For decades, Mozilla has been one of the strongest advocates for an open internet. Today, as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly central to how businesses and governments operate, the organization is making a similar case for open AI.
In a report published last month, Mozilla, a free software community and nonprofit project, said the performance gap between top open-source models and proprietary systems like Claude and ChatGPT has narrowed to just 3%. The report highlighted the growing popularity of open models, noting that in February 2026, Alibaba’s open-source model Qwen was downloaded more times than the next eight models combined.
The debate over open AI has gained fresh momentum after Meta released a new open-weight model on August 10, and promised more would come soon.
Raffi Krikorian, Mozilla’s chief technology officer, believes organizations need alternatives to proprietary AI systems to gain greater control over their data and infrastructure.
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5 daysYou mean AI should be rotten to the core with advertisement, surveillance trackers and taken over by Big Data monopolies mostly headquartered in a fascist country?
Yeah, that’s pretty much where it’s headed.
- gankouskhan@bookwyr.meEnglish5 days
Sadly that is AI of the present. A few of the leaders have already mentioned and have implemented “suggested results” in their responses, and surveillance is well… I assume we all know that was baked in from the start.
And that’s why the Mozilla organization is in decline, users beg for them to stop mucking with AI and make Firefox the unquestionably best browser in any platform, they answer with “OK, here’s more AI”
- kittenroar@beehaw.orgEnglish4 days
The AI in Firefox is local-only – no data centers, no privacy leaks, no supporting big evil. And you can opt out .
- Senal@programming.devEnglish4 days
If its such a compelling feature set then opt-in shouldn’t be an issue.
“Our FOSS Torment Nexus, which was created by evil from evil, that requires more evil to keep it updated, that fundamentally supports the evil campaign of surveillance subjugation by corrupt tech CEOs by it’s very existence as an excuse they can use to point out that not every evil machine is evil, is entirely good and ethical because it’s only local!” is not the brag you think it is
How have these sycophants been allowed to seep into every position of decision making or influence.
- 5 days
It’s always been this way since the first cities. Internet makes things more obvious
- 5 days
Yes, self-hosting and small-group AI hosting needs to be legal, accessible, and feasible.
Despite the pessimistic (and largely technically incorrect) takes here, the internet is actually an incredible feat of human collaboration; the most distributed, interconnected, democratized, and resilient communication system ever built.
You’d hope that Lemmy users, being people who’ve mostly fled the big social media sites with at very least some marginal technical cost to themselves, wouldn’t be pulling a millennial version of the boomer “AOL == The Internet” thing by treating FAANG’s sites as the internet, but alas.
- HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish5 days
I mean as a browser im moving away from firefox but I may end up using it as a standalone local llm. I would still like a gpl os flavor built around locall llm. something that is very limited on installation but with options to expand capability. Essentially something like a start trek computer.
- 5 days
Yeah I too am a big supporter. There are already all sorts of open models on Hugging Face. The smaller fined tuned models are often better than the big models at the specific tasks they are trained for.
There’s just a big learning curve at how to start using the open weight models and LoRAs on Hugging Face for example
- 5 days
“organizations need alternatives to proprietary AI systems to gain greater control over their data and infrastructure”
It was a rhetorical “why”, but sure. The most reasonable alternative would be not touching “AI” with a ten foot pole.
