Anthony Enzor-DeMeo is taking charge of one of the internet’s most important — and most complicated — companies.

Mozilla is in a tricky position. It contains both a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the internet a better place for everyone, and a for-profit arm dedicated to, you know, making money. In the best of times, these things feed each other: The company makes great products that advance its goals for the web, and the nonprofit gets to both advocate for a better web and show people what it looks like. But these are not the best of times. Mozilla has spent the last couple of years implementing layoffs and restructuring, attempting to explain how it can fight for privacy and openness when Google pays most of its bills, while trying to find its place in an increasingly frothy AI landscape.

Fun times to be the new Mozilla CEO, right? But when I put all that to Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, the company’s just-announced chief executive, he swears he sees opportunity in all the upheaval. “I think what’s actually needed now is a technology company that people can trust,” Enzor-DeMeo says. “What I’ve seen with AI is an erosion of trust.”

Mozilla is not going to train its own giant LLM anytime soon. But there’s still an AI Mode coming to Firefox next year, which Enzor-DeMeo says will offer users their choice of model and product, all in a browser they can understand and from a company they can trust. “We’re not incentivized to push one model or the other,” he says. “So we’re going to try to go to market with multiple models.”

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  • Sockenklaus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    241·
    18 hours ago

    Do you trust Vivaldi despite it beeing closed source? I get that you mistrust Mozilla since they integrated AI but there are plenty of forks that cut the AI part and even are explicitly privacy focused.

    • super_user_do@feddit.itEnglish
      4·
      17 hours ago

      The company seems legit. Moreover they are very transparent about their business model, or at least enough to be trustable. I am not against Proprietary software per se, I just dislike AI Slop and value when companies respect me as a user. You got a point about the Firefox Forks though

    • Axum@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      16 hours ago

      The only parts of Vivaldi that are closed is just their ui skin on top of chrome and the tweaks they added. They still provide source for the open bits they use (chromium under the hood).

    • mirshafie@europe.pubEnglish
      22·
      17 hours ago

      It’s literally just a sidebar that lets you do queries to your LLM of choice. It’s not even in the way. If you don’t want to use it, you just don’t use it.