I do agree with your sentiment on cost, especially regarding exploding co2 emissions for LLMs, but it sounds like you're putting the blame mostly on Mozilla for what is market dynamics in capitalism, with most of the contenders being heavily VC-funded, and where Mozilla maybe just tries to signal that "AI" can be done responsibly also. If they don't try, people will blame them for "being late to the game/out of touch/ irrelevant" - so better to do it according to your principles and in-time I think.
> mozilla is a non-profit so doesn't need to respond to market signals.
No? They, just like every other entity, will have to achieve it's investors goals using the least amount of costs possible.
It just happens to be the case that Mozilla's investor's goals aren't more money.
For example, if a non-profit wants to build a bridge to a small island to provide the children of that island access to the mainland's schools; that non-profit would still be very susceptible to market signals regarding the most cost-efficient materials for bridge-building.
It is precisely because of current market signals that this move is a bad move for Mozilla. If GPUs were a dime a dozen and an AI engineer cost a thousand times less to employ than a browser engineer, Mozilla offering an LLM service would be a lot less objectionable than in the current economy.
> No? They, just like every other entity, will have to achieve it's investors goals using the least amount of costs possible.
The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donors not investors. The fiduciary duties of non-profit directors do not have to include using the least amount of costs possible.
The Mozilla Foundation's stated goals are "to advance the vision of the future of the internet and technology".
You might reasonably argue that this means copy catting every other product by slapping AI on itself, but I would counter that this actually demonstrates a lack of vision.
FF is still a solid choice, privacy-wise (with some manual tweaking), but just in the past few years 80-90% of their revenue came from adtech partnerships, so expect a series of rug pulls like the recent ones.
Being a non-profit that does not have a share-price, I'm curious if you have evidence for validity of your assessment of "big swings resulting in compensation packages".
I can offer a rationale that I hope that will be interesting. Evidence is more effort than I'm willing to invest in a random internet conversation. I hope that's okay. I don't mean to cause offense, but neither do I like having an interesting discussion shutdown.
Executive leadership compensation tends to be based on,
- the size/prospects/complexity of the company
- the compensation received by executives in similar roles at other companies
- the amount/type of oversight by the board
This incentivizes executives to increase the complexity of their role in order to justify greater remuneration. The classic example is turning a widget factory into a widget financial services provider. In this case, by behaving like Silicon Valley companies chasing the latest fad the executive leadership of Mozilla get to demand the same remuneration packages.
