Mozilla Announces $225,000 for Art and Advocacy Exploring A.I.
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Mozilla makes money disappear. Their 2016 revenues were in excess of $520M, and their claimed output was the Quantum browser.
The two largest R&D verticals seem to be their browser and the codecs group. That still doesn't account for expenses of $520M in 2016, and much much more in 2017.
Where is all the money going, Mozilla?
You have no idea what it takes to have _hundreds_ of engineers and supporting teams to work on a multi-million lines of code application that needs to be shipped to a giant group of users.
What do you think Mozilla is? A bunch of hackers in a room? It is a global company with 1200 employees. In a dozen offices around the world.
How do you think money disappears? You think Firefox and all the other things Mozilla does happen by itself? That this is all free? That this does not cost any money? ....
The question you need to ask is if the chrome (browser) and codec team in Google add up to 1200. Or the IE+Edge and __add_MSFT_GRP__ add up to 1200.
Further, do those groups cost their parents $500M/year?
Please stop talking.
The remaining expenses are fluff. In a corporation, one wouldn't be allowed to have non-essential expenses far exceed essential ones. In a non-profit, this philosophy needs doubling down on.
I might be completely wrong, but Mozilla seems to be subsidizing the whims of a corrupt few at the top.
Your napkin "calculations" make zero sense. Go read the financial report.
"""Mozilla seems to be subsidizing the whims of a corrupt few at the top"""
Ah it is clear what your real intent is.
And what might that intent be? Are you suggesting Mozilla's top brass are bonafide angels doing God's work, above public scrutiny? They seem to position themselves as champions of the people and freedom, much like politicians
A similar thing could be happening to Wikimedia Foundation's finances.
There is so much interesting going on in the linked post, I really wish this community would be able to have a mature discussion about that.
If you're a software engineer @ Mozilla and earn less than ~$190K/annum ($225M/1200 employees), your boss is exploiting you. OR Mozilla routinely pays actual engineers far lesser than what their top brass spend on whims.
[1]: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2016/2016_Mozilla_Au...
The other expenses break down into mostly marketing ($47M) and "general and administrative" ($59M). The first one makes sense - it's a small budget for a global presence. G&A usually includes office rent, which I'd bet is a huge chunk.
Let's do the math: SF is ~$80/sq.ft. Usually assumed is $175 sq.ft/engineer. That's $16M of those $59M. Then there's utilities, insurance, etc. Let's call it $20M.
Then there's legal expenses - those usually go into G&A. Given that in 2016, Mozilla squeezed $1B of payments out of Verizon ($375M/year until 2019), I'd assume some lawyers made a good chunk of money. Given the huge jump in G&A from 2015, I'm willing to attribute the entire difference ($20M) to legal costs. This was a huge one-time event, it would make sense.
Now we've explained $40M of those $59M. So, at this point, we're debating if the remaining $19M could possibly have been extracted nefariously. Likely, no, because there's more costs. And if you have 1,200 employees, costs add up quickly.
Meanwhile, the only evidence you've brought for your accusation is "because I believe it's true". That's not even close to meaningful. You're certainly entitled to your own opinion, but the facts we all share say otherwise.
2. Not all of them are devs, and devs are (typically) the most expensive. Which should further increase the average US compensation for devs to MUCH MORE than $140K
3. GitLab has hundreds of employees but they choose to have a lean real estate footprint, especially in exorbitant zip codes like SF to keep costs low. Obviously, Mozilla isn't concerned by minutiae like over paying for real estate
4. Why does Mozilla need a ~$50M marketing budget? HUGE RED FLAG!!!
5. Self adorned morally upright Mozilla squeezing out a $1B to squander on __insert-here__ is a crime against humanity. They neither have a moral edge over Verizon, nor does money in their coffers benefit humanity. It empowers the senior management in much the same way as government funding empowers the morally bankrupt politicians at the helm.
In conclusion, Mozilla's budget breaks down into 66% software (whose costs still don't make sense given their global developer footprint), and 33% B.S. overhead.
If one digs deeper, (I'm guessing) you'll find the senior management @ Mozilla to be earning orders of magnitude over junior developers - like a private corp. Further, even private corps have no tolerance for 33% of their budget being squandered!! [Atlassian, Gitlab, ...] are famous for having almost $0 in marketing budget, while a not-for-profit like Mozilla THAT HAS NOTHING TO SELL thinks it OK to wash $50M down the loo.
We need a politico like organization to go deep into Mozilla's inner workings as these numbers DO NOT COMPUTE
As for PR/marketing, it might be worth remembering Mozilla's mission: "...to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all"
Yeah, kinda needs marketing.
But really, your mind is set. It's part of a conspiracy to enrich the Mozilla leadership. If that helps you sleep at night, go for it.
Psychology and sociology are 'soft' sciences because you can't test people psychologically and sociologically in 'hard' ways without seriously crossing some serious ethical boundaries.
It could be argued that a lot of the decisions being made that back the design in contemporary infrastructures already are engaged in this sort of testing and behavioral modification, in ways that seem innocent from the onset, but yet still propagate across social systems in ways that are far too chaotic and complex to forecast.
But a lot of useful Science can be done by observing, documenting, cataloging and explaining the effects of AI being already inflicted on us.
I think if there were more transparency concerning these systems and their affiliated organizations, that would obviate the need to add another layer of reasoning, which would reduce the number of unknowns, rather than increase.
Of course, that requires cooperation and trust. Which brings one back to the question of intents. Which can conflate intents meant to 'inflict' (harm?) or intents meant to grow, develop, inspire, progress.
I think this is less about AGI/ full AI than it is about learning systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
That said, the impact of this stuff especially in the context of the web is both profound and evolving.
I understand that it may be useful but this is far outside of what I would expect Mozilla to spend its funds on.
>Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.
> We’re awarding $225,000 to technologists and media makers who help the public understand how threats to a healthy internet affect their everyday lives.
> In a world where biased algorithms, skewed data sets, and broken recommendation engines can radicalize YouTube users, promote racism, and spread fake news, it’s more important than ever to support artwork and advocacy work that educates and engages internet users.
I guess that's somewhat related to their mission. Although they seem to be taking on more of an activism / PR role with this project.
My guess is that it's largely people within Mozilla responding to the popular outrage against Russian 'bots', fake news, and the alt-right.
How do they think they'll accomplish that, short of taking over the world's governments?
Hipsters gonna hips.
It looks like they've got too much money too, despite being dependent on Google's handouts for survival.
The Foundation focuses on advocacy and movement building around internet related topics (i.e. Privacy & Security, Digital Inclusion), while the Corporation focuses mainly on Firefox, Research projects (Rust, WASM, WebVR), standards work, and other "product" related things.
(source: I'm a Mozilla Foundation staff member)
I mean it’s all good and fine but please also focus on the one thing you are supposed to be doing primarily.
Disclaimer: I donate to Firefox.
Issue list: https://github.com/jfitzell/mozilla-keychain/issues/88#issue...
And in every topic like this, ones about Mozilla's spending (or sometimes Chrome or any other org that has a popular, free product), someone feels the need to say "but why not this one bug that I harp on?" really, really consistently.
How was it low content? In a post about spending am I not allowed to specify my opinion about the spending? You can think of me as some entitled jerk and that's your opinion and I myself doubt I might be acting like one. "But" I would expect that you would allow me to at least say how I feel about it. It's not a technical debate, there can be multiple points of view not necessarily right or wrong.
No, you really don't. You donate to the Mozilla Foundation, who are the non-profit parent company who do these kinds of things, not build Firefox. Firefox is made by their subsidiary Corporation, who cannot accept your donations.
The Corporation doesn't even need your donations anyway; they make a lot more revenue than the donations Mozilla receives.
However, the more you donate, the larger the whole company is allowed to grow while legally being a non-profit. Also, the more is donated, the more they are allowed to transfer between the Foundation and the Corporation.
But you are still not ultimately donating to Firefox. You are donating to the Foundation, who need the money more in the first place so that the whole can legally remain a non-profit, even if they earn more revenue.
Whether or not you feel they should have more money to work with is up to you, but I note that quite a few people seem to wish that Mozilla could do pie-in-the-sky stuff like manage their own user clouds and VPNs and search engines while not remaining motivated by shareholder profits.
Why not (serious) social science projects? Don't have today's sociologists have anything to say about this or do they need a few more decades for warm up.
To answer your question directly though, there is "serious" work like that from people like Veale and Skirpan; also orgs like AI Now are very serious about this area.
Not a normative judgment, just thinking about what people think this labor costs vs. what it actually costs.
Can you explain how this is Mozilla "throw[ing] its money away"?
So do various other companies with significant physical presences in the Bay Area (Google and Facebook come to mind).
We've really learned to repeat the anti-'academia' meme. There is no "academia"; Mozilla is an organization; "academia" is millions of people around the world in every place and environment imaginable. It's absurd to assume all these people are the same or coordinated somehow.
Given the absurdity, one might ask: Who would be interested in discrediting everything produced by every college and university?