Comment by dale_glass

Comment by dale_glass 5 hours ago

> Also, the timing of their Nov. 13 announcement is pretty bad. There is already chatter that AI may be a bubble bigger than the dotcom bubble. For a company that doesn't have deep pockets, it would be prudent to take the back seat on this.

Unless Mozilla plans to spend millions on cloud GPUs to train their own models, there seems to be little danger of that. They're just building interfaces to existing weights somebody else developed. Their part of the work is just browser code and not in real danger from any AI bubble.

sfink 4 hours ago

It could still be at risk as collateral damage. If the AI bubble pops, part of that would be actual costs being transmitted to users, which could lead to dramatically lower usage, which could lead to any AI integration becoming irrelevant. (Though I'd imagine the financial shocks to Mozilla would be much larger than just making some code and design irrelevant, if Mozilla is getting more financially tied to the stock price of AI-related companies?)

But yeah, Mozilla hasn't hinted at training up its own frontier model or anything ridiculous like that. I agree that it's downstream of that stuff.

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PunchyHamster 2 hours ago

If they just use 3rd party APIs/models, and AI bubble pops, the amount of users of AI in FF will not change.
The upstream might earn less, and some upstreams might fail, but once they have code switching to competition or local isn't a big deal.
That being said
"This could've been a plugin" - actual AI vendors can absolutely just outcompete FF, nobody gonna change to FF to have slightly better AI integration - and if Google decides to do same they will eat Mozilla lunch yet again

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dale_glass 4 hours ago

The bubble if any is an investment bubble. If somebody likes using LLMs for summaries, or generating pictures or such things, that's not going anywhere. Stable Diffusion and Llama are sticking around regardless of any economical developments.
So if somebody finds Mozilla's embedded LLM summary functionality useful, they're not going to suddenly change their mind just because some stock crashed.
The main danger I guess would be long term, if things crash at the point where they're almost useful but not quite there. Then Mozilla would be left with a functionality that's not as good as it could be and with little hope of improvement because they build on others' work and don't make their own models.

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