Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is taking charge of one of the internet’s most important — and most complicated — companies.

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.”

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  • Sims@lemmy.ml
    0·
    29 days ago

    Everyone’s sick of AI

    But not everyone are ! But a group of people have gone to the ‘hate the tool’ corner, are very aggressive and feel that ‘everybody else hates it’. But ‘we’/‘they’ don’t - some do.

    Any software/tool that leaves it up to the user if they want to use such a feature or not, are okay. Open source and Foss doesn’t exclude the use of AI, and ‘catering’ to a special group of angry people that just want to remove the option entirely for everyone else, is not very ‘community’ aligned in my view.

    There will be plenty of clones that pull out this or that part of the official source tree, so nobody will lack a normal browser. I currently use ‘Zen’ and I had to ‘force’ AI on. Other will just remove it entirely.