Common question, thanks for asking! We’re a public benefit corporation spun out from, and primarily owned by, the Mozilla Foundation. We're focused on democratizing access to AI tech, on enabling non-AI experts to benefit from and control their own AI tools, and on empowering the open source AI ecosystem. We're a small team relative to the "main" Mozilla, which lets us experiment a bit more easily.
We do run into this branding question frequently, and will add some clarity to the website.
> I really think Mozilla and Firefox have a role to play in the AI landscape that's shaping up.
Chiming in here as a Mozillian focused on AI not specifically related to Firefox - I agree! Just a heads up that a separate public benefit corporation, Mozilla.ai, exists and is supporting a suite of commercially-licensed, open source, general AI dev and enablement tools. That includes mcpd, what we're calling "requirements.txt for MCP", meant to enable more trusted automated interfacing between machines.
A goal here is to support developers looking to build out AI-enabled systems that interact with each other and with the Internet, be that through a traditional browser or some other way.
Good feedback. Some of this is intentional - as an independent and growing ~20-person company, we're able to operate more quickly than the larger Mozilla organizations, and we're purposefully distancing ourselves from the associated bureaucracy that comes with any large organization. We are very much in line with the Mozilla ethos around personal ownership, privacy, control, and agency. We're figuring out how to best push on those principles in the world of AI, and appreciate feedback and contributions from the community.
Common question, thanks for asking! We’re a public benefit corporation focused on democratizing access to AI tech, on enabling non-AI experts to benefit from and control their own AI tools, and on empowering the open source AI ecosystem. Our majority shareholder is the Mozilla Foundation - the other shareholders being our employees, soon :). As access to knowledge and people shifts due to AI, we’re working to make sure people retain choice, ownership, privacy, and dignity.
We're very small compared to the Mozilla mothership, but moving quickly to support open source AI in any way we can.
Jeff, thanks so much for putting that stipend information together; I'm sure your list has started discussions amongst students and amongst faculty at many institutions. The variance in stipends was eye-opening to me, and clearly they all need to go up.
The posted numbers for my home institution, the University of Maryland, are a bit off; current offers are $25k for 9-month and up to $36k for 12-month, if funded on an RA over the summer. That RA summer funding is not guaranteed. Again, clearly, this needs to go up.
Thanks for checking about the numbers. I did just double check the Maryland numbers, and what's in my table seems correct:
The 25K you're referring to is for 9.5-months so is normalized to 9 months to compare against the other 9-month numbers. It's already notated with the [1] footnote in the table.
The 36k is not guaranteed in the offers given to students: the UMaryland CS offer letters states "Students who are TAs or RAs over the summer earn an additional $5,600 up to $11,000", which I can only interpret to mean that 11K is not guaranteed. So what's reported in that table is my interpretation of the minimum stipend if the student does get one, but what you say makes sense, that an RA provides the higher number in that range -- I just don't have a way to represent that.
Oh, you're right! Good catch, I agree that the numbers are accurately reflected as you had originally written them. Thanks again for compiling all this information, really helpful service to the broad community.
Folks interested in this kind of work should check out an upcoming ICLR paper, "LowKey: Leveraging Adversarial Attacks to Protect Social Media Users from Facial Recognition", from Tom Goldstein's group at Maryland.
Similar pitch -- use a small adversarial perturbation to trick a classifier -- but LowKey is targeted at industry-grade black-box facial recognition systems, and also takes into account the "human perceptibility" of the perturbation used. Manages to fool both Amazon Rekognition and the Azure face recognition systems almost always.
We do run into this branding question frequently, and will add some clarity to the website.
reply