[dmarcos]

All countries see AI as a geopolitical concern. An open source strategy is smart. It’s effective and also builds good will / soft power. Many see Chinese AI companies as the good guys and root for them. I’m pro open source and also celebrate but still aware this is most likely just the means to an end.

I used to work at Mozilla. I think we are missing a player in the market with a more principled open source approach.

[pdimitar]

And who might that be, I wonder? The company that seems more worried about executive bonuses than to adhere to its mission, for at least a decade now? Perhaps a certain one whose name starts with M and ends with ozilla?

Purely random thought, of course.

[dmarcos]

I don’t know. thinking machines perhaps?

A lot of things have to come together: talent, capital that is not looking to maximize returns, ambition to compete in the marketplace. At peak Mozilla it was clear to everyone that we needed an undeniably successful product to be able to influence the market. Advocacy alone is not very effective.

[rvba]

They spend their money from Google on a lot of things but not theit core product (Firefox), so it juat kept losing market share.

They killed extensions. They introduced signed extensions - and then forgot to renew the certificate. Mozilla employees build what they want, not ehat users want etc.

[pdimitar]

Definitely. Sadly "capital that is not looking to maximize returns" is a very tall order in the last 20+ years.

[kamranjon]

I also think Allen AI with their Olmo models are doing great stuff by releasing full training data and pipelines and checkpoints which I’m not sure any other US company is really coming close to transparency-wise.