Mozilla is creating a startup to build more open and trustworthy AI

Mozilla is creating a new startup called Mozilla.ai, which the company hopes “will build a trustworthy and independent open-source AI ecosystem.” Moez Draief, a longtime AI researcher and scientist, is leading the new startup, and Mozilla is investing $30 million to get it started.

As products like ChatGPT, Bing, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion have become hugely popular, they’re also encountering huge problems with misinformation and are being put to use creating deepfakes and copyright problems. Plus, they’re already beginning to change the way the internet works. If chatbots become our primary interface to information and inspiration, that has huge ramifications for user privacy, copyright, and much more. Mozilla has been tracking this stuff for a while — its much-cited “Creating Trustworthy AI” white paper came out in 2020 — but has mostly stayed on the product sidelines. Now, it’s getting in the game for real, trying to influence the industry not just through policy but through product.

This is a familiar playbook for Mozilla. The company has a long history of being a small but influential player in the market, especially with Firefox. It’s no longer the most popular web browser out there — not by a long shot — but it’s popular enough to get Mozilla in the room. And Mozilla’s long history as an organization that actually understands and cares about the web gives it an outsize voice in many of those rooms. (The company, of course, has roots all the way back to the days of Netscape, which means it knows more about the consumer web than just about anybody.)

The Mozilla.ai announcement is light on detail about what the company plans to work on. Its website refers to building “a trustworthy open source AI ecosystem,” and it sounds as though it’ll be focused on building safety and transparency tools for developers rather than trying to compete head-on with GPT-4.

Mozilla likes to talk about building broader community and ecosystems, but it’s also clear that the company also sees AI as part of the future of Firefox. CEO Mitchell Baker said on The Verge’s Decoder podcast that she thinks we’re headed into a moment of real change — and that could help Firefox (or some other browser) win back some market share. “Do I think that disruption is coming? It is much more likely in the browser space than it was six months ago, for sure where it was really locked.”

It’s interesting timing for this announcement, too. Bard and Bing are obviously owned and operated by two of the largest companies in tech, both of which have a vested interest in keeping their experience closed. Even OpenAI, which long promised to be the kind of open ecosystem Mozilla’s talking about, has begun to share far less information about its models and training data. Mozilla seems to figure that someone’s going to have to champion a better model for building AI and that it might be the only company that can do it.