That's what I wonder as well...As they do need material to rebase from. I don't know of many teams that might be able to handle that level of commitment and expense (lets be real, it's costly to create and maintain a browser). Some of the forks have small teams, so I expect that there will be a lot of project deaths as a direct result of Firefox losing Mozilla constant support. Realistically, if Mozilla gets KO'd, nobody outside of a bigger company could ever hope to develop and maintain Firefox.

I am specifically talking about the point in the early 2000's when Mozilla was behind when other browsers were stepping up their game. I don't consider implementing AI features a modernization attempt, that's just chasing a trend that big corps are trying to gaslight end users into adopting. Given the pushback and dislike of AI in general, it would be smarter for them to cater to users that don't want it. Which is why I use Vivaldi which is proudly against using AI until it can be ethically implemented (due to the current implementation, never).

Do you really think that there won’t be multiple models even if the bubble bursts? The “best” models are from China and are open source. “We” don’t control China at all! So I don’t see this as likely.

There likely will be a few models remaining when the dust settles, but considering the sheer cost, scale, and power requirements of the data centers the current ones need, I could see one company buying up the rest when the bubble crashes. I don't want this to get political, but the models coming from China are incentivized to follow the government's policies regarding information control. They already answer certain questions with government sanctioned answers, or outright refuse to answer. I don't see them remaining open source for long, and their datasets even less so.

What I DO have an issue with is Mozilla turning its users into training fodder for the AI companies - instead of just building that private AI they keep jawboning about.

This is a fair concern. I don't use the AI chat bots, and I try to not use the AI answers that pop up with searches. And I refuse to use the generative AIs. But I'm a minority it seems. Thousands of people use these AIs everyday, many of them by choice. So the real question becomes, do we want them using browsers like OpenAI's new browser, that will likely mine everything they do for their datasets? Or do we want a browser that can limit what these AIs can scrape up, like Firefox?

We're losing the battle against AI. The amount of people using it keeps growing. Just look at the people using Grok to argue with each other on Twitter. Or the students getting ChatGPT to write their essays. We need to build alternatives that aren't controlled by billionaires, massive corporations, and venture capitalists. But that's going to take time. And until we get there, we should be mitigating the damage as best we can, by giving privacy-focused alternatives when using AI.

These aren't great choices. But if I have to choose between them, I'd rather back Mozilla.