Mozilla is now an AI company

22 Nov 2025 by cthos
1557 words

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In an ongoing series of my disappointment with this AI bubble, Mozilla has gone all-in on the AI Hype Train. Their thesis is dodgy, it's basically the "if we don't build AI into our browser, the evil big corporations will be left unchecked". Right. Okay. It's worth noting that this extends on their idea of "Responsible AI" from a white paper they published in 2020.

There's a fair amount to unpack here, but I want to start with a quote from their 2025 updated white paper which I think is telling (emphasis mine):

Consumers are starting to pay attention to AI’s impact on their lives. Workers — from delivery drivers to Hollywood writers — are pushing back on how AI affects their livelihoods. However, we have not yet seen a wave of mainstream consumer products that give people real choice over how they interact with AI. This is a key gap in the market.

There is a big presupposition built into this: Generative AI (that's the thing upending livelihoods) is a technology that deserves Mozilla's attention, and could be a market differentiator for them.

How? Like, really, how? I do not believe that there exists, nor can exist, an "ethical LLM". The current conversation is how LLMs are driving people into psychosis and encouraging vulnerable people to suicide, as if that's just because the companies making the LLMs just don't care enough. I'd argue that using a very fancy next-token-generator runs that risk regardless of who's in charge of it. Sure, OpenAI and others have nudged the LLM into seeming deferential and conciliatory, but that's part of why they are so addictive. It's very unclear to me why Mozilla thinks they can make an LLM that doesn't do these things that also provides the illusion of competence.

Based on their stated goals, you might think that Mozilla has some exciting trick up their sleeves to make LLMs safer. You'd be wrong. Their addition to Firefox so far has been:

Look at all those big tech LLM models the browser prompts you to try out.

I'm sure Perplexity is "ethical" and this integration is surely going to help people who are already using it.

Great, cool, let's spend the compute calling an LLM to auto name tab groups.

Because Open Graph tags are too much to ask.

Seriously, who? If we take an argument I saw on Bluesky, "Millions of Firefox users use ChatGPT and thus they should have an option in Firefox"^[5]. Citation really needed there, because near as I can tell most of Firefox's users (as an alternative browser) by-in-large do not want AI features. As of October, 2025 - Firefox represents about 4% of browser market share. According to some website statistics^[6], chatgpt.com gets about 2 billion visits a month. If we assume that traffic is evenly distributed among browsers (it's not) and that every visit is a unique Firefox user, you'd get about 80 Million Firefox users using ChatGPT! Woweeeeee. But it can't be that high, those are not unique visits. We have no idea how many actual unique visits they're getting, and that'd be 10% of OpenAI's reported number of "users".

All of that, however, is beside the point - going to a website does not equate to "want to have that website deeply embedded in my web browser". If that were the case, we should have a dedicated PornHub sidebar in every browser.

The other argument I've seen is that "well, no one is asking for it, but we don't just design features based on what people ask for". This is basically the same argument as "if you asked someone in the past, they'd have said 'build a better horse'". Which has always struck me as funny. Car usage was a choice, and had we not invented the Automobile we might have had much more accessible cities (because there wouldn't have been a concerted effort to defer to car companies). Who's to say a world where we've got faster horses is better or worse than the one we currently live in?

Now, there are some boosters out there who make the argument that "people are going to use LLMs anyway, so we should have an 'ethical' company providing them an alternative." It's funny that this "alternative" always includes "more LLMs" or "more AI". Throw more technology at the problem, and that is the solution. The answer is apparently not "provide them a way to opt out of Generative AI".

No, to the SV tech community, the thought that the answer could be "Provide alternatives to the problem that are not LLMs or diffusion models" is anathema. The answer to the "busy mother looking for recipes" is a search that hasn't been inundated with slop results, that provides links to sites in context.

The answer to "people are developing a psychosis when talking to a chat bot" is not "MAKE IT EASIER FOR THEM TO TALK TO WHATEVER CHAT BOT THEY WANT!". It's developing universal healthcare and easy access to trained professionals. Not giving them an ad-lib machine that talks like people but only generates a stochastic output.

A certain discourse has taken hold: "I'm not saying AI is inevitable" while suggesting that the way out is more LLMs. I think what these people are saying is really just "Corporate controlled AI is not inevitable, but LLMs are." The very idea that you have to incorporate an LLM into everything because it is "popular" is an inevitability argument.

I don't see why they don't understand that. Are they so surrounded by people who think LLMs are a path to full societal automation that the idea that they're a dead end being propped up by a ridiculous amount of investor money that they think the rest of us are idiots?

Perhaps (as Ethan Marcotte suggests) LLMs are a failed technology and shoving them into everything to keep a bubble inflated is a terrible position to hold?

Maybe these folks think that technology is neutral, and LLMs are only as bad as the people that are pushing them, and not that they are The New Aesthetics of Fascism?

Listen, LLMs and Diffusion models are causing a lot of direct problems right now, and if your solution to those problems is "But what if I made another LLM", then we are never going to agree. I do not believe you can create an LLM that is built on ethical consumption and have it look anything like what we've come up with.

I feel like the crowd that says "well saying they suck hasn't fixed anything" is being pretty cynical. They don't think there's legislative appetite to do anything about it, and they might be right - for the moment - but there is a deep appetite for political change right now, and more progressive and, dare I say, socialist candidates. If we can salvage what's left of our democracy we could, in fact, do something about this collectively.

Instead, their solution is just another techno-feudalistic idea wrapped in "but what if this company doesn't turn out evil".

I'm just so tired of that line of reasoning.

I honestly don't know. They've been making a bunch of decisions I don't agree with for years now and I honestly have no clue other than "a lot of execs think that LLMs are a path to a machine god and thus think it needs to exist". The folks over at DAIR have written extensively about the underlying ideologies fueling this bubble and... I think it would behoove Mozilla to read up on just what their goals are, because proliferating LLMs (and Diffusion models) only helps them.

Anyhow, yeah, I'm tired. So tired.

For anyone who feels like I do, keep it up. There aren't as few of us as the boosters think, and the bubble is running on the fumes of lying about capabilities.

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