The next era of AI is about infrastructure, not just models | Hacker News Reader

The next era of AI is about infrastructure, not just models

blog.mozilla.ai

61 pointsroyapakzad25 comments

Why does Mozilla keep diluting their efforts into stuff like AI?

From the outside it looks like they barely have resources to keep Firefox competitive.

Apparently to sort tabs.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-ai-enhanced-tab...

Huh. Arc had an interesting AI use where pinned tabs would get renamed automatically to be more informative - about 50/50 in my experience. The best part of this though was the ability to opt-in on a per-use basis - pin the tab, click to rename and just delete the default name and _then_ AI would try.

The CEO has a bunch of AI papers. Seems like a smart guy, but I don’t know why he’s using the Mozilla brand or platform to screw around with AI stuff. Maybe because Mozilla makes no money and they’re hoping to jump on the AI bandwagon? I don’t know, doesn’t seem like it will end well..

> Maybe because Mozilla makes no money

Mozilla makes a surprising amount of money, almost entirely from google.

This is a problem. Mozilla is completely dependent on it's primary competitor for funding Firefox. Although I don't agree with Mozilla's current direction, trying to diversify their primary source of income is rational from this perspective.

> Maybe because Mozilla makes no money

Something like $680 million annual revenue. There are thousands of companies in Silicon Valley that would kill for that.

I thought it was pretty obvious from context that “making no money” meant no money outside of Google giving them money to avoid an anti-trust. Which they could decide to rescind whenever they want or negotiate down.

Which they probably would if Firefox ever started to become a serious competitor to Chrome.

Author here. The reason I joined the Mozilla ecosystem, and the reason I want to help Mozilla's mission succeed in the era of AI, is identical to the reason I supported Mozilla in my teens and college years during the early browser wars. Then, we had MSFT coming in to create a single point of failure (and control) for your access to the Internet via IE - Firefox combatted that. We're in the same situation now, with your access to the Internet - commerce, social networking, information - going through a walled garden of Gemini or OAI or Ant or Perplexity.

Mozilla is nowhere near large enough to solve this problem on its own, but: (i) Mozilla AI, which I'm leading, is pushing to solve this at the infra and maybe platform layer by providing developers the ability to choose to use their own AI tooling and (ii) Mozilla writ large is a big enough machine that it can create a community and alliance across dozens or hundreds of players to create a viable alternative to a bleaker, non-open Internet. That's my hope!

> We're in the same situation now, with your access to the Internet - commerce, social networking, information - going through a walled garden of Gemini or OAI or Ant or Perplexity.

Really? I'm still using the internet, and I don't touch any of that stuff.

> by providing developers the ability to choose to use their own AI tooling

Wait, what does that have to do with any of what you said before? That doesn't sound like "access to the Internet."

> create a viable alternative to a bleaker, non-open Internet.

And now you've switched back to talking about the open (or not) Internet, which has nothing to do with "developers [choosing] their own AI tooling".

It sounds like you're just pursuing your own pet project while trying justify it using the language of internet freedom.

Wishing you the best, hope it works out. Would love if Firefox became a bigger player in the browser market too.

very well said, and I have been rooting for the team big time!

if you have an alliance hub for discussions with those also building open infrastructure tooling, please let me know!

have already been in the Mozilla AI discord since last year and had a great time being one of the 2 external participants during the name brainstorming for renaming any-llm ^_^

Agreed with much of this. Models are commodities. LLM gateways are the correct enterprise pattern imo.

I recently set up GoModel and there's now way I'm going back to a world without it. Gateways are great for local too! I can swap out models or quants and my tools do not need to be reconfigured.

At the enterprise level, you need to be resilient to provoder downtime and gateways can handle this org wide.

> Gateways are great for local too

My gateway (litellm) has my local models with a fallback to the same model on openrouter. Best of both worlds.

I'm not falling back to the same model, but I do have both my local llms and OpenCode Go being gateway'd, so I get a single view across all of my usage.

It may be a lot of cool things but one thing it is not is a web browser.

Chrome is now bad ChatGPT with more convenient webpage inspection

Well I think it is the platform layer. If you can blow up $1m on a harness sure… otherwise rent it.

Egads surely Mozilla can produce a blog post that isn't written in AI-speak?

Will organizations want to control their own proxy or use OpenRouter?

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