After the controversial news shared earlier this week by Mozilla’s new CEO that Firefox will evolve into “a modern AI browser,” the company now revealed it is working on an AI kill switch for the open-source web browser.
On Tuesday, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo was named the new CEO of Mozilla Corporation, the company behind the beloved Firefox web browser used by almost all GNU/Linux distributions as the default browser.
In his message as new CEO, Anthony Enzor-DeMeo stated that Firefox will grow from a browser into a broader ecosystem of trusted software while remaining the company’s anchor, and that Firefox will evolve into a modern AI browser and support a portfolio of new and trusted software additions.
What was not made clear is that Firefox will also ship with an AI kill switch that will let users completely disable all the AI features that are included in Firefox. Mozilla shared this important update earlier today to make it clear to everyone that Firefox will still be a trusted web browser.
Why not just ship it without any of the AI stuff and give users the option to install and use it instead of bloating the application? This also confirms that the stuff is essentially OPT OUT instead of OPT IN
In their defense, Mozilla doesn’t have their own source of income, they heavily depend on search sponsorships. Jumping onto the AI train is one way to keep afloat for now
How does AI actually improve their financial position? Who pays them to use AI?
Right now browser usage patterns are shifting because people are trying new things. Most of those new things are AI integration. If those new things prove popular or have staying power remains to be seen.
Firefox , in my estimation, is looking to leverage their existing reputation for privacy focus while also adding new technologies that people seem at least interested in trying.
A larger user base means that people will pay more for ads, which if they maintain their user control and privacy standards users are less likely to disable on the default landing screen.
It’s why they keep getting flac for working on privacy preserving advertising technology: they want you to use Firefox because they don’t stop you from disabling the bullshit, and they hope to do the bullshit in a way that makes you not mind leaving it on.
All the AI stuff was mentioned in the same context as discussion about how they need to seek money in ways that aren’t simply being paid by Google.
I have a better kill switch: Waterfox and LibreWolf. Don’t have to worry about of that nonsense right out the gate.
But that’s just saying that instead of using Firefox and not turning on the feature, you’ll use a less maintained version of Firefox where they didn’t enable the feature. I don’t feel like those projects have much value add in the privacy spectrum compared to Firefox, particularly when one of them was owned by an advertising company, and neither of them actually has the resources to maintain or operate a browser in isolation, which is a major concern regarding security and privacy both.
Is there nobody with sanity left? This has blown up so much the user base clearly does not want it. Focus your efforts elsewhere. You gain marketshare by putting users first. Also fuck markets.
If all Firefox users donated to Mozilla it could work. Alas, we don’t.
I probably would, if the organizational structure and its spending focus(es) weren’t so fucked up. They have been spending insane amounts of money on bullshit like AI instead of core browser features, and their leadership has extremely high wages for something that should be a non-profit open source organization. And it has been like this for years at this point.
Their CEO makes more than I think CEOs should earn in general, but the rest of their executives earn relatively normal to low salaries for their roles and the sector.
Non-profit doesn’t mean everyone works for free.
Then let’s
How? Where? I’ll donate, take my money, and ads a voting system where paying users can vote for the next features
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/donate/ if you’re actually interested in donating.
A very vocal portion of the user base, but we don’t actually know what absolute portion cares. I’m personally unlikely to use possible AI features outside translation, but Mozilla has generally done enough that I don’t feel particularly worried they’re going to mess with my privacy or force me to use a feature I don’t want.
Would be nice if folks stopped calling LLMs AI. If they are true AI, they would be able to learn how a kill switch works and disable it
We already have a term for “true” AI, it’s AGI - Artifcial General Intelligence.
Both AGI and LLMs are types of artificial intelligence, as are things like OCR, speech to text systems, or chess engines, and a ton of other things, it’s a vast field of computer science.
AGI is a hack term that is only necessary because people have been misusing the term AI. All that other stuff is just really fancy scripting and math. There’s no I involved, A or otherwise.
It’s really not. The people who invented the term “artificial intelligence” both meant something different than you’re thinking the term means and also thought human level intelligence was far simpler to model than it turned out to be.
You’re thinking of intelligence as compared to a human, and they were thinking of intelligence as compared to a wood chipper. The computers of the time executed much more mechanical tasks, like moving text into place on a printer layout.
They aimed to intelligence, where intelligence was understood as tasks that were more than just rote computation but responded to the environment they executed in. Text layout by knowing how to do line breaks and change font sizes. Parsing word context to know if something is a typo.
These tasks require something more than rote mechanical action. They’re far from human intelligence, and entirely lacking in the introspective or adaptive qualities that we associate with humans, but they’re still responsive.Using AI only to refer to human intelligence is the missuse of the term by writers and television producers.
The people who coined the terms would have found it quaint to say something isn’t intelligence because it consists of math and fancy scripting. Their efforts were predicated on the assumption that human intelligence was nothing more than math, and programming in general is an extremely abstract form of math.
To add an example, in video games we call it AI whenever the enemy appears to make a choice.
Yup, that’s a good one.
Purely for discussions sake, I’d say that the video game entity is making a choice, but it lacks volition.
No freewill or consciousness, but it’s selecting a course of action based on environment circumstances.
