but its still something that needs development and work. It makes no sense to me to be in the browser. I see this again akin to graphics. I would like to see an os that has one that is strictly about the os. After installation maybe you could have additional modules to expand its scope or agents where it acts as a central interface. A kind of head butler.
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They should join the web browser rebel alliance since there is no alternative to Chrome.
Ladybird is slowly becoming useable the last time i looked, so there is some movement out there, but it’s slow and the future of the open web browser and the open web itself is currently very uncertain.
Ladybird’s main dev considers existance of anybody who isn’t he-him to be a political stance.
I am more interested in servo browser now.
Last year I was reading a bit about Mozilla, all that google money, their spendings, their CEO and got really really angry looking on how shit the Firefox is I use daily.
The reason Firefox still exists is that Google can prove it’s not a Chrome monopoly. Now this is just me forming conspiracy theories, but I do believe that Google would stop these payments the day Firefox would really out-innovate Chrome and get more market share.
I do believe all that Google money is not keeping Firefox alive, it’s keeping it dead.
At that moment I rage-donated money to Servo. Monthly. Didn’t regret it, yet. Found their transparency records what they use it for. Up to now they use their money very responsibly.
I don’t know about that. One of the big reasons chrome even got off the ground when it started was that it had the reach and backing of Google. If you opened Google, you had a “Get Chrome”. If you did a search on Google, you had a “Get Chrome”. You had advertisements, etc. It being faster to start with was nice, but even then, the other browsers at the time caught up pretty quickly.
Without that help, Firefox might just get left in the dust. We’ve already been at the point where websites are mainly designed for Chromium browsers, and that you’re encouraged to fire it up if something doesn’t work for you, and you’re using Firefox, Safari, Konqueror, etc, since the majority of users use some form of Chrome.
Microsoft couldn’t hack it when they tried developing their own browser, and they’re both much larger than Mozilla, have the reach of Windows, and whatever was left over from IE. They ended up switching over to Blink/Chromium.
I can’t imagine Mozilla would fare any better, after losing a decent chunk of their funding. The fact that they’ve done decently so far is a minor miracle in and of itself.
has Mozilla considered spending their limited resources working on their web browser
Part of the report is also a contingency for when they need to find alternative income.
They’re hardly abandoning all Firefox development and dumping it into this.
When Firefox dies, will websites stop pretending to follow W3C and just all spec to chrome and make the Web even more of a surveillance nightmare?
Then we’ll really need a rebel alliance.
Well, Safari is still a thing and has a five times higher market share than Firefox. If Firefox were the only competitor left standing their 3% market share would already not be enough for many companies to care
Open source ai is doing well. Mozilla integrating the models directly into it’s browser doesn’t really do anything to help them.
I have to disagree. Easing access is the thing that is needed to ensure that Open Source AI isn’t pushed to the fringes of society.
Even Browser addons are a hurdle for the common user. You are speaking from the perspective of someone who knows how to do things.
Making sure everyone regardless of technical aptitude can use OS AI is the only thing guaranteeing that closed source apps that simplify access don’t take over everything.
For example, I’ve already had a decent bit of resistance just trying to encourage friends, and family to use an ad-blocker.
That’s basically a recommended standard for using the internet these days, like pop-up blockers were. Government agencies use and generally recommend them.
What does that look like?
I don’t encourage my friends anything – maybe im not close like that.
For my parents, i install firefox with ublock and say, ok, now use the web with no ads.
Then when they use chrome for something (usually its superior form autofill abilities or website compatibility) they ask me why they have ads, or phishing attempts, and I tell them it is because they are on chrome, and to use firefox if they don’t need chrome that instant.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
There’s so much more we could do.
Is this a glitch in my app or how does this comment have a negative amount of downvotes?
I mean, it is a good quote.
I think it is a bug in PieFed (the Software your Instance is running). Have that happening to me as well and am just ignoring it. :)
I don’t know. Maybe it was an AI bot that got it’s feelings hurt by Frank Herbert and the system noticed the downvote was caused by AI so it inverted it’s vote.
The AI Bot, meant to free humans from thinking, ended up being enslaved by The System.
"As it is written!"
someone’s salty
‘Rebel Alliance’ for Open Source: Good, I’m with you.
AI: Nope.
https://report.mozilla.community/
Mozilla’s main contributors: Microsoft, Facebook, Google.
Then Firefox embeds [free VPN] and “privacy-preserving” ad measurements.
jeez. im almost feeling bad for them. should we send them like 10$ or something. I use it
By design, you can’t send Mozilla money for Firefox development. It all goes into AI and venture capital grants and whatever else isn’t the browser.
Pretty sure they’ll be fine.
“Mozilla CEO earned $6,903,089 in 2022” https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5053290/mozilla-2023-annual-report-ceo-pay-skyrockets-while-firefox-marketshare-nosedives
JWZ has also had some choice words:
Also: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/kitten-meat-deli-slices/ (explicitly about Mozilla stuff) And
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozillas-original-sin/ And
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/mozilla-has-1-4-billion-dollars-that-they-are-spending-on-some-ai-bullshit/
Sounds like the Mozilla CEO has joined the AI evangelism war on the side of the evangelists.
No wonder he’s doing Star Wars comparisons, because this is a fantasy thing that the world’s billionaires can’t figure out how to build.
Because there aren’t enough of those, and because Mozilla will definitely entice people to pay money to them because… Why?
Open models are one of the few forces keeping AI from becoming an oligopoly: Without them, a handful of companies would control the technology, prices, and the rules of what users are allowed to do. Competition from open models is already pushing the entire industry to innovate faster and charge less. 💪😎✌️
If the open source ones are good enough why would anyone pay enough for AIMegacorp to make a profit?
Most companies have not yet been using AI efficiently, and often do so simply out of FOMO. What’s more, the fact that open-weight models have caught up with or even overtaken closed AIs is a recent development over the last six months.
From my personal experience, most companies don’t look at the benchmarks and simply buy “AI” from a company based on their perception of that company.
All the Chinese models are scary and “dangerous”, Grok too (but for slightly more legitimate reasons), Meta that’s Facebook and everyone knows they’re bad at privacy (even your boss), so they end up choosing Microsoft’s AI, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
Mozilla wants to do everything except make Firefox succeed, it seems.
What would actually make it succeed though? I have been using it for a long time, not like there are any issues.
Just seems more of a culture for people just use Chrome. Is marketing the solution or what?
Sometimes I feel like believing the conspiracy theory that the heads at mozilla are google flunkies, who only keep the browser around so google can’t be called out for monopolistic behavior with Chrome. Firefox is the only alternative to V8, the Chrome web engine. Safari doesn’t really count
Also unsure about that, but it is true that Google help fund its development (unless they stopped?), and I would also believe it its just to help themselves.
What a shame it would be if the trend continued towards powerful free and local models that can run on hardware people already own. Then all the poor companies trying to crash the economy and rent their models to everyone at exorbitant prices along with all the data centers being built might go bankrupt.
What I remember from the movies is that the rebel alliance is being hunted to extinction unless they get lucky and one shot the bad guy.
Thing being, even the cheap models don’t offer good value for money. Once the big players run out of money, the whole thing will collapse.
You son of a bitch I’m in.