Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is taking charge of one of the internet’s most important — and most complicated — companies.

Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”

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  • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    26 days ago

    How is it that no CEO sees the writing on the wall and goes “you know what? Everyone’s sick of AI and it’s a great opportunity for PR if we just said we’re NOT going to integrate AI anytime soon.”

    That will actually differentiate your company from the sea of “embracing AI as the future” everyone else is doing. Especially for an open source company, surely they’ve done user demographic studies and realized that they have more anti-AI users than most mainstream software, why not cater to them when no one else is, and secure their good will?

    • JoeMontayna@lemmy.ml
      0·
      26 days ago

      If they were smart they would hedge and use AI but not call it AI. Actually build a product that leverages AI and give it an appropriate name.

      • brucethemoose@lemmy.world
        1·
        26 days ago

        Yeah, you know, like literally any piece of software they do.

        It’s like getting all hyped up over linked lists.

        I love linked lists! But they don’t need to be plastered all over the logo and in my search bar and endorsed as “the future” by CEOs.

    • Sims@lemmy.ml
      0·
      26 days ago

      Everyone’s sick of AI

      But not everyone are ! But a group of people have gone to the ‘hate the tool’ corner, are very aggressive and feel that ‘everybody else hates it’. But ‘we’/‘they’ don’t - some do.

      Any software/tool that leaves it up to the user if they want to use such a feature or not, are okay. Open source and Foss doesn’t exclude the use of AI, and ‘catering’ to a special group of angry people that just want to remove the option entirely for everyone else, is not very ‘community’ aligned in my view.

      There will be plenty of clones that pull out this or that part of the official source tree, so nobody will lack a normal browser. I currently use ‘Zen’ and I had to ‘force’ AI on. Other will just remove it entirely.

  • ghost_laptop@lemmy.ml
    0·
    26 days ago

    Mozilla needs so much to stop having a fucking CEO who gets paid millions and start using that money to improve the browser.