It still remains a risk well worth taking. With Mozilla, it is merely uncertain but for just about every other company, it is all but guaranteed. You can plainly see this philosophy in the industry's naming sense, where super-computers of yester-year are relegated to "edge" roles.

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?