Mozilla's like never sat on the sidelines on stuff, like never.
Going back 25 years, it's not our position to sit on the sidelines, like especially if...
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Techlore Talks.
Today, I am really excited to welcome back Mozilla, specifically Adam Fishman,
who is their VP of product, to discuss his role in the company,
the philosophy behind their recent AI tools at Mozilla, especially within the Firefox browser,
the decision-making process behind them, how they work, the opt-out process,
and why they chose to do it this way, and overall how Mozilla approaches AI as well as other features
and what we can expect from them in the coming years and where their commitments lie for all of you to know about.
It is no secret that AI is a polarizing technology, and when Mozilla started rolling things out in their browser,
it's been a pretty polarizing thing.
So I wanted to bring them on and ask them some questions that I had regarding it,
so I hope that this interview can also answer some of yours.
Let's get into it.
Hello, everybody. I want to welcome Adam on the interview from Mozilla.
if you don't mind sharing a little bit about what you do at Mozilla and a bit about yourself to get
started. Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me, Henry. I am Mozilla's VP of product, which means that
all of the product managers, the humans who are sort of responsible for figuring out what we
should be building and where we should be taking the browser and features and functionality and
stuff like that, like those are all part of my organization. We work with designers and engineers
to build the browser. Got it. And then why does this role exist? I guess asking, not to call into
question your value to the company, but can you just explain to me maybe a scenario in which
having this role is necessary and what would happen if it wasn't there? Just operationally.
For sure. Well, when companies are really small, you don't necessarily need this role. A lot of
times in earlier stage startups, you have like the founder, the CEO is the head of the product
organization. They basically say like, this is what we should build and why and everyone goes and
builds it. But as companies get bigger, and you want to build and maintain more stuff, you have
like a bigger and bigger surface area. And one of the roles of the product leader, myself, is
basically to make sure that we're working on the most highly important stuff all the time.
And so what happens is you have millions of ideas and I and the teams will bring those ideas
through me or the sort of problems that they want to work on. And I help them sort of sift out like
what's important to work on, what our users care about, what they don't. And so I kind of take like
a huge like amount of stuff that we could go build and help us whittle it down to a smaller,
more focused set of stuff so that we actually can build the right, the right things. Sometimes I get
it wrong. Sometimes the team gets it wrong. That's one of the hard things about building products.
But yeah, I work a lot with our, the executive team at Mozilla, my peers in engineering leadership.
We're also kind of, again, as an organization gets a lot bigger, like we are the people who help figure out the way that work needs to move forward now and in different new and different ways. And so, yeah, how do we ship code, for example? How do we build products? Like, does that need to change? All that sort of stuff. That's kind of the role of like the leader of the product team.
And the buck stops with me.
I'm like the last and final decision maker on, should we launch a thing?
Should we not launch a thing?
Is it ready yet?
Is it not ready?
So I'm the ultimate accountable person when stuff goes out the door.
Got it.
So that's going to be relevant because I wanted to ask quite a bit about the AI stuff and see what the philosophy is there, but also some other features that have been dropped as well.
And I wanted to see if maybe because as us, we might see a blog decision, but it'd be cool to get a little bit more of the internal thinking about what's going on back there.
Before then, I also wanted to just ask kind of what's your history before Mozilla and like what brought you to Mozilla in the first place?
I think what brought me to Mozilla is a lot of the same stuff that brings a lot of people to Mozilla.
Like it is the last independent browser that exists.
We're fighting the good fight.
We have like incredible mission.
I only work for companies that have a really great mission and a reason for existing.
When you build products every day, it's really hard to do that work if you don't believe in,
like very strongly in what the company is doing.
So that's why I came to Mozilla.
And also the people are really incredible.
I had an opportunity to lead the new product development organization a year or two ago.
And so like all of the things that aren't the web browser that we work on.
And there's a million different products.
It's really fun.
It's very like startup-y.
We're super scrappy and move really fast.
And there's just some of the best people on the planet
working across all of Mozilla.
So it's really fun.
It's great.
We have a tough audience.
You know, there's like,
there's a lot of people that have really strong opinions
on what we do.
And they feel a lot of ownership,
personal ownership in the browser.
So that makes some days really hard.
Like if we mess up or something like that.
But, you know, generally we try to get it right.
Even when we mess up, it's usually not intentional.
And we usually fix it pretty quickly.
So that's why I came to Mozilla.
Before Mozilla, I worked at a bunch of different interesting companies.
I worked for a company called Imperfect Foods, which ships ugly fruits and vegetables to people.
I think I tried them once.
Yeah.
I worked for Lyft.
I worked for Patreon, where you are a creator on the platform for a little bit longer.
Yeah.
And always in like building products and always in mission-driven and mission-oriented companies
like Imperfect Foods, Patreon, like even Lyft, all very mission driven businesses. And that's
been super important for me for my my whole career, just makes it worth getting out of bed in the
morning to go to work. So that's what I do. Very nice. And then I think a really good starting
point here actually isn't I thought of it as you were talking, pocket, right? Like pocket, I think
is maybe a good starting point to kind of discuss things that, you know, maybe made some some of the
community upset. I mean, I was one of the people who was quite anti-Pocket. I never used it. One
of the first things I did when I installed Firefox is disable Pocket. And I kind of would always
humorously say, I don't know who's using this. But after you removed Pocket, they all showed up.
They all spawned. But what was the behind the scenes look? I don't know if you were involved
in Mozilla when Pocket was dropped. But if you have any context there, it's just kind of a starting
point of something that maybe people are a little more familiar with. Yeah, I was involved in not
necessarily the decision to sunset or close down Pocket, but I was definitely involved in the
discussion around what is this thing? What are we doing with it? I think the reality is like Pocket
was a company that we acquired a long time ago when news like aggregation and sort of like save
it for later tools were pretty popular growing like gangbusters. And it made a lot of sense for
the web and how people were navigating the web. And then what we found was over time, like it
required a lot of energy and effort to maintain like a lot, an outsized amount of energy and effort
the amount of people that were using it. And at the end of the day, we were looking at the people
working on it and what it was doing to advance the efforts of the browser and Mozilla's mission.
And we just sort of came to this conclusion that like, could we take these people that are working
on Pocket and have them work on other stuff that is more meaningful, that is more of what our users
want. And even though there was a passionate audience of Pocket users, that passionate
audience wasn't growing and it was declining pretty steadily over time. And there were a bunch
of alternatives to Pocket. And we just were like, do we, do we, should we be in this, in this world
anymore? As much as we love it, we were like, what if the smart people working on this could do a
bunch of other really great things for the browser and what would happen? And obviously we knew that
would be a bummer for the people that use and dependent on Pocket. But we tried to provide a
smooth transition for folks to find other things that they could use. And there's other companies
that we sort of endorsed and things like that. But yeah, at the end of the day, we were just like,
gosh, we have so many more things that we want to do. And we are sinking a lot of time and energy
into this particular product. And even though a number of people like it, we know we could build
a lot better things for even more people if we put that time and attention elsewhere.
It's just one of those tough decisions that like winding it down was winding down any product
is a really hard decision, like especially if a lot of people are using it.
It's it's one of the hardest things that a product manager or product leader has to do.
So, you know, you don't take it lightly, but we were able to like keep all the people that
were working on pocket and have them work on other great stuff.
So like some of them are now basically building parts of the desktop version of Firefox or
the mobile version or like on the content team.
And so like all of that stuff, they've gone on to greater homes at Mozilla and at Firefox
to have like bigger impact on other stuff that feels more relevant to today.
Yeah, very nice.
Yeah, I know it's always challenging.
And so I think just hearing like what happens behind the scenes is quite valuable.
And I guess, you know, so that's something that was removed in the past.
But I feel like I also now like to see kind of the internal processing of something that was added, especially AI.
Very polarizing topic.
For sure.
You guys really stuck your necks out.
As you said, the community is quite precise on what they want.
And I feel like you did the one thing that polarizes any community that already is polarized on this topic.
Yeah.
So I want to start with just your philosophy, not I guess maybe you personally, but also just as Mozilla, like what is your guys' philosophy on AI?
I feel like now in 2026, things are settling a bit down.
I feel like up until even early 2025, there were still these, everyone just had these bright rose colored glasses on.
This is going to fix everything.
The hype was just very high.
And I feel like the hype has died down quite a lot.
But these companies haven't gone anywhere.
AI hasn't gone anywhere.
So what is your philosophy on AI, just to kind of open up this discussion?
So I have my personal philosophy, which is fairly well aligned with Mozilla's philosophy.
So I'll kind of speak about both of these things at the same time.
I think, and especially for our audience who thinks about this a lot, I think a lot of
people have every right to be skeptical of AI that's kind of like gimmicky and forced.
And there is a whole world of products being created where people are just like, well, if
We just sprinkle some AI on it.
That's that that's that'll work.
And a lot of that is coming from like outside pressure, you know, boardrooms, investors, public markets, like things like that.
And so like I don't and Mozilla doesn't subscribe to that theory of AI.
Like it's a technology.
It's interesting.
It can do some really interesting things.
I think regardless of how you feel about AI, I think one thing that's pretty clear is we're sort of working, moving towards this new era of how people and computers interact with each other.
And AI is going to have a really big impact on shaping access and the use of the Internet and information.
And that has always been Mozilla's focus.
And so, you know, we could put our head in the sand and sit on the sidelines and be like,
no, we're not going to pay any attention to us.
And then the problem is Google and Microsoft and OpenAI, they're going to make all those
decisions.
And that's not good.
Mozilla's like never sat on the sidelines on stuff, like never going back 25 years.
It's not our it's not our position to sit on the sidelines, like especially if big things
are shaping the future of how people use the web.
And so like our philosophy is we're going to play the role here
that we've played for 25 years,
which is we're going to be the stewards of the right way to do things.
And we're going to be in the conversation
and we're going to work on products
so that we can have a say in how AI works, evolves,
is actually useful to people, is trustworthy,
and puts the users of the browser, the users of the AI in control
and doesn't like thrust it upon them.
Some people are not going to be happy by that stance.
They're going to be like,
you shouldn't even touch this with a 10 foot pole.
And I just think we feel differently about it.
You can, there is a middle ground here
where you can have the values and the views
that Mozilla has and believe that it's important
for us to be involved in this
or else somebody else is going to write all the rules
and people are going to be way worse off as a result.
So we choose to participate instead of sitting it out.
Yeah, I think this is, as an outsider looking in,
it calls into question the nuance of what you all are.
Because if I see you all as just a browser, just Firefox,
it is quite hard to justify the AI position in some ways, I think, just on its face.
But when I hear what you say, I hear Mozilla sees itself as,
no matter what the feature they release, it doesn't have to be AI,
could be some made up thing, you know, like we can make something up, let's say machine learning,
which is right now, maybe that was like the pre phrasing similar feature sets of AI,
maybe it's, I don't know, googly bears, you know, like some new technology, it doesn't exist.
And these big tech companies are starting to implement it. Independent of the Firefox browser,
Mozilla would try to still be at that table and do what it takes to be at the table to still
try to represent the values of that community. Do you think it's a fair assessment?
Yeah, I think so. Because we do. I mean, there's Mozilla, the foundation, right, which is all the advocacy work and all the pushing that we do with governments and regulators and all of that sort of thing to advocate for people, right, for choice, for like anti monopoly behavior and things like that.
Like that is the world that we're going to operate in regardless of the Firefox browser.
It's just like how we see the world.
And so, yeah, I think you're right on that front.
So do you see this AI?
Because people are seeing the AI as a Firefox feature.
So how much of the AI rollouts do you feel like is a feature?
Like that's designed to help users and be in, like, let's say you didn't have any advocacy.
You weren't going to be showing up at any table with big tech companies.
you were just managing a browser.
So how much of this AI do you see
as genuinely useful for people
and like fits into their workflow
versus more of that advocacy role?
Like this is something that we need to figure out
what this looks like,
like what does AI look like
when it's actually done in a proper way?
And you're kind of building the infrastructure
for better companies, organizations, individuals
to have a better avenue.
Like they don't have to go through some Chrome API
that only works with their, like, you know.
Yeah. Well, the answer is kind of both. We kind of do both at the same time, right? And it's hard
because it means you're doing a lot. But I'd say a couple of things about that. One is, you know,
we talk to people, you probably have seen our Reddit presence. You probably have seen people
to Reddit on my DNS. So no, I did it. I did it for I can't take right. Yeah, well, I was gonna say
for your own mental health reasons. Sorry to cut you off. No, no, no, it's totally fine. But like,
there's an active and vibrant Mozilla community in a lot of places, right?
Social media, Reddit, like our own connect,
like we get inbound all the time from, from folks.
And, you know,
we asked a lot of people at all ends of the spectrum of like comfort with AI,
like, did they want to, were they curious about it? Did they like,
what do they want to see in the browser?
And the majority of people said like, I'm curious about this.
I'm curious what Mozilla's take is on how it can make the browser better or our experience better.
And so like, yeah, I want you to do stuff here.
And so we said, OK, that gives us some good license to experiment.
Like, let's learn how this can be helpful.
Let's learn what the Mozilla approach to AI is.
And if we don't do that, we're actually ignoring a huge, like the majority part of the users of the browser.
So like that was like one very strong signal.
In terms of like what is useful with AI, I think a lot of people think about AI and they're like,
they think of just the generative AI that I know today, the like slop that's filling the internet
with stuff, the, you know, fake images and like all that's hallucinations and like all of that
sort of stuff. But there's a lot more to it that I think people don't realize is like, oh, actually
that's AI as a technology under the hood doing stuff. Accessibility is an example. And you
You probably know this Mozilla is a company that cares a great deal about accessibility
because the more people who can access the internet and content and the more it's sort
of democratized, the better, right?
More people online, better.
As you navigate the web, there are an infinite number of images, for example, that don't have
any alt text associated with them.
So we have an on-device AI model in Firefox.
So it's on your device.
So that means it's not like hitting a cloud server.
It's not sending data anywhere else.
It's literally doing this on your device.
That as it comes across one of those images,
the browser's rendering the page,
it will check for alt text.
It will analyze that image
and it will actually output a description of the image as alt text.
So if you're like a very anti-AI person
and you're like no AI anywhere,
what if you were also blind
and you needed that information
because most people don't add their own alt text to images?
on the web. Like that is a genuinely useful feature to a large swath of the population.
I think we estimate that something like one in five or one in four people who use the web has
some sort of disability. Now they're not all blind, of course, but like imagine the population that is,
that is a really useful feature. And there's no way that we can do that at scale. Like no human
can really do that at scale. And so like, that's a very specific, narrow, like feel good example.
But the other side of this is we have this new product that's coming out. It probably around
the time that this show is going to release, we're going to have this product that's coming out in
beta called Smart Window. And we've talked about this a lot. Basically, first, you can choose to
use it or not. So one of our philosophies about AI, we could talk about AI controls too, if you want
to talk about that in a sec. But like, you can turn it all off if you want. And that is, again,
a feature that I have not seen any other browser do, is the ability to have a toggle that says,
like, get all this stuff out of my face, delete all the models that are locally on my machine,
like gone. I don't want to be aware of it. I don't want to be exposed to it. I don't even want to see
a marketing message that says you should use it. Like you can turn it all off. And then you can
like selectively reactivate stuff if you want. That's fine. But anyway, so smart window, it
basically is another browsing experience. Again, you have to go into it yourself. We're not like
saying you must use this. It's almost like an incognito window or a private window. You know,
we have private window, we have a regular window, classic window, and then we'll have a smart window.
So you can go into this and you can say, hey, because I'm going into this, you can say, I'm
interested in AI, right? And it will, as you're navigating the web, develop a memory of your
behaviors on the web. Again, locally stored, like on your device. So it's, it knows like some things
you're interested in. It knows that you are a vegetarian based on things that you're doing.
You can also see and remove specific memories.
So you know everything that it knows about you.
And you can say like, I don't like that.
Get rid of it.
I don't want you to know that.
Take that out.
Is an example of like how this is genuinely useful to somebody.
During our piloting of this, we have somebody at Mozilla who is building this product.
And this person is really into heavy metal.
Okay.
Not my particular genre of music, but you know, no hate for anyone that loves heavy metal.
They also play guitar.
And so they were looking at two different guitars and they were doing like comparison shopping.
And they were like, which one of these should I get?
So the smart window, there's an assistant that kind of follows you around.
And it basically said, like, you should think about this guitar between these two because it is better for heavy metal.
And it was like, whoa, why is it better for heavy metal?
It's like, well, it doesn't say that in the description of the guitar, but it knows that the guitar has a longer string, which you can use for tuning a guitar lower and making it heavier and like, like making it sound heavier and stuff like that. And so like, this is an example where, okay, it knows this is a subtle thing about you that you like heavy metal. And now you're doing something on the internet, you're shopping for a guitar, you're browsing, and it's making a helpful recommendation for somebody.
So that's like not the accessibility example, but it's an example of just like how it's how it's useful.
Would the person been able to figure this out eventually on their own?
Probably, but would have required a lot more research, like would have required like knowing specifically about the string length and like stuff like that.
And just it, you know, the AI can help you with that with that sort of stuff.
And again, it's really only for people who absolutely want to use it because they don't have to otherwise.
So but both of those things seem pretty like genuinely useful to me as someone who like buys things online, you know, as someone who knows a lot of people who have disabilities that are trying to use the web and things like that.
And those are two very different use cases of AI.
You can actually turn both of those off if you want.
But we found that a lot of people would turn off, even if they were turning off the AI controls, they would then selectively turn back on something.
They're like, oh, actually, this is really useful to me, but I'm gonna leave this on.
And so I found that really interesting in talking to people about how they use the features, too.
Very nice. Yeah. And just, I guess, a quick comment.
It's interesting because I feel like maybe until offline AI models, and maybe this is something I need to evolve my own views on,
because I hold this view that personalization is a bad word, actually,
because the way personalization has been done until now has been cloud,
collecting lots of data,
and then inferring your preferences based on that from big tech companies.
And so anytime a service says personalization,
it's typically for me a big red flag.
That's still the case, like 90% of the times.
But I think this offline AI world is now enabling offline tools to be able to do this personalization without needing the cloud, which hasn't, I mean, it could have been possible before, but we're seeing it a lot more often now where it's like, oh, we now have an offline way of analyzing things, et cetera.
Just a comment, I guess.
I wanted to just get a tiny bit technical here.
Sure.
I don't know if you guys have a very, you know, you talk about this idea of showing up at the table and making sure that you're representing, you know, a better way of doing things.
Can you point to like a specific thing that you've seen other big tech companies propose that concerns you that you think people should know about that you at Mozilla are actively doing differently and how that could play into things?
I feel like we see this in the in like the web engine space a lot where Google wants to do something with Chromium and then you guys like, no, we need to do it this way.
So I don't know. Yeah. If you have something like that.
I don't know that I have a specific example related to like the browser engine or something, something like super highly technical like that.
I mean, I know that we are doing that stuff all the time.
In the AI side of things.
You know, we haven't yet seen a ton of legislation around AI usage, but we're involved in all
of those conversations right now.
I would say where we differ from big tech in terms of like big tech does it one way and
we do it a different way are a couple in a couple dimensions.
One is we've been talking about this idea of choice.
And this is choice comes in a lot of shapes and sizes.
So like take the Chrome browser, for example.
They have an AI in Chrome.
That AI is Google's AI.
They own that AI.
They want that AI to have as much information about you as possible for the reasons that you said.
It makes better ad targeting.
Like at the end of the day, we do not own an LLM.
We're not training them.
We're not in the business of doing that.
That is one, reserved for people with way deeper pockets than us.
And two, like, you don't need it.
There's like a million awesome open source AI models now.
So we are giving people options and choice on like, which AI model would you like to use in Smart Window?
And we're telling you like, well, this one's faster and this one's better at this and this one's better at this.
And then the other thing is we're also allowing people to bring their own model, which is a slightly more technical feature.
Eventually, we're going to make it super easy for anyone to do it.
But right now, you can actually go into the smart window when it's live, and you can say, using the open router AI protocol, you can say, I want this model that lives here.
And you can even have it be a local one and point it at that.
And it just works.
So you guys use right now, it's only open router through like an API key.
Do you do you like Olama or anything?
Yes, I think we're looking at a lot of different ways that we can work like different partners
that we can work with here.
But open routers like the sort of the most common protocols are the ones that we're trying
to use in the beginning because it makes it most widely accessible to people.
But like, that's an example, like nobody else is going to do that.
Like chat GPT's browser is not going to use any other model.
It's going to use, it's going to use chat GPT.
Like, come on.
I should say open AI's browser, Microsoft, same deal.
Like we are trying to give people that choice.
And then the other thing is like the idea of turning it off.
Like nobody else is really letting people turn it off.
Certain none of the big companies.
And like, we know that there are, there's a world where if you turn off AI in the, in
it might actually make your browser experience
not as great as somebody who's enhancing it
with AI stuff like translation
and sort of all of those things.
But like, that's okay.
That's people's choice.
And so I think this idea of like choice and agency
and then also transparency,
like who else is showing people
like what memories the model has about them?
Like, is Google gonna tell you all the data
that it has about you?
Like, probably not.
that's a scary proposition, you know? Um, and we show everybody that in like full transparency,
like pull the curtain back. Here's everything it knows about you and delete the stuff that you don't
want it to know about you or turn it off entirely. So you, you don't want it to collect any
information. That's fine. Um, it's quite similar. Actually, I think Claude might be the only one
that seems to do that because Claude has memory and also Claude doesn't have a browser. They just
have their extension, which I think only works in Chrome so far. Only works in Chrome. Um,
But it would be cool, I think.
You know, we seem to be a bit more values aligned
with the team at Anthropic.
We've actually done some cool partnership stuff.
I saw the security vulnerabilities thing.
Oh, man, that was amazing.
Yeah, that's actually,
I would love to tell that story a little bit,
but we can do that later if you want.
That's fine.
I mean, we're here.
I have my list of things to touch on.
Okay, cool.
So basically, so you mentioned security vulnerabilities.
So basically what happened was the folks at Anthropic who build Claude, the various Claude models, they have a like a red teaming security team.
And they were building and training models to find security vulnerabilities in products, which seems like could be a good thing, could be a terrifying thing.
We had previously tried this with AI, like a year ago.
We were like, we're curious, is this work?
And it didn't work.
Like it was, the models were not very good at the time for this sort of stuff.
And then some new models came out.
And what happened was the Anthropic team started testing a bunch of the JavaScript engine in Firefox.
And the reason that they did it is they're like, well, this one's going to be a tough nut to crack because it's open source.
So the community has been pounding on this for years.
It's got to be super hardened.
Anyways, Opus found like 22 security vulnerabilities in a span of two weeks, which is like 30, 40% of all of the vulnerabilities that we found the entire previous year, which is amazing.
And so they started like submitting patches, like submitting PRs to the code base.
And we saw that and we were like, whoa, what is going on here?
So we like reached out to that team and we've actually been working with them ever since we fixed all this stuff like right away.
And then we've been working really closely with them because like it sort of like crossed this chasm where we were like, wow, actually, AI can do this stuff now.
Like this is really powerful.
Imagine how much stuff we could find and fix in the Firefox browser that are like serious security issues.
And so we've gotten pretty close with that with that team over there, which is which is nice.
They've let us like take some things for a spin and, you know, try, try new things.
And obviously like they love working with us because we fix stuff really fast and we have some of the best security engineers on the planet.
And so anyway, so that's been really fun.
It's been like a fun thing to do with, uh, with that team, but impressive like use case for, uh, a browser that we were like, sure, we, you would never find anything in.
Yeah. Given it doesn't, I haven't heard maybe they are planning something internally on like their own browser. But I think the fact they went for an extension, I think speaks to them maybe wanting something more open, which would be very nice. I feel like I don't get the vibe so far that they're going for just a locked in ecosystem for everything.
I don't think so.
So I don't know if you guys are open to anything, like if like there was a Firefox extension that they might be working on or anything to expect in the future.
Yeah, we've talked about that with them.
We've talked about just sort of building our own
that looks like theirs.
I don't think we're quite there yet.
We're kind of focused on doing some other stuff with them,
like a lot of the security stuff,
which has been really helpful for us.
So maybe eventually, I think.
But yeah, I mean, we're very friendly with that team,
which has been fun.
And like I said,
seem to be pretty values aligned with us,
which is good.
Very nice.
Okay, now back to on topic.
Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Yeah, so you mentioned the AI controls, and I wanted to kind of get into this next.
Sure.
So, okay, my understanding of events, this could be wrong.
I keep up with too many articles back here.
It's like hundreds a week.
You guys released the AI features.
Naturally, it was a polarized kind of assessment.
People haven't even seen it yet.
They haven't tried it yet, but it's still, you know, a lot of people are anti-AI, period.
and then we saw the Firefox AI controls come out as kind of a separate announcement after the kind
of a little bit of the backlash so do you mind maybe walking through what that looks like what
the AI controls do what they don't do yeah so so first of all like we always knew we were going to
build ways of turning stuff on and off that's like just a thing that we had as part of our plan
what you saw was like us sort of testing some things with AI and then figuring out like okay
what does this look like to turn it on and off?
Now we have a meaningful number of features.
So it makes sense to have that feature now.
So it's sort of like part of a sequential roadmap.
And since we can't release like everything all at once,
we have to like build and ship and build and ship and build and ship.
So that's like generally the backstory.
Now how they work on the surface, they're really, really simple.
But underneath the hood, they're actually quite complex.
And there was like a lot of discussion and debate and like figuring out how's this going to work
and like what states are we going to have
and all this sort of stuff.
So what it is on like the surface
is it's a new area in Firefox settings.
So you go into the browser settings
and there's a big thing, this is AI controls.
And you go into it and it lets you make decisions
on whether AI is globally on or off
or whether you want it off,
but you want certain AI enhanced features
to be available. So like an example might be translation. So a lot of people like translation.
And we actually were originally just going to build the thing as a blanket on off toggle.
It's either on or it's off. Simple. And then we talked to a bunch of users about it. And they
were like, wait a minute. Like, I don't like AI, but I do like translations that are done with ML.
And we were like, but that's kind of part of the AI umbrella.
So like, what should we do?
And they were like, well, could we turn most things off and some things back on?
And we were like, sure, that seems reasonable.
Like, so we're like, give the people what they want.
So you can, if you're a no AI person, you can flip the switch, blanket, turns everything off.
And like I mentioned earlier, it turns off like any mention of it.
So like, we're not gonna show you a thing that's like,
you should try smart window when that comes out.
Like not happening, gone.
Stricken from the record doesn't even exist
like in the memory hole.
And so you can do that if you block it all.
But if you still wanna leverage some aspect
like translation or you're like,
I wanna turn off everything else,
but I wanna test out the smart window thing.
Like you can leave that on.
When you block everything
or you block an individual thing,
we delete the models from your device.
so like that was another step where we like should we do that and we're like look if people don't want
ai they don't want it so get rid of it how much space are all of them together not not a ton i
don't know the i don't know like how much they all are together but like not a ton these are these
are small these are like small on-device models um and for performance reasons like we wouldn't
ship the browser with like a huge amount of you know on-device stuff but it's also just more the
principle of the thing. Like if I said, I don't want it, I don't want it. Like I don't want it
anywhere on my system. So get it off. So we do that. Like they're really gone. Like I said,
we don't suggest them. We delete the models like gonzo. And then as new features come online that
take advantage of AI. And by the way, like not every, we're, we're not just shipping AI features
every day. Like we're shipping a lot of things. Sometimes things are benefited by that technology,
But as they come online and they have AI, like powering them or participating in or use the leveraging that technology, they'll go into the AI settings or the AI controls. And so that will grow over time. And we'll probably have to like, reorganize it and stuff like that. But it's still going to work the same. Turn it off, or leave it on, or turn off certain things or like whatever. Yeah, that's kind of it. That's that's pretty much how it works. But as you can imagine, under the hood, like,
making sure all these things happen.
Like, okay, I turned it off.
The models are gone.
Like what happens if somebody turns it off
and turns it on really quick?
Like, what do we do?
We're like, well, the models are gone.
Sorry.
And by the way, just so folks know,
like models don't download to the machine
until somebody actually goes and engages
with an AI feature in the first place.
So it's not like we like load up a bunch of things
in the browser package.
Like they are downloaded at the moment
when you're like, I would like to use this now.
and so you know and then we're like okay this is somebody who wants the thing so here is the thing
and it happens like behind the scenes and and stuff like that but then they're equally just
deleted behind the scenes when you turn it off so yeah so that's how it works yeah very nice i have
a few more technical questions about this before i i go into i guess what i've naturally grouped up
here as we're talking as the case for ai skeptics yeah but before i get there which of these ai
features or are all of them also going to be on mobile is this desktop only is it mobile we
sort of selectively decide if things should be at parity based on the use case of the feature.
So like, as an example, on iOS, we have this shake to summarize feature. And it's been my people are
kind of into it. We obviously can't have a shake to summarize feature on the desktop, unless people
are violently shaking their computer or something like that. So like, that's not a two way street.
But controls is a two-way street.
So like AI controls is coming to all the mobile experiences.
A lot of people, when we rolled it out,
were like, well, why isn't it there already?
And we were like, well, we got to figure out,
work out some of the kinks.
And the easiest way to do that actually
is to do it in one platform and then learn,
especially the platform that has the most users,
like learn and then roll it out to the other platforms
because it makes the time it takes for us to go from,
we'd like to release this to actually releasing it.
much, much, much shorter. So that's an example where like something will be everywhere.
And then there's other features and functionality that just like, maybe they make sense on mobile,
maybe they don't. If we do some sort of like voice thing, maybe that makes sense on a mobile device
where it's hard to type. Maybe it makes sense in the desktop browser, but like to be determined,
I think. So we don't have like a hard and fast rule for must it be on both platforms. We kind of look
at like, does it, does it make sense? One thing that I can tell you makes a ton of sense on mobile
is tab grouping an organization
because that is painful on a mobile device.
Like no matter the platform,
Mozilla aside, Firefox aside,
like that's hard to manage a bunch of tabs.
So if there's a way that AI can give you
intelligent groupings and recommendations,
that might be inherently really useful for people.
And again, they don't have to do it.
They can turn it off.
But that's the thing that we're like thinking about.
How do we bring that to a mobile experience?
So yeah, so hopefully that answers your question.
Yeah, and then, you know, I also was wondering,
I feel like a lot of people are anti-I for privacy reasons.
Yeah.
So are all of these models offline?
Do any of them have internet connected connectivity?
Are they disclosed when they are?
Most of the models download locally to your device.
For something like Smart Window,
where maybe you're choosing between a variety of different models,
those have to be hosted somewhere.
Some of them can be accessed locally, but some of them have to be hosted somewhere.
And in that case, we're really clear about what you're sort of opting in to do.
You're opting in for some things to be sent to a provisioned instance that we control that is secured for doing inference and things like that.
But the main thing is we don't retain any of that stuff.
So like if that if stuff does leave your device and we're transparent about like it has to leave the device here, we're not holding on to that information.
One sort of violates our principles for stuff.
And two, like, you know, we're not doesn't really benefit us in any way.
Like, why would we want to hold that?
That's not what users want.
Like, why would we do something that our users objectively don't want?
And so, you know, even if it's like a memory or a query that has to go somewhere to return an answer, like it's deleted after that session.
It never stays.
It never leaves that.
And it's sent in very secure ways.
So it's why we do things like OHDP and stuff like that in other parts of the browser, too.
Like we often go to really great technical lengths to ensure that we're doing the right thing by our users and our manifesto, even if it's not the fastest engineering route.
And so often a lot of people are like, why can't you just get this other feature out the door as quickly as possible?
And we're like, well, it's complicated to do it the Mozilla way.
And so, you know, it takes longer.
But yeah, some things will have to leave device temporarily.
But again, we're really transparent about that you're entering an experience where that could happen.
And again, you don't have to go into that experience at all.
So yeah, the remaining things are all on device.
So yeah.
Nice.
And then my last technical question before we open up the skeptics section.
Firefox forks, what part of this is, are all of these models and the AI features part of the same code base that potentially if someone was just forking the Firefox code and changing a few things,
are they going to have all these AI features by default kind of baked in?
Or how does this impact downstream forks of Firefox?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
I actually am not 100% sure of the answer to that.
I would imagine things that have to hit the server access points and stuff that we control,
probably that's not going to happen in forks.
But I think the ability to pull down a model,
like all that features and functionality should be there
and running things locally should be there.
But again, you know, people,
one of the beautiful things about our browser
is you can kind of customize it to work however you want.
Like I, for example,
have a locally running version of Firefox on my machine
that I test out building new things in all the time.
It's like a fun side project that I have.
And it's pretty cool.
And I mean, I don't use that as my daily driver browser.
I use like the regular version of Firefox or nightly or something,
but I have Adam's version of nightly.
I was literally going to say, Adam, we need to see Adam's version.
I had to, I had to label it because I was like,
it looks so much like the other version of nightly.
I'm like, how do I know which one I'm using?
And so it literally in the dropdown, it says Adams Firefox nightly,
but I've, I've like extended split view and like all kinds of things to just try.
I'm like, what's possible. Could I do this? You know?
And it's been really fun to do it.
So, yeah.
So, yeah, I wanted to just dedicate a section maybe to skeptics, mainly because I feel like maybe even a year ago, I would have been in this.
This would have been my demographic.
I've become a little more open to the idea of AI, especially now that I'm seeing the tools be a lot more useful for me personally.
And also the use cases for the more private alternatives are starting to already get better.
There's this relationship I see in privacy respecting technologies, which is big tech just does something.
They don't care about the implications and the downstream effects, but they release this really cool thing that creates a lot of FOMO.
And then it takes some time.
And then finally, you know, people find a way to do it on device or they find a way to do it online with end-to-end encryption or zero knowledge, whatever.
I feel like the AI gap has been not closed, but we're already starting to see what it looks like.
So if someone is skeptical of AI or listening to this podcast, maybe they're in like, I'm always going to say no to AI camp.
I had kind of two core questions to ask you for those people.
The first one is, what is like an honest discussion on AI and what it can and can't do based on you slash Mozilla's philosophy?
And do you see AI needing to be in their lives?
Or is this something that, I know it's kind of a difficult question to answer, but I would start there and then I have a second question.
Yeah. So like honest discussion on AI, what it can and can't do. What you just said, which was,
you know, a year ago, you were a skeptic and now you're starting to warm up because you see how
it's becoming more useful. I tend to agree with that. Like my anthropic example of like a year
ago, we tried a thing or six, eight, nine months ago, we tried a thing and it failed miserably.
And then December, January, guess what?
It works really well now.
And that pace is fast, how good some of these things are getting.
So the first thing I would say to skeptics is you don't have to love AI.
It's actually good to be skeptical of it.
I teach this to my kids.
Be skeptical of the output.
Independent thought is not gone in society.
and it shouldn't be, at least like in my family.
I'm like, that's really important.
Our ability to think critically about stuff
and to interrogate things that we get back from AI
is really, really important.
Like by the time that this show goes out,
what AI can and can't do
will probably have changed again, right?
Like I don't even know what the release schedule is,
but the pace of which things are improving is wild.
So I would say like things that AI can do today pretty well.
Obviously, those coding use cases that I gave examples of are like, it's pretty impressive.
Still requires human review, but it gets people a lot farther along a lot faster.
It's allowing a lot of companies to build products faster for people.
That's genuinely good as long as they're building the right stuff.
I think aside from that specific case, AI can take information and make it easier and more accessible to people and help them learn and grow over time.
It is generally a good teaching tool to ask it questions, get feedback, ask that feedback questions, like continue to go and turn those conversations.
It's interesting.
Democratizing like learning, you know, like my sometimes the AI stuff that I generate from my daughter's math test is just as helpful as the tutor that we pay for.
And in fact, those two things working together are actually way more beneficial.
So like, I think eventually, it's going to help people get a lot of things done that are kind of drudgery tasks, repetitive, formulaic, it's going to save people time, and they're going to not have to do the stuff that they don't like to do anymore.
Today, you have to have like a corpus of really high quality information and context to do that.
And it still fails when there isn't enough context or high quality information or it doesn't know something.
It's not great at recognizing, oh, I don't actually know that.
So I should tell Adam that or Henry that.
Instead, it wants to please.
So it's going to try to give you an answer.
And that answer is wrong.
you know, and like completely manufactured. That's happening less and less because I think
sometimes some people are getting better at giving it more context. It's also gobbling up more
information and stuff like that. But like broadly speaking, it still makes those kinds of mistakes.
And so like we've spent a lot of time with our work on things like Smart Window that like if it
objectively can't answer a question, it's going to let you know that it needs to search for the
information like elsewhere, or it's going to be like, I don't have the answer to that question.
Sorry. I think, let me tell you one more thing that it can't do. Because I told you some of the
things I think it can do really well, like coding, information synthesis, and stuff like that. And
you mentioned big tech kind of just like flinging things out of the ether and letting everybody else
catch up. Let's talk about agentic workflows. These are things that AI cannot do super well
right now, like complex agentic workflows. And by agentic, I mean it acting on your behalf to make a
bunch of decisions, click on a bunch of things, like do a bunch of stuff. Like we at Firefox
know that if we're going to do anything in that area, it has to be safe and secure. And it can't
just go off into the ether and like do a bunch of things on your behalf that you didn't intend it to
do. And so we are treading really lightly in that space. Like Smart Window at its launch is not
going to have any of that stuff in it. Like if we do that at some point, it will be very specific
use cases that are like heavily tested and pressure tested because like the more complicated
a workflow is, the more opportunities an agent has to get it wrong. It's like that game of telephone
that we all used to play in school.
Like I like whisper in your ear
and you whisper in somebody's else ear
and 10 steps down the road,
it's not even the same like sentence
that we started with.
Like that's agentic workflows right now.
And so we don't like,
it's irresponsible for us to like purport
that that works well for users.
And so like, you're not,
like that's a thing that,
you know, some companies are saying like,
oh, it works great.
It's awesome.
Yeah, use it.
Use all the things.
And we're like,
we're not so sure.
So like, that's not going to find its way into the browser anytime soon.
So like stuff like that, like I think it again, I'll come all the way back to the beginning.
Like, it's good to be skeptical of this stuff.
I actually encourage it.
I love talking to AI skeptics.
And I like talking to AI true believers, too.
I had a friend from OpenAI at my house one time, and I was just grilling him.
I was like, are we in a bubble?
What's going on here?
How is this useful?
Tell me how, like, all these things.
And like, it was a good conversation.
And I think you should do that sort of stuff.
Like it only makes people better.
It makes this stuff better and gets the outcome that we want.
So anyway, that's a long answer to your question,
but that's how I think about it for skeptics and what it can and can't do.
Yeah, and I want to be mindful of time.
I only have a couple more, but as you're talking,
and you don't have to go super deep into it either,
but I was kind of thinking like,
what are the friction points I've seen from different people
who don't want to use AI.
And I think one of them is
they just don't see the use case,
which is kind of what you touched on.
But another thing that came up is ethics.
I've seen a lot of people concerned
about how data is trained,
how most of the companies involved
in this space are all,
in some way, for the most part,
unethical companies
based on these people's views,
including mine sometimes.
The privacy implications.
the IP implications, the environmental implications potentially as well.
I know that seems to be changing every day if AI actually uses a ton of water or not,
depending on who you ask.
So, you know, data centers, people are very against data centers being built.
People's energy prices are going up because of AI.
Like, these are the things that also, I think, make people go,
I don't want to use this technology.
I don't want to support this industry in any capacity.
Is this maybe more so where we go back to what you said about showing up and showing an alternative way of doing things?
Is that how you would see this personally?
Yeah, I think Mozilla will always do as much as we can across a lot of those dimensions.
So if you take ethical training, we have the Common Voice Project, which is an open source way that people can actually donate their voice to do language transcription, like voice transcription.
And you come into it and you know what you're doing and you're like helping translate things
and you're speaking things back.
And it's like, I'm donating my voice and my time to this effort.
And it's like an open repository of training data that everyone is like, we're all in this
together.
You can use this.
And yeah, we're like pretty, when I think about like policy and regulation and stuff
like that, like, again, I mentioned that it's pretty early still on a lot of these areas,
But Mozilla has been like elbow to elbow with the big, the big tech companies when it comes to other types of regulation, like anti-competitive stuff and choice screens in Europe and like digital, the Digital Markets Act and things like that.
Like AI is not going to be any different.
We're in all those conversations.
We like go to the symposium in India where they're like having conversations about this.
Like we're in the mix and we show up pretty big when we show up at these, these things.
And so like we're trying to the best of our abilities.
I think there are some things that like we have to be realistic about, like can Mozilla
itself solve that problem?
And I think there are some things that are like systemic ecosystem challenges that we
can certainly advocate and be a voice.
But like it's going to take a lot more than just us to push that forward.
And so we try to like change the standards so that then everyone else has to do the same
thing.
And that's like the best thing that we can do is we can change the system so that you can't work around the system, you know, and that there are rules and there is like an expectation of what you do here and what energy usage and things like that.
And so I don't think we can fix everything, but we're sure as hell trying.
So, yeah.
And then going back to my actual second question, which was, you know, the first one is what if people just don't see the use case, et cetera.
I think the other concern is there are probably things that Mozilla does.
Everyone uses a Mozilla product, whether it's Firefox,
whether it's something else you guys have, for a particular reason.
And I think potentially another skepticism someone might have is,
oh, is this Mozilla shifting away from their priorities?
I only want, and I respect Mozilla for their third-party web engine.
I don't care about this AI stuff.
and now they're going to be focusing on AI stuff.
So should I start looking for another browser?
Like I can see this be a pretty realistic chain of thoughts.
So I was just curious,
like what are your guys' priorities going forward
and is that going to stay the same?
Yeah, I can tell you that AI,
if you look at like the number of people
working on this at Mozilla is like this big
relative to all the other non-AI things
that the entire organization is working on.
It's like maybe 5% of the company in some capacity
spend some part of their day like working on something like this like like our ai product
management team is like four people pretty small in like a thousand person company and so i think
you know i think people are always going to push for the thing that they think is the most important
thing to work on but i would say the teams that are working on the gecko rendering engine
web compatibility ensuring that the firefox works on the most websites on the planet that it's
perform it, like that actually still makes up the lion's share of the people at the company.
And I don't see that changing anytime soon because like we're nothing if the browser doesn't work.
And the Gecko rendering engine, like we're the we're like the last, the last of the great rendering
engines, you know, it's like Chromium WebKit and us. And like, we can't walk away from that. Like,
that's what makes us independent. That's what makes us like have a voice and have a seat at the table.
And so like that stuff's going to remain super, super important for us forever.
So that's what I would say about that.
Like people will always have their sort of like lead horse that they're really excited about.
And they wish that every one of the company was working on that one thing.
Some people probably feel that way about Pocket.
Like, could you just work on Pocket all of you all the time?
And the reality is it doesn't work out that way.
But I can assure people that like the majority of our energy and effort is being spent on
building like a world class browser that works for as many people as possible. And we think AI
is a component of that, but it's not, it's not the only meal. It's not the only dish on the menu.
So to, so to speak. And that doesn't feel like it's changing here.
Yeah. And then I had a Bobby Holly on from your team as well, not too long ago to talk about kind
of the, the web kit or not the web kit, the gecko side of things and how it compares to web kit and
chromium and stuff like this. So Bobby is one of the guys I work with on a daily basis. He's
It's a good interview.
So if you guys haven't listened to that,
that was a good one too.
Cool.
My last question.
It's kind of on the note of the skeptics,
but I think it could just be a good finishing point for us here.
How would you recommend someone who's confused about all of this get started?
They're like, okay, I hear this interview.
I've had it, you know,
maybe I've had my AI controls off for everything
because I don't want to touch it.
Is there a specific feature
or maybe is it something away from Firefox entirely
to kind of like dip their toes into the AI world
if they want to at least see if it's for them.
Yeah, I mean, I would say there's a few things.
Like one is like watching videos like this,
hearing somebody like you talk about like,
I'm skeptical, like convince me, why should I use this?
Like just getting over that hump
and sort of educating yourself
is like a good starting point, I think for people.
In terms of like specific features in the browser,
You know, trying out Shake to summarize is kind of fun.
It's going to be coming to Android.
So that'll be a thing.
So then it'll be available on as many platforms as possible.
I mean, I think what we see most often for people who are turning it off is they turn
it off and they leave translation on or they leave alt text generation on.
Then it's like, well, are you trying AI at that point?
Or is it kind of just working behind the scenes?
It's probably more working behind the scenes, but at least you're getting some of the benefit
of it.
When it comes to like actually trying it out, I would say you might wait until Smart Window is live and know that Firefox and Mozilla are handling this in a way that is as aligned with your interests as any other, like better than any other company on the planet.
And, you know, and then try like if you're more technical, try like a bring your own model kind of situation where, you know, maybe the models on your device or whatever, or try one of the open source models or, or something like that.
And like, you know, just ask it some questions.
I find that like a lot of times
when I don't know what to do with AI
or when I come into like a blank canvas,
I'm kind of like, well, what can I do here?
And it's like, oh, I have a bunch of ideas
for things you can do.
And it's like, oh, let me try one of those.
And I just sort of do a little trial and error.
And I kind of learned,
that's how I've learned how to use Cloud Code.
That's how I've learned how to use
all the AI that I use in my life.
But like you think of AI as like a plucky intern
that's sort of like always willing to help, you know?
And like, that's the good construct for like,
well, what kind of a task could I ask this thing to do for me?
Or how could it help me?
Like intern level task, you know?
That's a good way to put it.
Expect it to get it wrong a little bit,
but like generally it's gonna kind of help you
in your day to day, you know?
And so like, you know, drafting things,
summarizing things, like taking dense,
convoluted information and making sense out of it.
Like, especially where people miss nuances
across like really complicated,
like chunks of information.
It's actually really good at that stuff.
Like, like, because that's what machines are good at.
Like they're, they're better, they're better than us.
And then I would say the other thing is like,
don't lose the skepticism.
Like AI is not a substitute for your own judgment
or facts or accountability.
Like even at Mozilla, we are really clear
even about employees usage of AI.
Like it's not a substitute for your judgment.
Like we expect you are in control of the things that you take out of AI.
And obviously we have really strict policies on what can be used and stuff there.
But like it's not a replacement for human judgment.
And it's not a replacement for like accountability if you're using it.
So be skeptical.
Like if you are skeptical, stay skeptical.
Like approach it with that lens
because I'm not gonna tell people
to be different than they are.
It's how you're wired, you know?
And so like, I think that's important
for people to approach it with the lens that they bring
or if they just don't want to, don't approach it at all.
But I think you'll be missing out
if you don't like dip your toe in the water, as you said.
Yeah.
Got it.
Do you have any place to send people
to follow what you're working on,
either on Mozilla's end or your personal end
for people in the connect?
My personal end has very little to do with Mozilla work, but I would say definitely we're trying to release as much as we can on the Mozilla blog and especially forward-looking roadmap type stuff.
We are often teasing the things that are coming in future features.
Mozilla Connect is also a great way to get involved.
We have a community of people that are just clamoring to get access to stuff before it's available for the public.
Like, we love that because it's often filled with some skeptics.
And like, we want to hear all of the things that they don't like about it and like what
the problems are.
Like, that's actually the way that we build better products.
So like that, I know you don't hang out on Reddit for obvious reasons, but like Reddit,
we pay attention to that stuff.
Like we really do.
So any of the community touch points, socials, things like that, like those are the ways to
kind of send us feedback.
And we really do listen and pay attention to all of that stuff.
We can't always act on it right away.
But like, it's a big part of the inputs into how we think about building products and like
understanding what users of the browser want and don't want. So keep doing all those things
would be my advice to people. Very cool. Well, thank you for your time, Adam. I know we went
a little over here, but I really appreciated the talk. And I think we did a good job diving into all
the nuances of these AI features, hopefully. Yeah, I sure hope we did. And thanks, Henry,
for having me on. This is really fun. You're a great interviewer. So I love talking about this
stuff. So I'll come back anytime. Cool. Thanks, Adam. All right. And with all of that said,
I just want to thank Adam for coming on the podcast, taking the time to be here and helping
explain a little bit of the philosophy behind AI, the pros and cons and Mozilla's approach and where
they think they are in the equation. If you have any more questions, definitely let me know.
I probably will have them on for another interview down the road, especially regarding their new VPN
product. So if you have any questions about their free VPN that is now inside of the Firefox browser,
definitely let me know and I'm going to try to follow up with them and get that interview going.
Last thing, if you like these podcasts and you want to support them and keep them growing,
you can become a Techlorian in the description. This is a really easy way to get access to
exclusive perks in our community like our private signal group. You also get access to some credits
across both our website and our videos if you're into that kind of thing. And of course, you get
to keep this podcast growing.
That is all I have to say.
I hope you learned something new today
to keep yourself and the people around you safer.
And I'll see you next time on Techlore Talks.
.