I have to ask: why, exactly, does it make sense for Mozilla to invest heavily into running expensive servers to run vanity chat bots for people? What's the path here to something which improves their financial situation or browser market share? How isn't this just yet another random service they'll throw money into for a couple of years before shutting down?
Because if they don't they will not have feature parity with Chrome (Gemini) and Edge (Copilot).
And while not all people are fond of AI, there are shit tons of people out there who do. Which means you automatically diminish your market share if you don't (because your most important competitors do)
Firefox doesn’t have a profit model to sell ads or user browsing behaviour like other browsers as far as I know.
I appreciate the languishing comment, at the same time Firefox has features that seem to be a little unique to it out of the box. Spaces comes to mind.
Getting really good at one thing might be beneficial.
Ai summarization seems to be more and more common in a browser. Maybe they’ll add it as a local feature once a model can comfortably run.
Firefox the browser doesn’t make any money. Doesn’t matter if the wheels are square or round if no one’s willing or able to put gas in the tank. As many prior rounds of Mozilla on HN have pointed out, it’s completely unacceptable to consider having to pay Mozilla for Firefox, and anyways a few million dollars will barely hire enough coders to keep afloat on CVEs (unlike e.g. Let’s Encrypt, who has a much simpler organization to operate!).
So we’re now in the timeline where Mozilla is the liquid metal terminator in T2 trying to escape lava by shapeshifting, as you say, three horns and a bubble dome. Accurately put! And a hilarious image too.
We’d best hope that the antitrust lawsuits don’t kill the Google money that’s keeping their car fueled.
Does it matter? Without it, there would be no money from Google.
You're moving the goalpost rather substantially. "It makes no money" and "it costs millions to maintain" -> it pulls in hundreds of millions per year, the majority of their income. They can afford to focus on it.
That's pretty much accurate. Mine's been up and running on my clunky old home machine for 6 months, and I just this morning overheard a couple coworkers talking about the local llms they're running. Right now a substantial minority of PCs could run useful models. Usage is at the stage where it's small and growing rapidly. Early adapter phase, but all you need is a relatively modest years-old GPU to handle something like this model.
What isn't done, and probably won't be for a while, is a nice generic framework so we can tie their local llm into all sorts of local apps and processes. The big players all want us to use cloud services.
