Mozilla Launches New Mozilla.ai Startup

Mozilla announced today that it’s launching Mozilla.ai, a new startup dedicated to building a “trustworthy, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem.” Mozilla.ai will receive $30 million in initial funding from Mozilla, and the foundation is hoping to build a community around its new startup.

“Mozilla.ai will be a space outside big tech and academia for like-minded founders, developers, scientists, product managers and builders to gather,” explained Mark Surman, President of the Mozilla Foundation. “We believe that this group of people, working collectively, can turn the tide to create an independent, decentralized and trustworthy AI ecosystem — a real counterweight to the status quo.”

For starters, Mozilla.ai will focus on developing AI products that are transparent and “don’t misinform or undermine our well-being.” Because as Mozilla points out, the leaders in AI today are more interested in maintaining their leadership than creating AI products that users can really trust.

Earlier this month, OpenAI received criticism for its lack of transparency around GPT-4, the company’s latest AI model that powers Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. And according to a report from computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, the company may have tested GPT-4 on its training data, which causes a risk of data contamination.

“We will build things and hire/collaborate with people that share our vision: AI that has agency, accountability, transparency and openness at its core,” Surman said today. The Mozilla Foundation expects to share updates about what it’s building in the coming months.