• 6 Posts
  • 53 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • I think the big reason that nobody’s mentioned yet is simply that they were earlier. Back when projects like Tox and Matrix were first starting to pop up, telegram was already fully formed. Signal didn’t come until at least a year later and didn’t have feature parity until several years later. Telegram by contrast was a much closer experience to WhatsApp and Messenger, making the transition much easier, particularly for low-tech knowledge users.









  • Tell me this is a good thing.

    Mozilla has long been the most ethical player in this space (while still producing SOTA ML). All of their datasets/models are open source and usually crowdsourced. Not to mention, their existing work is primarily in improving accessibility.

    ALSO, the other half of this story is that Firefox is becoming the primary focus again. Everybody’s freaking out about the AI stuff but that’s because they’re only reading the headlines. The programs they’ve shut down are things like Hubs (Mozilla’s metaverse platform), the VPN, and the sensitive data scrubber (which was using a third party service anyway).



  • So frustrated to see how this conversation is playing out. This is exactly what people have been asking for but all anybody can seem to see is “AI” in the headline.
    This pivot is about refocusing on:

    • The Browser
    • Privacy
    • Ethical AI

    This seems like a much better position for Mozilla to operate from, particularly because they’ve excelled at producing ethical SOTA ML for YEARS before ChatGPT. In all, this seems far more forward looking than the previous strategy of “make weird little web tools to make money maybe” and it’s an absolutely massive untapped niche, that they already have the talent to tap into. If we punish the players best positioned to shift the industry standard away from extreme and exploitative data collection, we will end up in exactly the Orwellian AI hellscape that we’re all so afraid of.