The newly formed startup will receive its seed funding of $30 million from the Mozilla Foundation,
On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the non-profit organization behind the Firefox browser, is launching a startup focused on artificial intelligence.
Called Mozilla.ai, the new company isn't on a mission to build just any AI: its mission is to build "trustworthy" and open source AI, according to Mark Surman, Mozilla's CEO and head of Mozilla.ai.
The startup aims to unite like-minded people who believe that AI-related developments should be transparent, controlled, and open.
mozilla.ai will provide developers, researchers and product creators with a separate platform, separated from large corporations and educational institutions, and will allow them to jointly build an independent, decentralized and trusted ecosystem.
In terms of development, the first phase will focus on tools to improve the security and transparency of generative machine learning models.
“Working on Trusted AI for almost five years, I always felt a mix of excitement and anxiety. The last month or two of rapid announcements of big AI technologies have been no different. A truly exciting new technology is on its way to emerge – new tools that immediately inspired artists, founders… all kinds of people to do new things. The worry comes when you realize that hardly anyone is looking at the railings,” she said.
Surman is referring to the surge of AI models in recent months that, while impressive in their capabilities, have disturbing real-world implications. At the time of its release, OpenAI's text-generating ChatGPT could be tricked into writing malware, identifying vulnerabilities in open source code, and creating phishing websites that look like high-traffic sites.
We've been working on trustworthy AI on the public interest research side for about five years, with the hope that other industry players with more AI experience will commit to building more trustworthy technology. They didn't. So we decided in the middle of last year that we had to do it ourselves and find like-minded partners to do it with us.
We then set out to find someone with the right mix of AI experience in academia and industry to lead this project,” Surman said. Funded by an initial investment of $30 million from the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla's parent organization, Mozilla. ai is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, along with Mozilla Corporation (the organization responsible for developing Firefox) and Mozilla Ventures (the Mozilla Foundation's venture capital fund). Its chief executive is Moez Draief, who was previously chief scientist at Huawei's Noah's Ark AI lab and global chief scientist at consultancy Capgemini.
the initial priority from Mozilla.ai will be to form a team of approximately 25 engineers, product scientists and managers to work on reliable recommender systems and extensive language models such as OpenAI GPT-4.
But the company's broader ambition is to establish a network of partner companies and research groups, including Mozilla Ventures-backed startups and academic institutions, that share its vision.
The good news: We've met thousands of founders, engineers, scientists, designers, artists, and activists who are taking this approach to AI. Smart, dedicated people are creating open-source AI technologies, testing new approaches to auditing, and figuring out how to embed "trust" into real-world AI.
The bad news: Big tech and cloud companies, which have the most power and influence, aren't doing the same. Meanwhile, these companies continue to consolidate their control over the market.
Bottom line: Some people start out doing things differently, but the most important work (and investment) still gets done the same. We want to change that.
Mozilla.ai will spend the next few months developing tools which, for example, will allow users to verify the sources behind the answers that chatbots give them. The company will also look to build systems that give users more control over AI recommendations (namely, the algorithms that power YouTube, Twitter and TikTok feeds).
Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/
Congratulations on this great project.
Following the line that provides security to society, they alone will be convinced of which product offers them greater confidence, in this way it will not be necessary to change anything, but to improve more and more and offer a good product to users. The others, therefore, will lose credibility.
All the best
Manuel Mesa