Mozilla wants to start a conversation about who controls AI
OpenAI this month closed its latest eye-popping funding round—one of the largest ever private investments—at the same time as it reportedly further drifted from its nonprofit roots to full for-profit status.
To the Mozilla Foundation, OpenAI’s for-profit evolution is an example of how tech giants and big-money investors can overtake civic-minded mission statements and profit structures in the fast-paced AI arms race.
It’s part of the reason the nonprofit org is pushing a new vision for something it calls “Public AI,” a sphere of initiatives that would give more AI access to nonprofits, government entities, and companies with socially beneficial goals to complement the current commercial space.
Mozilla outlined this new strategy pillar in a report released last month, and it will frame many of the org’s initiatives and advocacy conversations going forward, according to Nik Marda, technical lead for AI governance at Mozilla.
“We’ve been looking at the AI space over the last few years, and seeing both this increased consolidation and closed-ness in the AI ecosystem, and at the same time, this nascent, emerging trend of what we call public AI initiatives, things like governments starting to help increase access to AI resources, and these nonprofit AI labs starting to build open-source AI components,” Marda told Tech Brew. “And so we see that emerging ecosystem as a basis for creating a meaningful public counterpoint to the private AI ecosystem.”
