Fair enough, but is any stopping Mozilla from _also_ selling your voice data to third parties including advertisers and commercial ML interests?
(Asking this because Firefox has started sharing our data with leanplum)
As of today, the open source and free software equivalents to machine learning and AI products are sorely lacking when compared to commercial offerings. Whether it is open-ended speech to text with good ergonomics, text to speech, intent recognition, speaker recognition, OCR for text, OCR in the wild, translation, object recognition, image segmentation, image to text or natural language processing, commercial offerings are leagues ahead of what free software can do.
If we look at one of the most impressive AI demonstrations in history, GPT-3, it is not apparent whether open source can even replicate it because with AI, unlike in the past, time and skill is no longer directly fungible with money. I would argue the concentration of such capabilities to Microsoft and Google servers is a threat to the ideals of free software as great as any it has seen before. Yet, relatively little attention is spent there because people are too focused on yesterday's problems.
This concentration is difficult to avoid because current algorithms require large amounts of data and computing ability, which only large corporations can marshal. Mozilla is far from perfect but despite their many stumbles, they're the only large organization seriously attempting to address this imbalance. As much as these algorithms are marketed as AI to users, ML is better thought of as libraries, in the line of ffmpeg, to programmers. Mozilla still do seem to care about creating a local-first offering. If everyone stops using them then what is gained exactly?
Indeed. The creator of LuaJIT is only a single, very skilled, person with a desktop computer. People like Fabrice Bellard can produce gigantic amounts of FLOSS source code. Yes, those are only examples, but people with their skills and motivations to build FLOSS software will need access to lots of money in order to be able to build ML models.
I disagree, most large companies view this data as a competitive advantage and won't sell it directly. They may sell the results but the data itself is their moat. Smaller companies on the other hand are more willing to sacrifice future profits for current money.
As far as recording things I didn't consent to, the likes of Google way more likely to do that[1].
1 - https://mashable.com/article/google-assistant-microphone-smo...
My guess would be there isn't much of a point selling voice data from an open dataset. Also, since the code is in the open, it would be relatively easy to spot if they were sending data to somewhere they do not or record when they shouldn't.