Mozilla Launches New Startup Dedicated to Building Trustworthy AI

On the eve of its 25th anniversary, Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind Firefox, is launching an AI-focused startup called Mozilla.ai with a mission to build trustworthy and open-source AI.

According to Mark Surman, Mozilla's executive president and the head of Mozilla.ai, the goal is to create AI that has guardrails and can prevent its misuse in the real world.

While impressive AI models have emerged recently, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, their potential for abuse has raised concerns. Mozilla believes that not enough is being done to curb abuse.

Funded by a $30M seed investment from the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla.ai will build a team of 25 engineers, scientists, and product managers to work on trustworthy recommendation systems and large language models.

Mozilla.ai's broader ambition is to establish a network of allied companies and research groups that share its vision of creating a "trust-first" open-source AI stack.

Mozilla.ai aims to collectively create an open-source AI stack that the mainstream industry can use regularly, just as they have with the Linux and Apache stack over the last two decades.

While Mozilla.ai is bound to ethical principles, it isn't a nonprofit and is open to spinning out successful explorations into products and companies in addition to open-source projects.

Mozilla.ai's managing director, Moez Draief, sees the advantage of flexibility that nonprofits lack, but he acknowledges the challenge of staying independent amid consolidation by big players in the AI space.

In the next few months, Mozilla.ai will develop tools that let users interrogate AI chatbots' sources and create systems that give users more control over content recommendation AI.

Mozilla.ai is a promising effort to build trustworthy and open-source AI, and it's not alone in its mission. Other nonprofits, including EleutherAI Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, are democratizing AI tools.