Comment by sfink
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.
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