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Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI: Read the memo | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Specifically, Mozilla plans to scale back its investment in a number of products, including its VPN, Relay and, somewhat remarkably, its Online Footprint Scrubber, which launched only a week ago. Mozilla will also shut down Hubs, the 3D virtual world it launched back in 2018, and scale back its investment in its mozilla.social Mastodon instance. The layoffs will affect roughly 60 employees. Bloomberg previously reported the layoffs.

Yo, wtf. Their VPN, Relay and Monitor are basically the only Mozilla services I'd use and pay for. To me this sounds like this is the wrong direction. What do you guys think?

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Article quote "Mozilla will focus on bringing “trustworthy AI into Firefox.” To do so, it will bring together the teams that work on Pocket, Content and AI/Ml."

Does not scream privacy friendly, imo

[–] [email protected] 30 points 9 months ago

In the past, they've often spearheaded privacy-friendly solutions, like the translation feature in Firefox, which is already today 100% offline. It's possible to run LLMs offline, too, for simpler workloads. For example, they could probably use an offline LLM to have that translation feature form readable sentences more often.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago (1 children)

on the one hand i agree: trustworthy does not mean privacy. but on the other hand: ai does not necesaarily mean privacy invasion (though experience might tell us otherwise)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

In theory there should be an acceptable balance, somewhere. What this would look like I do not know.