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JohnPDickerson

29 karmajoined 5 years ago
CEO, Mozilla AI. More info: https://www.mozilla.ai/

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JohnPDickerson
·3 days ago·discuss
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!
JohnPDickerson
·3 months ago·discuss
Handy is an awesome project, highly recommended - many of our engineers and PMs use it! CJ, Handy's creator, recently joined us as a Builder in Residence at Mozilla.ai. So for those interested in deploying a more raw/lightweight approach to local speech-to-text (or other multimodal) models, feel free to check out llamafile - which includes whisperfile, a single-file whisper.cpp + cosmopolitan framework-based executable. We're hoping to build some bridges between the two projects as well. https://github.com/mozilla-ai/llamafile
JohnPDickerson
·4 months ago·discuss
Common question, thanks for asking! We’re a public benefit corporation spun out from, and primarily owned by, the Mozilla Foundation. We're focused on democratizing access to AI tech, on enabling non-AI experts to benefit from and control their own AI tools, and on empowering the open source AI ecosystem. We're a small team relative to the "main" Mozilla, which lets us experiment a bit more easily.

We do run into this branding question frequently, and will add some clarity to the website.
JohnPDickerson
·8 months ago·discuss
> I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up.

Chiming in here as a Mozillian focused on AI not specifically related to Firefox - I agree! Just a heads up that a separate public benefit corporation, Mozilla.ai, exists and is supporting a suite of commercially-licensed, open source, general AI dev and enablement tools. That includes mcpd, what we're calling "requirements.txt for MCP", meant to enable more trusted automated interfacing between machines.

A goal here is to support developers looking to build out AI-enabled systems that interact with each other and with the Internet, be that through a traditional browser or some other way.

You may enjoy some of our projects: https://www.mozilla.ai/open-tools/choice-first-stack