IM 855: When You're Right, You're Right - Why Firefox Still Matters

10:04Mozilla's president:Is it labeled as versions? If you say, oh, I screwed that up,

10:08Anil Dash:I can revert to the prior version? Yeah, because you push it to GitHub so you can say, oh, nevermind. Let's go back one. Git allows you to do that. So yes, it's all designed kind of as you would do it as a developer.

10:20Mozilla's president:Yeah.

10:22Anil Dash:And Neil Dash had a great piece, Codeless, he calls it, from idea to software, that really describes this revolution that's happening literally as we speak right now. He says, there's finally been a great leap forward in coding tech unlocked by AI. Not just it's doing some work for me, but we couldn't do this before. And there are a number of tools people are using. He talks about Ralph Wiggum, which I've mentioned before. There's another one called Gastown. A lot of these are ways of harnessing multiple instances of Claude all working together. Or in some cases, there's one guy who's written a tool that does it in an adversarial way.

11:04Anil Dash:He says it's like court, where you have one Claude instance write some code and then has to justify it to an advocate who is taking the other side, saying, no, no, no, that's a bad idea. and has to prove it before it gets committed. It's very interesting. This is all about orchestration. And Neil says, here's the 10-point bullet point summary. Codeless is a way to describe a new way of orchestrating large numbers of AI coding bots to build software at scale. You don't write code directly. You write a plan for the end result. And the system directs your bots to build code to deliver it. And he goes on.

11:43Anil Dash:I don't need to get too many details. But I think it's really interesting for me to watch this organic development of people like Anil and Harper Reid and so many others kind of expanding the space. It's not necessarily anthropic, although anthropic is pretty good about embracing it. I should also, one other thing I wanted to point out, you've probably seen the conversation, maybe even been tempted by what was called Claudebot. not spelled how you think c-l-a-w-d well yeah anthropic got mad and he's renamed it to

12:22Mozilla's president:molt bot which is bad name terrible close to mold and you may be tempted uh to try it as i was of course i should have actually i saw it comes with a free set of headphones all you

12:40Anil Dash:have to do is give it three credit cards. A lot of people are crazy about this thing. My alarm bells went off pretty quickly.

12:51Mozilla's president:Well, my first alarm bell, I also saw all the chatter about Claudebot and I was like, oh, I guess I'll look into this. What is it? And my first alarm bell went off and it was like, the only really way to communicate with it is through WhatsApp app or like your chat app of choice that it has to be kind of set up. And I was like, that just seems like a somewhat ridiculous extra hurdle to have to this. And then all of the descriptions I heard of what it could do just didn't sound that people were like, oh, I use Claude bot to make a reservation for me on resi. I'm like, I could make a reservation for me on resi.

13:30Anil Dash:Yeah, but this is

13:31Mozilla's president:all automated in fact but it's not automated because you have to say claude bot i'd like a reservation at blank place at blank time and you could go do that if you have that information if

13:42Anil Dash:that's how you're using it but you could also say claude bot i've got a couple of free hours in new york city on next thursday afternoon find a good restaurant and make a reservation for me i guess so you could be more generic is what i'm saying but don't because one of the ways you use Claudebot is to give it permission to do anything. It says, this works best because you don't want to interact with it. It works best if you just say, go ahead, just do it. And that really makes me nervous. Claudebot has amassed, Maltbot, I should call it now, Maltbot, which really has amassed 44 ,000, this is from TechCrunch, 44 ,000 stars on GitHub.

14:23Anil Dash:A star is how you vote on a project on github and say i like this 44 000 is a lot so much viral attention has been paid to moltbot tech crunch writes it's even moved markets cloudflare stock surged 14 on tuesday as social media buzz around the agent re-sparked investor enthusiasm for cloudflare's infrastructure uses cloudflare developers use moltbot to run locally on their devices now contrast this to what Anthropic has done with Claude, the Claude version it's making for normies, you have to have a Macintosh called Claude Cowork. We talked about this on Sunday with Alex Stamos, who's a very prestigious security guy.

15:06Anil Dash:In fact, his latest startup is called Corridor.ai, and it's about security with your AI, with your vibe-coded AI stuff, how to make sure it's secure. He said, And Anthropic did this right. With Claude Cowork, it creates a virtual machine. In fact, that's why it takes a while. Have you tried it yet, Paris, on your Mac?

15:25Mozilla's president:Yes, I've been trying Claude Cowork.

15:28Anil Dash:It takes forever to set up. It takes a while to load up, right? That bar goes across. That's because it's actually building a virtual machine that it's running in. It is sandboxed from your system. They've done a lot of work to keep it from being harmful. so contrast that with moltbot which says just give it permission to do anything you want it's running bare metal on your machine there is a i think a real risk of prompt injection on both tools but that's why claude co-work runs in a sandbox so code injection i think i think google wins in the end because i google already knows everything about me so what's the harm in adding energetic layer

16:11Mozilla's president:on top of that. Or as Google, as Apple uses Gemini, and you're in the Apple ecosystem, well, Apple already knows everything about me. What's the harm of adding a layer there? I think that feels a lot safer than saying, I'm going to take a third-party, so to speak, tool and give it access to everything I have.

16:30Anil Dash:And your credit cards, all three of them. Well, that's something for you.

16:34Mozilla's president:I mean, I've been trying to play around the Gemini as much as possible too. And I just, I haven't found it hitting this. I mean, I think Gemini in my uses is only useful when it is clear, like a Google specific task might have an edge. Like if I'm trying to figure out, like the other week, I was trying to look for coffee places in New York City that were open within a couple day window that would have a specific type of coffee brewer thing that I wanted in stock. And Gemini was way better at that than Claude or ChatGPT. And I think that just makes sense because they've got the search parameter thing down.

17:14Mozilla's president:But I've also just, I don't know, I've found that Gemini is like strangely lacking when it comes to other aspects of just running an AI model. And one example is like, have you tried to use the gemini agentic kind of injection for google sheets it's it would be so simple if you had let's say a little gemini popping up on the side that would take a look at your data and then be like okay this is the correct um uh excel sheet function to put in there but instead it tries to do that all in the cell itself instead of working separately and then inputting something it's just a mess. It just, there's so many unintuitive things about Gemini in a way that I haven't noticed.

18:03Mozilla's president:I guess perhaps it's just because of the pervasiveness of Google products, but I haven't noticed the same thing among ChatGPT or Claude. Yeah, I agree, Paris. Even in Gmail, I had to find an email today of something that I was scheduled to do that maybe I can't do now. And I gave it like five clues and I had no idea. and you think the gmail search is bad enough oddly this is worse and nate p jones uh did one of his many demos is that he used claude gave it access to his mail and said i need i can't find this this uh scheduling a line for somebody can you go look for it and it did and found it more

18:40Anil Dash:effectively than google did i think there's look there's a lot of utility in all of this stuff i'm just advocating for caution especially if you don't understand what you're doing or the potential risk even the guy who created a molt bot got bit by malicious actors he this is from a tech crunch um he uh peter steinberger is the guy who created it uh steinberger himself was served with a reminder that malicious actors exist when he quote messed up the renaming of his project anthropic said you can't call it claude bot that's confusing so he he complained on x that crypto scammers snatched his github username and created fake cryptocurrency projects in his name and he warned followers that any project that lists him as a coin owner is a scam in fact you might have seen some conversation i saw it on reddit about claude bot saying i can't use that it's a crypto thing and he said no no he says i don't i don't do any crypto with claude bot he posted the github issue has been fixed but cautioned the legitimate x account is m-o-l-t-b-o-t on x not any of the 20 scam variations of it we're there's a lot of bad actors out there they're using ai uh they're doing some you know all sorts of stuff that maybe a less sophisticated user might not be aware of, like prompt injection.

20:13Anil Dash:The best advice is to run, and you could do this with Clawbot, to run it in a virtual machine. Interestingly, a number of people have gone out to buy Mac minis, because it only runs on a Mac, I guess, or no, it's easiest to run on a Mac. They've gone out to buy Mac minis to run MaltBot on their Mac mini that's separate from their own hardware. It's just wild.

20:35Mozilla's president:But it still needs access to your data and other things. Sure.

20:40Anil Dash:And so, in fact, so does Cowork. If you want Cowork to do some of the things that they've promoted, like rearrange icons on your desktop, it's going to have to have access to your desktop. So there's always a risk.

20:52Mozilla's president:What does Steve say about this?

20:55Anil Dash:Oh, I don't know if Steve's completely up on all the risk. I think he's aware of it. He's not as, you know, an avid. he's he's a fan of ai for sure he's not as avid a user as as i am i think it's really important for everybody to who has some interest in this to start pushing on it maybe in little ways maybe just do what you're doing with chat gpt paris but the more you kind of use this the better you understand the kind of the uncharted territory we're working in uh these days when i uh you know you you mentioned uh that um and i think this is the case we jeff's the first person to do a podcast from his hospital bed uh he said next you wanted he wanted to do it in a sauna so i immediately opened up nano banana to to put us in a sauna weirdly jeff's in a towel paris is in a towel

21:51Mozilla's president:the rest of us are fully clothed weirdly this is basically the entirety of the internet it's training on just make the woman naked and then well you had i mean you were it was it was yeah

22:01Anil Dash:but you know we we know what it was communicating well but then i said well wait a minute put jeff and mina towels and it kept us fully clothed and put towels around us which is because men can't be nude apparently but the point was as soon as i opened gemini it said you don't want us to be yeah trust us uh it said as soon as i opened gemini oh do you want to connect all your stuff and i said yes of course i do because this is the new thing from google is google is leaning into this whole thing saying hey you know uh gemini i'll be better if you give it access to your gmail your calendar and your google drive so it can now i think i trust them they already by the way

22:45Mozilla's president:you trust anybody who texts you asking for gift cards by the way i just want to point out google

22:51Anil Dash:already has access to all of that right google no google read my that's what i'm saying yeah you've

22:57Mozilla's president:already you've already passed that rubicon yeah so now i'm just giving it over the hill i'm giving it to gemini i don't know i think this is the problem is in order to do useful stuff you do

23:06Anil Dash:need to give it access to stuff but do it judiciously i guess is uh is what i'm saying

23:14Mozilla's president:yeah or you can be like me and be like all right i'm going to try to use claude code to do what they say in the demo thing of organize some files and then you plug in your big old file folder that's full of court documents they're all publicly accessible so it's not really a security risk but they're poorly labeled and you're like gemini or claude i want you to organize these by case file number and using this naming structure and then it spins and spins and spins and you fall into a terrible error because claude can't claude freaks out if it accesses pdfs over 100 pages, even if it doesn't need to open the PDF.

23:51Mozilla's president:I don't know. I had some frustration this weekend, but I suppose such is the AI. You're just not paying enough.

23:56Anil Dash:You need to pay more.

23:58Mozilla's president:I'm not going to pay$250 to organize PDFs in file folders. That is a strictly$20 a month activity. It would take me 30 minutes to do. I can't pay$250. Is it over the limit of notebook lm that's a great question i forget what the notebook lm limits are but probably not but notebook lm i mean notebook lm is i found quite useful for i used it whenever i was um working on protein definitely not oh i'm sorry oh there you go uh you may have thought that was leo's voice it's not that's our next story i didn't realize it would play as soon as i opened it but go ahead Oh, I was just saying, I am.

24:41Anil Dash:By the way, that's a really good use for Cloud Code. And I totally think it would do what you want it to do. In fact, my next project.

24:48Mozilla's president:It frankly took a lot more steps than I think it should have, but that's fine.

24:53Anil Dash:You want to have an interaction with it rather than just go do it. That's the thing that worries me is just go do it. Although everybody's starting to talk about, oh, look what it can one shot and it can run for hours and blah, blah, blah. You do have to pay for it.

25:08Mozilla's president:It never succeeded Paris. No, I tried. I mean, it appeared, I ended up falling into a, I have now deleted it from my co-work history because it was, there's like some strange memory leak issues, I feel like with co-work on Mac. But there seems to have been like a recent bug that at least people chattering online have also experienced this, where it kept saying the prompt was too long, even though the prompt was like one sentence. I think it was just trying to include all of the documents in all of my folders as part of the prompt once we got back and forth a couple of times. But I don't know. I found it frustrating, but I tried, which I suppose is useful.

25:54Anil Dash:We're about half an hour away from our visit with the president of Mozilla. Let's take a little break. I do want to play this a new QN3 text-to-speech demo because it's pretty terrifying.

26:08Mozilla's president:Kids, kids, hide your wallets from dad. Don't let them get near him.

26:14Anil Dash:But first, a word from our sponsor, our show today. So, by the way, great to see Jeff Jarvis feeling better. Thank you for being here, Jeff, professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at craig newmark graduate school of journalism at city university new york i got it in because i didn't do it in the beginning i did it in the middle and also the author of many great books like the gutenberg parenthesis the web we weave and magazine and soon hot type i'm proofread job type great i what i've read so far i love i i had to put it on the back burner because i had so many other things that i have to read including uh stacy's book club book which is friday and i'm not quite done with it i gotta read it but uh but i love it so far i'm really enjoying hot type i think it's your best yet to be honest thank you yeah it's well it's a great story right it's a great story yeah a bunch of stories yeah uh the story of the linotype but we will uh talk about that more i'm sure when the book comes out next what it's a couple of months next month june june june things take forever paris martineau also here working on more radioactive shrimp

27:24Mozilla's president:in a way perhaps everything is radioactive shrimp if you think about it the metaphor for everything

27:31Anil Dash:she is a investigative journalist at consumer reports and covers especially covers of food safety and that is a big story these days i think we need to do the whole milk scandal just making that up. Lisa said, so we're supposed to drink skim milk now? I said, no, no, no. That's the good news. We're supposed to drink whole milk now. She misinterpreted the milk mustaches in the Oval Office.

27:56Mozilla's president:As a lactose intolerant person, this knowledge is not for me.

27:59Anil Dash:Oh, I'm sorry. That's terrible.

28:02Mozilla's president:I mean, listen, it's all in a spectrum, right? You know, I'm not, I'm not from childhood. I've always been like, oh, milk tastes disgusting. And that's clearly why.

28:12Anil Dash:Your body is telling you something.

28:14Mozilla's president:I can have most cheeses. I just, if I eat, I was going to say, I love cheese. I mean, that's the thing. I deal with, I love cheese and I'll deal with mild discomfort for cheese always.

28:27Anil Dash:And now we have a show title, mild discomfort for cheese.

28:35Anil Dash:anyway great to have you both the the gang is together and we're so glad uh we thought jeff wouldn't be here this week you were going to travel somewhere we're begging him to not be here while injured oh sir that's right the eye surgery so that's been delayed oh yeah yeah yeah i've had enough going on yeah don't get old paris i'm just saying actually i don't plan on it that's not good that's not because the alternative isn't good either

29:02Mozilla's president:stay young be cry i'll be cryogenically frozen at the age of 40.

29:07Anil Dash:forever young that's the key bob dylan had it our show today brought to you by trusted tech brand new sponsor want to welcome them to the show we love these guys had a great conversation with them last week uh and they solve a problem a lot of businesses have if you're using microsoft 365 there's a very good chance you are paying for licenses either that you don't need or you're missing licenses that you do need. And let's not forget, coming in July, Microsoft's been warning you about this. They're going to implement a significant price increase for M365 and also make it all a little bit more complicated.

29:42Anil Dash:There's a lot more nuance than before. This is why you need trusted tech. Trusted tech helps businesses of all sizes get the most out of their Microsoft investment by ensuring their M365 environment is well-supported and aligned with how the business actually operates. Look, everyone knows Microsoft licensing is complicated. Options can vary widely. Trusted Tech's team understands all this, and they can really help you understand what licenses you have, what licenses you need, how to make the most of the ones you're already paying for. If you want to make sure you're getting M365 done right, Trusted Tech is offering a free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation.

30:27Anil Dash:Just go to the website. Now, it's a little complicated and long, so I want you to get this right. Trustedtech.team slash Intelligent365. Okay, not.com. It's Trustedtech.team slash Intelligent365 to get a clear data-backed view of your current licenses, optimization opportunities, and next steps. No obligation. Now, if you think, well, Microsoft must hate this. No, let me tell you, Microsoft loves it. In fact, listen to what Kevin Turner says. he's the former Microsoft chief operating officer. This is what he said to Trusted Tech. He said, you have an incredible customer reputation and you have to earn that every single day.

31:07Anil Dash:The relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. Hey, if it's good enough for Kevin Turner, it's good enough for me. But more than that, Trusted Tech also elevates the Microsoft support experience because they have certified support services. And they are used by some of the best and the biggest in the world, like NASA uses trusted tech. NASA, Netflix, Neuralink, Apple. Yes, Apple uses trusted tech. Intel, Google uses trusted tech. Lockheed Martin and many, many more companies save 32 % to 52 % compared to the average Microsoft Unified Support Agreement.

31:51Anil Dash:So whether you're looking to fine-tune your Microsoft 365 licensing to improve the way your organization receives proactive support or both, Trusted Tech offers you free consultations to help you understand your options. Go to trustedtech.team slash intelligent365 and submit a form to get in contact with Trusted Tech's Microsoft licensing engineers and they can help you make your way through the thicket. trustedtech.team slash intelligent 365 we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines now i read that ad personally but i think in future i may not have to because the chinese company i think is it alibaba yeah alibaba that does qwen QN has released a new text-to-speech synthesizer that is remarkable.

32:51Anil Dash:Let me just, this is their sample page on, actually it's not theirs, it's Huggin Space's sample page that gives them some text to synthesize, auto choice of the language, although you can choose multiple languages. uh we've described this uh passage the voice we wanted to read in is speak in an incredulous tone but with a hint of panic beginning to creep into your voice here's what it sounds like it's in the

33:18Mozilla's president:top drawer wait it's empty no way that's impossible i'm sure i put it there okay that's pretty good you want to hear me i mean i guess it's a hint of panic but i wouldn't say the hint is panicky in a way that a normal human no way that's not where i put it there all right the acting is

33:41Anil Dash:bad the acting is bad in that acting all right well maybe this is bad acting too but anthony nielsen used it to create a uh i guess he used he must have used some samples of my voice i don't know how many he used he said i just asked him and my my my shock is because yeah he just said

33:58Mozilla's president:that what you're about to hear was produced with only a two minute sample of leo's voice and that

34:02Anil Dash:is astounding to me here's what anthony created hey burke this is definitely not leo asking you to buy gift cards but seriously can you grab me 100 apple gift cards just kidding this is anthony testing text to speech how's it sound that's pretty it sounds great that's pretty close

34:22Mozilla's president:it's insane that it produced that with two minutes i thought he was gonna say like a couple of hours is minimum. I was just saying, if you, I feel like you were probably one of the most record, like the most recorded people in terms of hours of content out there, easily accessible on the internet right now. And if you could put all of that into Quinn or something, you would have, it might sound better, more like you than you.

34:49Anil Dash:Burke did buy the gift cards, by the way. You can send those along to me, Burke.

34:55Mozilla's president:headsets for all um the what excites me about this is we talked about this in the show before is that what you just demonstrated is a markup language for voice is that you could take a book or take a script right and then imbue it with uh the emotions you want uh and i think that's where it gets really exciting i i mean 11 in the labs has has been

35:18Anil Dash:doing this for a while and can do it quite well. They have an app called 11 Reader. The other day, I was telling Lisa about an X thread I had just read about what's going on in Minneapolis. It was really good X thread. And she said, oh, send it to me. And I said, well, wait a minute, let me have 11 Labs Reader read it. So I gave it the URL. I attached it to our speakers in the kitchen and played it. Now, what I'd forgotten is that I had just set up Michael Caine's voice. So it was Michael Michael Caine doing it but it was really good and it is I mean I ended up saying you know what I'm paying the hundred bucks a year for 11 reader because I can now have and it has a lot of different voices I can have these voices these excellent voices to read stuff it's so good because um not everything is recorded I mean look I'd rather have a human recorded but there's a lot of stuff like x threads or you know blogs there's lots of books that should be audio books that aren't and there's lots of books that aren't read and so forth uh i think it's pretty impressive

36:25Mozilla's president:let me see i don't know what voice i have yeah i listened to a um book about the history of sugar uh for my supply chain book club uh using 11 labs it's pretty amazing isn't it just because i didn't like the audiobook narrator.

36:44Anil Dash:Well, that happens too, right? I bought audiobooks that I don't like the narrator. That's a very good point.

36:49Mozilla's president:My name is Michael Caine. I played many roles in my life. On and off the screen, I've spent a lifetime telling stories.

36:59Anil Dash:Now, I presume they licensed it. Of course they did, yeah. Same thing with Burt Reynolds. I've played some of these before. Deepak Chopra. I like Maya Angelou.

37:08Mozilla's president:I mean, again... People will forget what you said.

37:11Anil Dash:people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel i think that's great that's great she's gonna read all my blog posts from now on small quibble

37:22Mozilla's president:with this is what i did learn whenever i was having the 11 labs voice i chose read through the uh history of sugar book is it would be ideal if uh there was a way to opt because it was just reading from the e-pub but of course there are like um footnotes throughout it and it would read out every single number and then it would read the number like there was a footnote and then a period afterwards then it would think that's the beginning of a list and it would just get very confused right in small and obvious ways i think they've gotten better than that though now haven't they i mean this was like two months ago maybe they have okay but i was also on the free version and just using a ebook that I liberated from perhaps its rightful copywritten state using whatever thing you sent me.

38:16Mozilla's president:So I'm sure that some aspect of that probably mastered it as well.

38:20Anil Dash:Well, I think we're getting better and better and better. And I, yeah, you know what, this is a really incredible accessibility technology for blind people, people who love vision.

38:32Mozilla's president:Well, I used to be on the board of what is now called Learning Ally, used to be recording for the blind and dyslexic. And amazing organizations started after World War I and people were blinded by gas. And volunteers doing audio of all the books. The important thing about it is because of laws passed around this, they have the right to do any book.

38:57Anil Dash:Oh, interesting.

38:58Mozilla's president:Oh, that's good for accessibility. Yeah, but for accessibility, any book can be done. But the other thing they do is that it'll be interesting to see how AI has been into this. Some of the specialized readers, if you have, let's say, a biology textbook, the reader will come across a diagram of a leaf and will describe it using the reader's language. Because the reader is expert enough to know how to do it. And I can well imagine AI doing the same thing where it comes across an illustration and does the alt text of it in a contextual way.

39:36Anil Dash:really interesting stuff.

39:38Mozilla's president:Some people in the YouTube chat bring up a good point, which I'm sure that we've discussed before. But the advent of these speech synthesizing tools, the fact that you can get that good of a recording of Leo just from a two-minute clip of his voice really does pose some issues or concerns for spam and spoofing calls.

40:02Anil Dash:I mean, well, that's exactly why Anthony made that say, you know, get some Apple cards. Yeah, I know.

40:09Mozilla's president:But I mean, to from beyond a business point. I mean, my parents, when I went to visit them, we're talking with this. They're like, yeah, someone we know got a call from their son. Turns out it wasn't their son, but they had a whole conversation with him. Wow. Right. And they almost sent that person a lot of money. It's getting. So can you do it in real time?

40:31Anil Dash:could I have a voice changer that would change my voice into your voice? I haven't seen anything like that, but that would be...

40:39Mozilla's president:I mean, couldn't you have it running much like a voice to text or when you're talking voice mode to chat GPT? It doesn't have to be text to voice. It could just be the kind of back and forth you see already at an LLM where it's purely a voice interaction.

40:58Anil Dash:well and uh it's not great for voiceover artists sam pruitt uh mentioned that and it's not good for people who read audiobooks for a living i think real people are still better at this yeah but not much better i mean you can definitely tell when it's a

41:19Mozilla's president:ai uh even a good one from 11 labs reading something just the cadence is off

41:26Anil Dash:your uh former boss jessica lessen uh wrote a piece about using ai to to summarize her notes from davos and she said well it wasn't great it was kind of you know obvi it was the obvious stuff but it made an excellent powerpoint presentation after i modified it and edited it and added my my insights to it she said the thing that's different consultants are done for yeah right I think that's what's different is that the AI doesn't have her 20 years of experience. And the point she really made, which I thought was interesting, is the thing that's most interesting to her and her audience is how Davos this year is different from Davos last year and the year before and the year before.

42:10Anil Dash:And the AI can't really do that very well. Yeah, but having done it for about 10 or 12 years, it's always BS. What's the mood of Davos? Yeah. It was a bad AI. This year, it was all about AI, wasn't it? I mean.

42:27Mozilla's president:My question with this is, what does this really matter? What does it matter what anybody says on a stage at Davos? I don't think it does. It's just a different – it's just a more decentralized version of the – this presentation should have been an emailed press release that we get from, you know, Apple or Google whenever they're announcing a product. Except for it's 50-some CEOs and executives.

42:52Anil Dash:Jeff, you're the expert. I mean, Jeff went for many years.

42:55Mozilla's president:The advantage. Jeff Jarvis Jarvis.

42:58Anil Dash:Yeah. The advantage is the whole way.

43:00Mozilla's president:Well, I got to go. So, you know, we were going to say no. It's the lobby con is what you're saying. It's lobby. It's lobby. It's all you meet somebody and you have a different conversation. That's what the value is. You get inspired by something. I mean, I've had scenes in a couple of my books from Jarvis because it was there. And I can say, oh, this illustrates something. Right. But it was useful for me.

43:25Anil Dash:Did you let's see, we still have a little time before our guest joins us. We're going to be talking to the president of Mozilla about their new manifesto, which just came out. They're they're pro-human, not anti-AI, but they're the rebel alliance. Let's put it that way.

43:44Mozilla's president:I want to see if they have a uniform.

43:48Anil Dash:They probably have a tattoo. I mean, yeah, yeah, that's, you got to have a rebel Alliance tattoo. Dario Amode, who is the founder and CEO of Anthropic, wrote his yearly letter. The adolescence of technology came out this month, confronting and overcoming the risks of powerful AI. Of course, Anthropic has always been all about the risks and mitigating the risks.

44:14Mozilla's president:Again, risks defined by the doomsters.

44:19Anil Dash:Yeah. He says it's critical to avoid doomerism. Here I mean doomerism, not just in the sense of believing doom is inevitable, which is both a false and self fulfilling belief. But more generally thinking about AI risks in a quasi religious way. I agree with that. Yeah.

44:40Mozilla's president:Yeah.

44:42Anil Dash:He says, as of this year, the pendulum has swung an opera AI opportunity, not AI risk is driving many political decisions yes this vacillation is unfortunate as the technology itself doesn't care about what is fashionable and we are considerably close to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023 the lesson is we need to discuss and address risks in a realistic pragmatic manner sober fact-based and well-equipped to survive changing tides so he acknowledges the risk, but not the kind of, he says, many people have been thinking in an analytic and sober way about AI risk for many years, but it's my impression that during the last couple of years, some of the least sensible voices rose to the top through sensationalistic social media accounts.

45:30Anil Dash:He says, we need to acknowledge uncertainty.

45:35Anil Dash:Yeah, we're definitely in the middle of that. No one can predict the future with complete confidence we still have to do the best we can to plan anyway i think i agree with that yeah intervene as surgically as possible

45:52Anil Dash:he says to be clear i think there's a decent chance we will eventually reach a point where much more significant action is warranted but we will need stronger evidence of imminent concrete danger than we have today the most constructive thing we can do today is i don't what that means well yeah right now it's i would say what i would paraphrase that is right now any talk about risks are speculative it's imaginative and so it's maybe not too smart to plan for imaginary risks wait until those risks are less imaginary we can then do the right thing he says the most constructive thing we can do today is advocate for limited rules while we learn whether or not there's evidence to support stronger ones i think it's a very convenient argument from the

46:39Mozilla's president:guy whose uh product would be hit by those rules being more than limited well but my contention is

46:48Anil Dash:it's not just him that would be hit i would be hit all of us who are excited about and using ai

46:59Anil Dash:i think that you know many of the constraints people are talking about would harm society would be societally harmful harm society how by limp because this thing is a remarkable tool it would be like the beginning of the internet saying you know there's a lot of potential hazard here which indeed there was but didn't know exactly what it was let's block it down now i don't think anybody's arguing for it to be i mean i guess some people are arguing i wanted to pause but i think that there's a

47:33Mozilla's president:reasonable argument to be made that if this technology has even one fifth of the promise that its boosters argue it does that yeah maybe you should take a slower and more measured approach to building it in its early there's a famous paper that i quoted in the gutenberg parenthesis by james Dewar in 1998 when Google started up about looking at Elizabeth Eisenstein in the beginnings of Watch Out Gutenberg and saying that the lesson of those kinds of innovations is let them go because you don't know what they're going to do until you get there. And then you adapt and you figure it out. And the danger is that you delay an inevitability with a false comfort and think that because you've delayed it, you know what it's going to do.

48:20Mozilla's president:All you've delayed is the questions you don't know the answers to yet. I mean, yeah, I suppose in a vacuum that's – or I suppose in those cases, yes. I mean, I think that it's foolish and impractical to assume that any technology like this can be delayed in any real sense, given the fact that even within our own country, we're in kind of an ARMS race, not to mention globally. And just as foolish to believe that they're harmless.

48:50Anil Dash:He says, he does a thought experiment, which is kind of interesting. I'm curious what you think about it. He says, I think the best way to get a handle on the risks of AI is to ask the following question. This is a pure thought experiment. Suppose a literal, and he puts this in quotes, country of geniuses were to materialize somewhere in the world in, let's say, 2027. 50 million people, they're not really people, but 50 million entities, all of whom are much more capable than any Nobel Prize winner, statesman, or technologist. The analogy is not perfect because these geniuses could have an extremely wide range of motivations and behavior from pliant and obedient to strange and alien.

49:30Anil Dash:But sticking with the analogy for now, suppose you were the national security advisor of a major state responsible for assessing and responding to the situation. imagine further that because ai systems can operate hundreds of times faster than humans this country is operating with a time advantage relative to all other countries for every cognitive action we can take this country can take 10 or more maybe hundreds what should you be worried about here's he says what he's worried about first of all do you think that premise is realistic no no that's ridiculous no it's ridiculous yes it's like yeah imagine uh imagine

50:11Mozilla's president:if we lived in a world where there wasn't any oxygen and we were all on fire and the fire worked without oxygen and it was very very hot and your mom was burning up faster but your dad was also

50:23Anil Dash:burning what would you do it's like okay it's a hypothetical i acknowledge i don't think it's that far-fetched i mean it's it's still tech triumphalism okay one year do you think that you think that

50:36Mozilla's president:we're going to be at well we're going to be at 50 million geniuses level of here's why he says that

50:43Anil Dash:because it does accelerate if once ai starts to self-improve which it's starting to do a lot of claude code is written by claude code now it starts to accelerate at a very rapid pace so So yes, one year, a year ago, we are not that far ahead now. When we were a year ago, we're farther ahead. But imagine it's 10 times farther ahead in a year or 100 times farther ahead in two years. So that acceleration. So what's he scared of? Autonomy risks, number one. What are the intentions and goals of this country? Is it hostile? Does it share our values?

51:17Mozilla's president:See, right there is a huge presumption that the machine can ever want something, that it never has a desire. right yeah he's already creating them to people he's equating it to people already so he's saying

51:29Anil Dash:yeah misuse for destruction assume the new country is malleable and follows instructions then okay this is number two and is that's essentially a country of mercenaries could existing rogue actors who want to cause destruction this seems much more likely including terrorists use or manipulate this new country of geniuses to make themselves more effective that's that's seems not at all far-fetched look how we're leveraging look how i'm personally leveraging claude code now to do things to make me more powerful i mean it's more powerful and things like bookmarking stories for the show but i love the idea of you looking out over your

52:11Mozilla's president:spreadsheets of links being like i've accumulated power i'm benevolent though but what if i weren't

52:16Anil Dash:as far as the eye can see i'm ozomandius of the ai but now but steve was talking about this yesterday there is a very significant malware that is fully ai generated running about now and uh so it is there's no question that bad actors are using ai and they're getting that leverage now i'm using the leverage for something stupid but they're using the leverage for something very malicious uh his third question misuse for seizing power what if the country was in fact built and controlled by an existing powerful actor david sachs xi jinping such as a dictator a rogue corporate actor peter thiel um but that's true today with a company like uh palantir right true with alex carp absolutely do we want peter thiel or alex carp to have infinite power well that's right what we supposedly have regulations and laws for him well but our current administration in in order that we don't fall behind china is saying we better not have any of those because we've got a full speed with or without AI project Genesis yeah yeah uh fourth problem economic disruption if a new if that new country is not a security threat but simply participates peacefully in the global economy could it cause severe risks simply by being so technologically advanced and effective as disrupts the global economy causing mass unemployment or radically concentrating wealth i think that's a legitimate concern it wouldn't be on its own behalf i don't think i think it's probably best not to ascribe any volition on the part of this 50 million geniuses but whoever wields them peter teal or you know china could easily use them to commandeer the global economy maybe yeah put a lot of people out of work amazon's firing it's all societal problems

54:26Mozilla's president:people and these are all societal problems it's like this isn't a tech problem right but it's a tech but it's a societal problem caused by tech well uh in which text is a tool of of of agents

54:40Anil Dash:but it doesn't have its own agency well yeah and i agree with you i i've always said that i said the problem with AI is not the AI it's the people wielding it yes so you could you know we can leave out the autonomy risk the first hazard but all the rest don't assume that autonomy that

54:59Mozilla's president:there's volition on the part of the the problem here is that this is a societal problem and that they're trying to solve technologically and that's not that's not possible either yeah well if you if

55:09Anil Dash:you're curious to me goes this is really almost a book length uh piece if you're curious he goes in a greater depth on this uh you know what i'm encouraged that uh uh amaday is thinking about this stuff what 11 labs voice should read it to me oh you know what i could uh i could let's see which who would you like to have a carl's hagen i can have anybody you want to read it let me just find them oh there is a Feynman voice there is a Feynman voice okay let's see I think it's Michael Caine still it's it's loading the website right now so you can give it a url which I just did I gave it a Dario's piece and now it's going to uh the adolescence of technology confronting

56:00Mozilla's president:and overcoming the risks of powerful AI. January 2026.

56:05Anil Dash:I like that voice.

56:06Mozilla's president:There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan's book, Contact, where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity's representative to meet the aliens. I should pause it and get... You see, they should also have one, though, where you could have Steve Martin as the jerk read it.

56:27Anil Dash:believe that would be fun that would be fun how do i change the voice on this let me see voices uh let's see it is deeply clear uh let me see if i can get uh fineman here's fineman reading

56:51Hey, I'm talking here.

56:54Mozilla's president:Wielded. In my essay, Machines of Loving Grace, I tried to lay out the dream of a civilization that had made it through to adulthood. I don't love this.

57:05Anil Dash:You don't like that?

57:07Mozilla's president:This is my issue. I feel like many of these readers just...

57:11Anil Dash:They don't. They're not human.

57:13Mozilla's president:They're not human. Yeah, it does the voice really well, but it doesn't do their personality at all. science economic let's have john wayne not even the personality but just the cadence of how someone

57:24Anil Dash:would read a sentence here's john wayne reading it what do you think maybe that'll make it more accessible i like the michael cain voice and they have a lot of non-celebrity voices too it's not perfect i agree global peace and work and meaning i felt it was important to give people

57:42Mozilla's president:something inspiring to fight for a task at which both ai accelerationists ai safety advocates

57:49Anil Dash:seemed oddly to have failed seemed oddly there's an evenness to it yeah it's a little too a little too even huh well all right aren't we getting picky i mean it was only a few years ago

58:04Mozilla's president:that the computer voice sounded like this but that's what ai is going to do right it always tends towards the middle how about i mean literally it is going to tell the actress voice let's have a velvety actress voice want to confront the rite of passage itself

58:22Anil Dash:to that is we are about to face and try to begin making a battle plan to defeat them so i agree it's not human and if you're an actor a human narrator you're not out of work yet but there's no recording of this and if i wanted to listen to this in the car or i just my eyes are tired i don't want to read this uh or it's in dark mode and i'm jeff maybe you'd want to listen to it i think that works no all right enough you're watching intelligent machines jeff jarvis paris martineau we're waiting for our guest who's going to show up pretty soon uh we're going to talk to the president of mozilla mark sermon about the state of mozilla that he just recently uh published and i thought was i thought was pretty good very good uh did you see the guy who's trying to raise corn with ai i didn't understand this at all proof of corn.com oh i can't load it it's it's being there's

59:27Mozilla's president:No proof of corn? Or is this your weird extension that stops all new and fun websites?

59:34Anil Dash:That's what's running, unfortunately.

59:38Mozilla's president:Any extension that stops you seeking out a website called proofofcorn.com is wrong.

59:43Anil Dash:I think it's, well, anyway, you can go to proofofcorn.com.

59:46Mozilla's president:Oh, I can clearly see this was generated by Claude, because it's got the same sort of vibes as the Leo tomato game.

59:54Anil Dash:the idea was he wanted an ai to see if the ai could put together a corn farm basically right i don't know what the current state is because i i get i haven't seen it lately but i was gonna

1:00:06Mozilla's president:say cloud code loves the one thing i made with cloud code kind of looks like this it loves this

1:00:12Anil Dash:framing for its websites describe it because i can't uh it is i can show it i don't know a

1:00:20Mozilla's president:heavily padded it's a white background heavy padding on either side central column of things it's got a couple little like it then i don't i don't know how to describe whatever is going on with the corn it describes itself as an autonomous agricultural agent monitoring fields responding

1:00:38Anil Dash:to partnerships evolving daily uh it's trying to buy land so it can raise oh as of january 25th

1:00:47Mozilla's president:fred operates completely independently every day at 6 a.m utc he wakes up checks weather across three regions reviews his inbox composes partnership emails sends them no human prompting required but what is he trying to do he's trying to buy land fred's thinking is iowa is frozen solid been

1:01:07Anil Dash:through worse we wait so no corn yet here's another use now that's a harmless use of ai The Trump administration says the Department of Transportation is going to use AI to write its regulations going forward. The DOT's top lawyer said they don't need the perfect rule. They just want good enough. This is a ProPublica investigation. By the way, great, great illustration on the ProPublica web page. What do you think? Should they're going to use Google's Gemini, at least they're not using Grok to draft new transportation regulations?

1:01:51Mozilla's president:No, I don't think we should be doing this already. The issue is with our regulation that it is so cumbersome and overly rotten, opaque that there's God knows what stuck in there. I don't need an AI to be throwing its proverbial hat in the ring in influencing what ends up on our legal books.

1:02:17Anil Dash:This is the sad thing. The sad state of affairs right now in the United States government is that, you know, and I understand it all started when Ronald Reagan said the scariest words in the English language are, we're the government we're here to help which really turned a lot of people against the idea that government could in fact help and maybe there's more bureaucracy than there should be i i don't deny that maybe there's waste but there's also a huge or were a huge number of people with great expertise in these areas who were committed public servants who are really trying to do the right thing especially in the department of transportation many of them have been chased out of government so the trump administration's plan is to replace those experts with expert systems and in fact they say this is just the first agency that is fully enabled to use ai to draft rules the plan is to do it everywhere uh according to pro publica these developments of alarmed summit dot the agency's rules touch every facet of transportation safety get ready including regulations to keep planes in the sky prevent gas pipelines from exploding and stop freight trains from carrying toxic chemicals from going off the rails

1:03:39Anil Dash:why would the government use such nascent technology notorious for making mistakes to write these the answer from the government speed writing and advising complex federal regulations could take months sometimes years but with dot's version yeah why does it take months

1:03:58Mozilla's president:sometimes years because those things become law and it's a process sure this is this is part of the devaluation of government yeah this is a way to say it's intentional matter any machine can make

1:04:10Anil Dash:it it's straight out of ronald reagan's playbook and it's just gotten worse and worse with dot's version of gemini employees could generate a proposed rule in a matter of minutes or even seconds hey hey is that really what we want do we is that is i mean if if really is that your priority we want you know we don't want it to cost anything we want it to be instantaneous uh in any case most of what goes into the preamble of dot regulatory documents is just one it's just word salad one staffer recalled a presenter saying it doesn't matter it's just word salad you know what you lose when i could do word salad you know what you lose when you go fast and fast and cheap right you lose good yeah the goal is to dramatically compress the timeline in which regulations are produced such as they could go from idea to complete draft ready for review by the office of information and regulatory affairs in just 30 days shouldn't take more than 20 minutes to get a draft rule out of gemini they said they don't like regulations so they don't want to make

1:05:12Mozilla's president:easier to make you think they want to make it harder to make they think regulations don't matter

1:05:15Anil Dash:and and honestly they don't care i think that's the case right when in fact most uh of your if

1:05:25Mozilla's president:you're a business most of your interaction with government power is not through law it's through the regulations that result it's through agencies yeah interpretation of law uh academics and researchers for a minute and fred's how's corn Fred's plan is to open a Union Square farmers market stand in August 2026 with all the corn. It being Claude Code has grown. It currently has sent seven emails, including one that says something to the effect of, hello, fellow corn husker, to a person who I suppose might be able to connect Claude Code with the ability to grow corn.

1:06:09Anil Dash:but see this is what's interesting because we live in a kind of um an economy this is civilization right where you don't actually have to touch corn to grow sell corn right you just have to send an email or two that and transfer some money over that all of this can be done remote by remote control and that's really one of the kind of key things that happened in civilization you used to have to grow your own food or somebody would have to go out in the field and make food somebody still has to do that but it's now completely done autonomously by agents capital of labor yeah that's right capital and labor that's right and that division uh i think this is a really interesting project i hope he plans to really actually sell corn

1:06:56Mozilla's president:trying you know they're pursuing contracts with uh someone from purdue agri-food right now um chad from nebraska is labeled as a hot lead the rationale for that is it could be a strong collaboration potential with experienced farmer father clear land availability and aligned interests in ai good starting point for proof of concept wow we'll have to check back in in a couple

1:07:26Anil Dash:of months to see if did you see that uh wikipedia hired a bunch of volunteers uh they went through all of the ai uh dreck that was posted in wikipedia and elsewhere and they created a draft a a a guide to spotting ai writing which of course is immediately used to tell Claude Code, there's an now Claude Code skill called Humanizer that takes all of that information that Wikipedia volunteers put together and tells Claude Code how to avoid any chatbot giveaways. The plugin is on GitHub, 1600 stars as of Monday. It's really handy, writes the author, Siki Chen, and see Cheechan really handy that Wikipedia wet and collated a detailed list of signs of AI writing so much so that you can just tell your LLM not to do that oh boy there's a an app that I mentioned in my in the hot type called twain GPT to humanize your writing perfect

1:08:41Mozilla's president:hey maybe just write it yourself humanize your writing no problem yeah maybe that's a great way

1:08:47Anil Dash:to humanize your right do it yourself when you get the machine to do it you want to do anything

1:08:53Mozilla's president:yourself when you have the machine do every fun interesting or meaningful thing in your life and uh you know yeah that's true I don't know I feel dubious about Fred's corn raising potential. He got between today and February 5th to secure a land partnership. March, Fred's plan is to deploy Internet of Things sensors and prep soil. Then planting day is April 20th, and they're doing an 80-day sweet corn variety. Then they've got to figure out all of the licensing, harvest it in July, and then transport it to New York City. Yeah.

1:09:33Anil Dash:Fred has real money?

1:09:35Mozilla's president:Fred has some real money, and you can see how much of it it's spent.

1:09:38Anil Dash:How much is it spent so far? Where are you, Fred's money? This is proofofcorn.com slash Fred.

1:09:46Mozilla's president:The total investment is$2 ,532.99. Okay. It expects$4 ,000 in revenue.

1:09:57Anil Dash:See, if it doubles its money every year, in 10 years, it could be a monster.

1:10:01Mozilla's president:I don't know that farming is that profitable. I think there... maybe it's opt over optimistic isn't corn one of the ones that has to be subsidized by the u.s government in order to make work yeah that's it it's finding all the subsidy loopholes and taking

1:10:16Anil Dash:all that right i mean they'd probably be very good at that doesn't have anything about subsidies on here it could make the regulations and violate them at the same time it could be like a it's like a ouroboros Barry, some smell on Consumer Reports food story here

1:10:33Mozilla's president:It does say that if

1:10:36Anil Dash:You gotta write a story about this

1:10:38Mozilla's president:It does say that if it goes to Union Square market that they're inviting press for that Oh yeah

1:10:43Anil Dash:Union Square in New York, I presume Where else?

1:10:47Mozilla's president:I don't know I haven't forgotten your roots Is there a farmer's market there?

1:10:54Anil Dash:No there used to be a Macy's there but not anymore oh that's gone

1:11:01Mozilla's president:my question is how are they planning on harvesting this corn where is the budget for labor to harvest but where is the budget for that it's all built into the contract capital of labor it is they do they have a lot of stuff about the stand even square on here and not many details but the corn harvesting they plan on having a sign that says ai table proof of corn an ipad with live weather irrigation dashboard figured out a human representative to roast the corn and explain oh it's roasted oh they're not just selling i don't think it understands how the union square green market works it's not typically uh

1:11:41Anil Dash:you know there's no fires there no you know what they should do they should go to the christmas market uh where is that that's a i love that little christmas market and also there's one in union square there's quite there's like a dozen because they have the probability of success

1:11:57Mozilla's president:in august 2026 is 25 at least it's being realistic

1:12:07Anil Dash:i don't think it's a good project you know what let's think of something we could do what would be better what would be a better thing we could get claude to do i'll give it a thousand bucks what should he have it do? A lot of people are trying to make money in the market stock market.

1:12:21Mozilla's president:This is in About Proof of Corn, on Proof of Corn slash About. This guy, Seth, was walking with his friend in San Francisco. They have a little dialogue at 8.15 p.m. as they're walking towards the hotel. Seth, I can do anything I want with software from my terminal. Fred, that's not true. You can't, like, grow corn.

1:12:41Anil Dash:Oh, maybe it's Union Square in San Francisco.

1:12:44Mozilla's president:No, it's definitely Union Square in New York City. based on the documents. You know what I mean? I'm going to grow corn for you. That'd be great. Thank you. I'm going to figure it out and I'm going to show you. And that'll be our first vibe coding project together. It's a physical thing. I will buy effing land with an API via my terminal and I will hire some service to plant corn.

1:13:03Anil Dash:There you go. This is our future.

1:13:07Mozilla's president:Is it? And do we want that? Do we want our future to be two guys deciding on the walk to their hotel in san francisco they're going to use their api through a terminal to buy corn now paris if

1:13:20Anil Dash:i said it was an art project you would go oh this is funny this is cool i'm not saying it's not i don't find it funny it is i'm very amused yeah the ceo of mistral the french ai says china lagging behind an ai it's not true it's a fairy tale arthur mensch china is not behind the west this is on bloomberg television at davos the capabilities of china's open source technology is probably stressing the ceos in the u.s and you know what that alibaba text-to-speech that's an open source model that's running on hugging face i should say open weights i don't like open source. So even if they're six months behind, that's not that much behind, and they'll probably speed up.

1:14:11Anil Dash:So if it's not corn, would you accept Pokemon as a test of AI intelligence? What do you have against Pokemon? I was rid of that 15 years ago.

1:14:25Mozilla's president:I never always bored me. I never understood it. I thought this will go away, but no, it's got to come back. do you see the people out wandering around in the streets with their pokemon goes my wife you could pokemon go to the polls right now jeff uh i let me just uh let me just i have a little pokemon go right here i never played that i i love oh it's pokemon games back in the

1:14:51Anil Dash:day i'm surprised you didn't get into pokemon go they're not playing by the way pokemon go because you have to actually get out of the house to do that they're playing the original games that you played the Pokemon games. Let's just see if there's any Pokemon in my neighborhood here.

1:15:10Anil Dash:Oh, yes. Let's see. Have you been on top of it?

1:15:14Mozilla's president:Are you your

1:15:16Anil Dash:wild Dunsparce right there? Look at that.

1:15:18Mozilla's president:Right in front of you?

1:15:19Anil Dash:Right in front of me. Let me just go throw my I'm a I'm an expert in the in the.

1:15:25Mozilla's president:Are you just throwing the balls? You're

1:15:27Anil Dash:having to fight it i think that's you have to fight it later if you go into the gyms you know

1:15:31Mozilla's president:and there's a there's a battle yeah why are you why are you swirled why do you swirl it around

1:15:37Anil Dash:because it's better you get more you're more likely to trap it if you do a little spin ball that's the spin ball there you get extra a little extra uh english on the thing what's this oh look at that that's a wild lechonk i love the lechonk i do like the lechonk the chonks great it's a it's a pig of some sort yeah so yeah you spin you didn't know about this you spin it and that way you're more likely to catch it in your pokeball anyway you could see that an ai could probably do this better than i can uh this is from the wall street journal we're all a bunch of nerds said the man behind the trend silicon valley at the world's top ai labs are using the original pokemon games is a popular way to track the progress and abilities of ai models and figure out how to deploy them toward time-consuming complex goals you can watch them on twitch and elsewhere dave hershey who is applied ai-leated anthropic says it provides us with like this great way man to see how a model is doing and evaluate it in a quantitative way they like pokemon blue hershey is the architect and you've probably seen this on twitch of claude plays pokemon have you seen that right yeah and there's also gpt plays pokemon gemini plays pokemon yeah so it's about a smart one so it's as smart as a twitch chat room is how smart that is then

1:17:08Mozilla's president:yeah right that's right because they did that as me at eight years old

1:17:15Anil Dash:the streams of Claude, GPT, and Gemini playing Pokemon on Twitch have collectively racked up hundreds of thousands of comments as the models chart their progress in real-time. Wait, I see it now, Claude posted on its stream. The X equals 11 wall has an opening at Y equals 10 to 12.

1:17:37Anil Dash:Anyway, it's just, this is just one of those lifestyle pieces on the Wall Street Journal.

1:17:41Mozilla's president:You know what I love for two seconds is your symbol WTF.

1:17:46Anil Dash:Oh, yeah, this is useful.

1:17:49Mozilla's president:What? Actually, I think it deleted it because I didn't think we'd have time for it. I figured I'm killing it two minutes before Mark comes.

1:17:57Anil Dash:Yeah, Mark's going to be here any moment now. We're going to talk to the president.

1:17:59Mozilla's president:We're changing the subject from Pokemon.

1:18:02Anil Dash:Yeah, you're probably right. I actually deleted it. Let me go to the...

1:18:07Mozilla's president:Was it symbol.wtf? It's symbol.wgf, but I don't know what I'm looking at.

1:18:12Anil Dash:So you click it. So here's the thing. It's very hard when you're on a phone or anywhere else to figure out how to type in the trademark symbol, right? Well, all you have to do here is click it.

1:18:23Mozilla's president:Oh, I do know this.

1:18:24Anil Dash:And then it puts it on your clipboard and you paste it right in.

1:18:26Mozilla's president:I mean, you can just type in the words trademark symbol. In many cases. But how about this? And then you get it right up there.

1:18:34Anil Dash:Could you do the Myanmar thingamajob? this has a lot of nice little symbols. And actually, it's helpful. It really does.

1:18:44Mozilla's president:Whoa, I like the asterism. It's useful for the arrows, up, down, left, right. That's useful.

1:18:50Anil Dash:On Linux, I mean, on Mac, you have easy access to this stuff. There's an emoji key and so forth. But it feels like it should have more. This doesn't seem like the full scene.

1:19:01Mozilla's president:Yeah, there's so many more characters.

1:19:03Anil Dash:Yeah, I'm a little disappointed. I do like it, though. So my E and my name, the E accent aigu, or E with a cute accent, is right there. And I could just paste that in. Because as many of the time I've had to figure out how to do that.

1:19:16Mozilla's president:You can also just hold the E. Hold down the E.

1:19:19Anil Dash:And it pops up. On an Apple device, maybe. And Android. Can you do it on Android? Of course. On Windows, you used to have to type Alt-0170 on the keyboard to get it. It was such a pain in the butt. But yeah, Apple's made that much easier.

1:19:37Mozilla's president:Thank you. Actually, on the latest episode of Hands on Windows, Paul shows you how to do this easily on Windows.

1:19:44Anil Dash:Oh, all right. Well, now I have to watch Hands on Windows. Oh, no, wait a minute. I don't because I don't use Windows.

1:19:51Mozilla's president:Wow. Lyle in the sand.

1:19:56Anil Dash:We're going to take a little break. And when we come back, Mark Sermon, the president of Mozilla, will join us. i am a devout firefox user because i don't want chrome to eat the world uh and i think that uh mozilla has been has some challenges it's a challenging time for firefox and mozilla but they have a plan the 2026 state of mozilla doing for ai what we did for the web coming up just a bit with uh the the new president relatively new president uh of mozilla mark sermon you're watching and intelligent machines that guy who's about to pass out because he's exhausted is jeff jarvis jeff i mean you can if you if you want to take a nap there's a bed right over there just don't pull my comfort right yep okay just leave the at any given moment a cane

1:20:47Mozilla's president:is going to emerge from the side of the screen and pull jeff off

1:20:55Mozilla's president:jeff injures himself a third time trying to do a bit that is paris i still say paris you should come up with something like corn that we could do i should i should come up with a classic crop that would be a great boon for me avoiding the radio activity why don't i just come up with next corn pork bellies what's a commodity oil sorghum let's all do sorghum

1:21:26Anil Dash:what in what sense i don't know i just feel like that we could do this we don't have to do corn we can do anything we want what would what commodity what should we what enterprise should we um let me put it this way i spent 250 bucks a month on claude max let's do something with it

1:21:46Mozilla's president:this is going to be the classic next planet money episode we got we got mark all right hello

1:21:54Anil Dash:joins us now he is the president of mozilla and uh just generated a very ex generated wrote i

1:22:02Mozilla's president:think he wrote it with his own hands i i sewed it with a thread uh manifesto the mozilla manifesto

1:22:11Anil Dash:mark it's a pleasure to meet you thank you for joining us on intelligent machines oh thanks for

1:22:16Mozilla's president:having me. It's exciting to be here.

1:22:17Anil Dash:And I will preface this as I have before with my gratitude to Mozilla. I've been using, I'm a devoted Firefox user because I don't think we should be in a monoculture when it comes to browsers. I should confess that while I do use Firefox, I most often use a Firefox fork called the Zen browser. Is that okay?

1:22:38Mozilla's president:Yeah. I mean, the world needs that kind of diversity of browsers. I love Zen browser. And so it's not only okay, it's great. Oh, good. That's why it's open source. Fork it. Like, fork it. Lots of things, right? Fork it, folks. I have a guy who just joined me working as our CTO. And his thing is, we don't want three, four, five AGI's, like if that's the direction we're going. We need 7 billion, right? Yes. To be open, fork it, make it yours.

1:23:07Anil Dash:Yes. So that same philosophy that Mozilla applies to Firefox, you want to apply to AI.

1:23:14Mozilla's president:Exactly. Exactly. I think, you know, that we grew up, Firefox grew up, Mozilla grew up. I wasn't here at the time, but I was a fan in a tech monoculture around the web with Microsoft and Firefox, Linux, Wikipedia, all those things, they challenged that and they turned it around. And I think we're going into or we're right in the middle of a much more consequential monoculture. And it's time to break it open. Do something beautiful, big, joyous, different, diverse with AI.

1:23:45Anil Dash:You've been with Mozilla a while. You were executive director in 2008. Did that for 15 years, became president just a couple of years ago. At, I think, a challenging time for the Mozilla organization. organization, Mozilla's percentage in the browser market is down to single digits.

1:24:04Mozilla's president:It is. It is. And it's, you know, it's challenging for a couple of reasons. That's one is remaining relevant when, you know, the browser market is basically locked down by people who bundle their browsers with Android, with iOS, with Windows. I mean, really the dynamics of the browser market are kind of back to where they were before we started, which is people just use what comes with their device. And it's very hard to be an independent browser. And we make something great, we believe we're going to make it greater, but it's tough. So that's one challenge. And we have a new CEO of the Firefox organization, Anthony DeMeo, and he's got great plans, not just to figure out what AI means in Firefox.

1:24:51Mozilla's president:We can talk about that in a little bit. But just to make it something that people want to switch to. But they've got to want to switch. It doesn't come with their phone. But I don't actually think that's the biggest challenge for the Mozilla organization. I think the biggest challenge for the Mozilla organization is we're web people. And the thing that defines where the tech industry is going is AI, is data. And we come from an era of saying, we don't want to touch any data. We're about privacy. We're still about privacy. We're still about user control. But the challenge for us is we have to figure out what that means in a world that is totally different than the world when we started.

1:25:31Mozilla's president:And that's a lot of what we've been trying to work on. When we say we want to do for AI what we did for the web, it means bringing in new people who know how to build AI that protects your privacy, who know how to build AI that kind of is designed around human values. So that's what we're trying to figure out right now. And I think that's actually the bigger challenge than market share.

1:25:54Anil Dash:Mark, can I ask you a question? Let me just finish this because I think it's important. You're also putting your money where your mouth is. You've committed$650 million to this effort. I didn't even know Mozilla had that kind of...

1:26:06Mozilla's president:Well, we actually have almost a billion and a half in the bank. And, you know, that 650 is a bit more than we earned this year. So, you know, most of that comes from Google, from search? So, you know, the biggest part of the revenue comes from search, about 85 % of that.

1:26:24Anil Dash:That's why I was a little worried when the Google trial was going on that one of the remedies was that Google stops giving money to not just Apple, to you guys.

1:26:31Mozilla's president:We have known for a long time that we need to diversify. And that's why, you know, the Google revenue and the search revenue has actually gone down from about 95 % to about 85 % on the exact numbers. And because we are building new things and the first of those that's working is the best in class, privacy-oriented ads that you can see in Firefox. And if you want a different direction for the ad industry, we're actually building that and it's starting to be a part of how we support ourselves.

1:27:00Anil Dash:Nice. Go ahead, Jeff. I'm sorry.

1:27:02Mozilla's president:Sorry, before we go on. Sorry, before we go on. Mark, if you're seeing Leo's screen, you're going to want to go to the top of the zoom window and click on meeting and then you'll see

1:27:10Anil Dash:and you'll see everybody up in the top left you're seeing your uh your your your little cute little firefox animation you want to see yourself there you go yeah um but that didn't

1:27:22Mozilla's president:break anything from before right no no no not at all it's just you tell me to do that and i did and then i and then i was like oh this looks true i like seeing this the firefox window is that part of the show.

1:27:33Anil Dash:It will be. Yeah. I love that, by the way, great job on this. I love how it loads with the command line and it's great. If it does it too fast, unfortunately, because I want to, I want to read all the things.

1:27:44Mozilla's president:It's trying, it's trying to trick you. Well, not trying to trick you, but it's trying to, you know, just kind of dazzle you.

1:27:48Anil Dash:Show it right now, Benito, because I'm going to launch it and you can see, there you go.

1:27:55Mozilla's president:Cute.

1:27:56Anil Dash:Isn't that great? Love that. It goes so fast

1:28:00Mozilla's president:though you don't you know these videos look at these cool videos it's a little panda you know

1:28:04Anil Dash:is that a trash panda or is that a firefox no that's it's a kind of a cousin of a firefox

1:28:11Mozilla's president:it's trying to bring you in it's a red panda but we had a lot of people say that is just ai slop mozilla's going like doing these crappy ai videos that is handmade cgi that is you know the work of computer artists, just so you know. Nice. I guess this also goes to a large point is how have you handled the backlash from users about kind of rolling out more AI centric tools, rolling out more advertising, even when it is couched in this well-intentioned attempt to make up more private advertising experience? How have you kind of navigated that? Because Mozilla's user base, I think is unique in that Firefox users are nerds by and large.

1:28:57Mozilla's president:Yeah, I mean, people are people. Well, and I am them, right? People don't freak out when OpenAI puts out an Atlas browser. They're like, yeah, whatever. And we start figuring out what we're going to do this browser. People care. People care about Firefox. And so, you know, the key is, and we've always had to navigate this, being there with products that meet people where they are. Like people are using AI. You have this, you know, ChatGPT is like the fastest growing product ever in history, certainly in internet history. I use different AI things because they're helpful for some things. There's also a lot of slop.

1:29:36Mozilla's president:There's also a lot of reasons to aid it. So how do you hold the values of privacy, of choice, of control and meet people where they are and where they're going. And so the needle to thread is that balance. And so how we're tackling that is to start a conversation with people, partly by doing what we did in this report and say, we're not trying to build the AI you hate. We're trying to build something different. And so if you do want to opt in, we're going to build something different. We want to build it with you. We want to figure out what that looks like. And the other way to handle it is let you opt out.

1:30:15Mozilla's president:So Firefox will let you turn off all the AI as we layer in more features. And that's a key piece, right? We, unlike almost anybody, have always been about choice. You can go up in that little bar in Firefox and say, I want to search in Google. I want to search in Bing. I want to search in DuckDuckGo. I want to search in one of, I think there's probably a hundred different search engines you can turn on as your default. And that's going to be the same thing with AI. You can pick between open source things. You can pick between Gemini. You can pick between turning it all off. So having a conversation by building things about what AI looks like that's different has to happen through the product.

1:30:58Mozilla's president:And then you've got to give people choices. So people haven't seen us do that yet. So you've got to suspend your disbelief, which is a hard thing to ask people to do. So, you know, the only way to get there is through, maybe, is that simple answer. Mark, I think I'm old enough to remember when in the early days, my children, we didn't just have browser wars. We had server wars. Yep. Right, the Netscape server, the open market server. And then along comes Apache, which enables infrastructure for everybody. And I wonder whether that's a possible model, not on the consumer product side, but on the kind of what we used to think of as the server side of AI.

1:31:42Mozilla's president:Do you think that we're going to end up with things that become truly open enough that we can all use them and choose from them in a similar way? I sure hope so. And we're doing everything we can to help that happen. And if you kind of look back, it wasn't just Apache. It was Linux. It was MySQL. You had this whole thing that if you're nerdy and old like us, you call it the LAMP stack. And what happened then was Microsoft actually owned, I was a web developer in the mid-90s when the web was blowing up, owned the whole server stack for web developers. And then all these different pieces, Apache, Linux, they came together and they were a free and open alternative that you could pack on.

1:32:25Mozilla's president:And Linux, when I started as a web developer in the mid-'90s, I think was about 6 % market share. It's now 80 % of the servers in the world. It is the thing that developers just use. And so can that happen? Yes. Will it happen again with AI that developers turn to open source? I think this year or 2027 will be the year that people switch. What are the keys you're going to do to – how are you going to facilitate that? Well, let me answer – let me say two things. Why do I think it's going to happen and what are we going to do? So why do I think it's going to happen is two things. One is just on the kind of open source and open weights models, they're catching up in capabilities.

1:33:11Mozilla's president:So you kind of see a curve where, you know, the closed stuff and the open stuff, for most use cases that people are going to put into an app, they're kind of there. and at the same time serving up, it's not free, it's not like software, you still got to pay for inference, serving up these open source models is about 20 % of the cost of building on top of a cloud or a chat GPT API. So you have capabilities going up and you have costs coming down. Those things are meaning that people are going to switch. One of the biggest kind of blockers to this is that it's still all very hard to use. And there's so much all spread out, much like Linux was before Linux distributions, right?

1:33:55Mozilla's president:You could go get a piece here, download it there. So we have a company, Mozilla AI, 100 % focused on developers, 100 % focused on encouraging developers to choose open source AI. And what it does is it has, you know, a bunch of libraries, software libraries. It's now got one hosted product in beta called any LLM. And it does exactly what you imagine. As a developer, here's the thing that just like is a magical tool that lets you switch between this LLM, that LLM, but also any guardrail, any agent, things that make it easy to just adopt from this ecosystem as it comes along. So that's one of the big things we're doing.

1:34:38Mozilla's president:But you'll also see in that report, we talk about gathering some sort of rebel alliance.

1:34:43Anil Dash:I love that, by the way.

1:34:45Mozilla's president:Thank you. It's evocative. It's corny. It's evocative. And lots of other people, and this is the key to what happened with what you're talking about 20 years ago, Jeff, lots of other people are going at their piece of changing the game. And what we're going to do is we're going to invest in them. We're We're going to work with them. We're going to amplify them. And that is actually the way that it kind of pushes the tide into open source winning in the AI era. A very important question, Mark. Do you have a Rebel Alliance helmet, uniform, tattoo? Or a tattoo? One of the nice things about a Rebel Alliance, the Rebel Alliance, is you don't have uniforms.

1:35:30Mozilla's president:That's the whole thing. that you know you started with leo is like you use different a different browser you want diversity of browsers if you have people who are a kind of ragtag group who all have their own it's to scratch their own way of dressing like driving towards the same but but kind of different future i think you get a much richer thing and that's you know that's the uniform i'm wearing love it uh so what

1:35:56Anil Dash:What is that$650 million going to go toward? Where does that money go?

1:36:00Mozilla's president:We're kind of like in the answer to that, we're kind of like in the boring first week of your business school class. It's not very complicated. It is 80 % of that goes towards our existing core products. We want Firefox to be great. And we just keep investing in it being great. It's not like that has changed. That's where the money comes from in the first place. And also Thunderbird, people don't remember, we have a very privacy-centric email client, still has 20 million people around the world that use it, grew by 10 % last year because people want to go back to a privacy-oriented email experience.

1:36:40Mozilla's president:And so 80 % of it just goes to keeping doing that. And then we've taken 20 % and really pushed it at this challenge of creating trustworthy, open source AI that you can rely on. And so that means playing with this idea of a trusted AI mode in Firefox, where you have to opt into it. It'll be a separate window in the same way you have like a regular Firefox window. You can have a private window. You'll have an AI window. And that gives us a place to experiment with a different way of doing AI. And if you want to play with it and use it, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. So that's some of that 20%.

1:37:19Mozilla's president:Another 20 % is going after just what Jeff is asking about is, you know, the developer marketplace. So that's the Mozilla AI NELM kind of type of approach. That is a company we're likely to spin out called Mozilla Data Collective, which is a two-sided marketplace for ethical training data, which sounds like a lot of words, but is really people who've got valuable data who want to set the terms of how AI users, AI can do it. And really, that's a missing thing in the world. And then the other piece is really just rallying the public. I mean, our Mozilla Foundation group is working with creatives in Hollywood and activists in all parts of the world, actually not just Hollywood, even Bollywood, they're going to do an event in India next month.

1:38:11You know, people of all sorts who are not the AI builders per se, they're people who

1:38:16Mozilla's president:have a stake in where technology goes to imagine a very different future. You know, there's a lot of creative work there. So that's the kind of mix of it. And then underneath, there's something that, you know, is pretty new to us is we're doing using kind of an ethical approach, a responsible approach to venture investing, investing in companies that might make the next Firefox, who are trying to build something different and helping them along. So there is a piece of that 20 % that is going towards responsible tech companies through venture investing.

1:38:53Anil Dash:I just want to really support this because you're the group that should be doing this.

1:39:02Mozilla's president:you've always kind of all the group leo that should be doing yeah but at its best and you have a lot of trust i guess is what i'm saying well thank you i mean i i hope we are worthy of it because i would say there are moments where it feels like we've lost our way or certainly

1:39:16Anil Dash:people have worried that well thunderbird for instance was abandoned for a while yeah yeah i

1:39:21Mozilla's president:mean you're tracking this well so i mean it wasn't abandoned i was one of the people who never for one second abandoned it and kept it in the family but it was that the firefox group was like yeah this Thunderbird thing, email's not going anywhere. So we held it in the foundation and then we helped it set up its own company. It's still built so much on the community. But I think I'm glad that people still trust us. I hope we're worthy of it and we keep building that. And it is really all of us are needed. Like Mozilla at its best is, you know, it's kind of boring old trope that for many people, but I always love going back to it.

1:39:59Mozilla's president:when Firefox launched, there was this two page ad in the New York Times that was the Firefox logo made up of the names of everybody who donated to buy that ad. Because like, people wanted this thing to win. And that's the energy we need to get back again, right? Is so many people are pissed off about AI. They don't trust it. They're worried, but they don't like these companies. There's so many reasons. And all of us need to band together to make something different. And And, you know, guess what? Doing that and succeeding at that, I believe, is a far more plausible and interesting thing to do than putting data centers on the moon.

1:40:39Anil Dash:We're talking to Mark Sermon. He's the president of Mozilla and has just released their Mozilla manifesto. They want us all to join the Rebel Alliance. We're really glad to help you and support you in that. I've always been a fan of Firefox. I've always been a believer. And I've always wanted Firefox to succeed. I've been a little worried. You got a little heat, too, when it was announced that we were going to add AI to Firefox. There's a lot of people who said, I don't want a browser with AI. Vivaldi even said, we're never going to put AI in our browser.

1:41:10Mozilla's president:That was very funny what Vivaldi did. Because they said, until it's good. He just said, here's our roadmap. No AI. Bye. Look, you know, we don't exist for one set of people. That's the point of Firefox. Like some people are going to want AI that comes from the big guys. Go do that. And you can actually do it through Firefox. Some people want a different version of AI. We're going to build that with them. And some people want no AI. And that is the difference of Firefox. You know, on the one end, you have Google and Apple and Microsoft. They're going to just shove their AI into their browser, into Gmail, into Office, into everything.

1:41:53Mozilla's president:and you're going to have to take what you get. And then the other end of the spectrum, we have a Vivaldi of no AI. That's actually not the real world. The real world is people are worried about that vertically integrated lock-in big player stuff. And people think this stuff is useful. Of course, lots of people are going to want to opt out of AI altogether. We're also there for that. But there's a real gap in the world of running straight into the problem of we have to build this stuff differently if we want to use it. And that's what we're going to do.

1:42:28Anil Dash:It's really clear. I mean, one of the reasons I use Firefox is really clear that with Chrome and the Chromium Engine, it's developed by one of the largest ad companies in the world. And so their incentives, you know, moving to Manifest v3, for instance, really are in making sure that the ecosystem is good for their business. And that's not Firefox's incentive.

1:42:50Mozilla's president:And that may be people aren't tracking the Manifest v3, v2 thing, but basically that goes in Chromium and makes it so ad blockers don't work anymore. And we actually left v2 compatibility in Firefox so people could still block ads. And that's the kind of classic Mozilla ability to hold tension. Yes, does 85 % of our revenue come from Google? Yes, because people use Google to search. They like it. But that's how the revenue comes.

1:43:20Anil Dash:We should say when you use the search bar, if Google's the default search, there's referral fees that go back to Mozilla.

1:43:26Mozilla's president:Or if you search in Bing or whatever. So does most of our revenue come from search advertising? Yes. Do we allow ad blockers? So are we the browser now that blocks the most ads in the world?

1:43:37Anil Dash:Yes.

1:43:38Mozilla's president:And so holding that tension is the kind of thing that Mozilla is good at.

1:43:43Anil Dash:Yeah. As long as I can use your block origin, I'm happy. In fact, when you install Firefox now, you propose Privacy Badger, a number of extensions that are very privacy forward. I think that's fantastic.

1:43:55Mozilla's president:And what we haven't figured out yet is, so we'll continue to do that. And I'm proud of that. Yeah. What's the equivalent for AI? So what is it that if I want more control, I want more privacy, what are the things that we're going to offer? Who's got the extensions? What features are we going to build? I think that's what's interesting at this moment, right? When Mozilla started, it was just basically a clone of the Netscape browser from the early 90s, the mid-90s. And Firefox was like, what else are we going to do with this Netscape code and turn it into something special? So guess what it did?

1:44:29Mozilla's president:It added pop-up blockers. That was a crazy thing at the time. We were all inundated by pop-up ads. And so I think we're in a moment where we've got to figure out not only how do we give you Privacy Badger, all those things, but what is the next privacy badger? What is the next pop-up blocker? What's going to let us engage with this new era of technology, but on terms that feel better for us? And that's a pretty cool moment of invention to be in.

1:44:58Anil Dash:You know, there's been ups and downs with Firefox. I've defended it all along, but there were moments when it was hard to defend. What's your position on progressive web apps now, PWAs? because for a while you were not supporting those uh so what's a i mean over time we're evolving to

1:45:22Mozilla's president:kind of go with it but what was the issue with progressive web apps i mean maybe i tuned out to

1:45:26Anil Dash:to that you're way more i wanted you to support it uh but in order to use progressive web apps we really apple didn't really want to support it safari had kind of very weak support uh you had to use Chrome. And I didn't want to use Chrome, but I wanted, the idea of progressive web apps, to me, seemed like a very, very good idea at the time. Now, maybe there were technical reasons. You know, that's the thing. It's complicated. And as you point out, you've kind of changed direction a little bit in that.

1:45:58Mozilla's president:And I think, you know, whenever the shift in the technology, progressive web apps is one I remember, you know, going way back, you can hardly remember this. I mean, you may be able to be like,

1:46:10Anil Dash:You can tell I can remember it. Jeff can remember.

1:46:13Mozilla's president:But maybe collectively we don't remember. You know, there's a time that all the videos in the browser were in Flash, which was this weird plugin that wasn't a kind of web standard. And then the different browsers, like who's going to put in HTML5 videos in the web, all of these things. When you get to a change like that, a progressive web apps is a thing like that. it's not a standard yet. It's like people experimenting with what can work in the different browsers. So I think the progressive web apps thing is more like that. It's like we're working out collectively as an industry, you know, what's going to happen when, do we think it's the right thing?

1:46:51Mozilla's president:So, you know, we usually, when it's the right thing, we come along over time. And more often than not, we're the vanguard. I mean, a lot of the stuff, you know, like around tracking protection, many, many other things, Firefox has been the vanguard

1:47:05Anil Dash:before the other browsers i don't know if if you get the credit for this but i have to say in the last three or four years firefox has improved immensely in speed memory usage firefox sync has gotten better and better and better it really is now the kind of the state of the art um i think in every respect people who perhaps said well you know there's still this perception that chrome is faster for instance and maybe it is marginally faster i don't know but the firefox engine has gotten better and better and better i i think if people are listening and have say have said i don't want to use firefox really ought to try it because it's so important that we have this

1:47:40Mozilla's president:choice uh yeah and you know i don't take credit for for that the firefox team does and that's a part of a they've done a good job family and they've done an amazing job yeah and it was a huge lift like we fell behind on speed for sure and a bunch of things compatibility uh and you know Google just like leaned in hard and we lost the ball a little bit. But the Firefox organization has really grabbed it back. And, you know, you have a leader, which I'm excited about. Anthony is the leader of the Firefox organization because he is a technologist. He came in and he turned up the gas on Firefox in the last year.

1:48:20Mozilla's president:He came in to be the head of Firefox. And then you have that person leading that whole company now, Mozilla Corporation. and he has a vision. He's got the team galvanized, motivated, focused to just make Firefox great.

1:48:35Anil Dash:Well, great. Well, thank you, Anthony, for me then, because - I will.

1:48:38Mozilla's president:Well, you should get him on.

1:48:39Anil Dash:Yeah, we will. We will. I'd love to, Mark. And I thank you for your leadership in all of this, especially in AI. I think what, you know, and maybe, Jeff, you got to write this book, because I think the history of the browser is really fascinating, because it was just a window into the internet. It was how you accessed the internet. it has become basically the operating system uh for you jeff for jeff yes that's all the operating system is a browser uh and and i think that it's the role of the browser in our lives is significant and it does pose significant technical challenges i understand that with drm video and uh you know all these all these kind of complicated standards or non-standards that you have to adhere to I think Mozilla has done a great job of threading its way through this complexity.

1:49:32Mozilla's president:Well, the other thing is you mix the technological sophistication and work with the ethical considerations. I was delighted. That's why I still work here. I mean, I know you said that I've been there a long time, but that's why I still work here. I mean, there's very few places you can do that. When Mozilla did its Mastodon instance, I was delighted when you did it. Sad when you left it. I understood why you left it. But the important thing to me was that you dealt with ethical issues around social as well as freedom.

1:50:02Anil Dash:I want to point out my Mastodon instance still uses Mozilla's rules, Mozilla's privacy statement, all of that stuff. I said, this is the way it should be done. These are the rules we agreed to adhere to in terms of moderation. You guys are really great.

1:50:18Mozilla's president:I mean, two things I would say about that. One is the original Mozilla manifesto. manifesto. I mean, right now, the state of Mozilla you're referring to, Leo, is just kind of us re-upping on that in the AI era. But it was never meant to be like our rule set only. And I know you mean a different rule set when you're talking about the Massillon thing. It was meant to be a call to action of like people to build technology aligned with human values. And I think that's still durable today, whatever that is, 15, 18 years later, it was written in 2007. And so, So it's not just us, it's like others with those values.

1:50:55Mozilla's president:And I think probably if there's a place where maybe we lost our way or lost our edge more, it is we only get to a better future if we're constantly working with each other and others who are trying to build technology with these values. And so the mistake for me around Mastodon or the unfortunate thing around Mozilla Social was we weren't the best organization to take that on. That's why I get why you did it. And it's not an apology. It's to say like what we actually needed to do was like work side by side with the people who are taking on social. It's why I'm involved in Free Our Feeds with the people who are taking on this part of AI, with the people who are taking on this part of chat.

1:51:36Mozilla's president:You know, people like Signal. But you also brought that ethical consideration, again, alongside freedom. Yeah, I see what you're saying. Is there a similar thing around AI where you start to, you're not, you don't, I remember having this argument many, many years ago with Tim O 'Reilly, we should all get badges that we're good bloggers. I don't think nobody's sticking badge, right? I don't think Tim would say that anymore either. So I'm not asking for a simple rule set, but what you've always done is pushed, not just the technology, but the ethical considerations. So is that part of what you want to do with AI is where I'm kind of here?

1:52:14Mozilla's president:Yes, yes. And so I wrote a paper, A bunch of us wrote a paper back in 2020 called Creating Trustworthy AI. And that's really the foundations of a lot of where we are now. We updated that in 2024 with a similarly titled paper. And the idea that how do we hold really the human values part of the manifesto? And we actually added in 2017 a second half of the Mozilla manifesto around making sure that truth and human values are a part of what we consider when we build things. How do you align that with open source, security, freedom, privacy, all of those? Right, right. And that's the vision we've had for AI that we've evolved over the last five years.

1:53:00Mozilla's president:To your point is, we need an approach to designing products, to designing technology, to designing the economics in this era of tech that fuses those human ethical factors and those kind of technical freedom and privacy and security factors together. And it is what we're trying to do. And it's where, you know, the Thunderbird people are very cautious for reasons you would imagine around getting into AI because it's a privacy oriented email client and they're not putting AI in Thunderbird, you know, in any way that they have in their plans. But that group of people, they're working on an AI assistant experimentally that is like all encrypted, basically like a signal for chatbots.

1:53:46Mozilla's president:and so you have people who are trying to infuse all of those values together and build things around them and that that's what's exciting about mozilla is you get to build stuff that that fuses those things together now i'm bummed because i have as you can see on my screen always on my mastodon linked to your your content policies on mozilla and i realized it's no longer

1:54:10Anil Dash:there so i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to find a cache of it and i'm gonna have to put it on my

1:54:14Mozilla's president:site and you know one of the other rebel alliance members or these people i've always been a fan and supporter of is the internet archive so they've got there for you i'm sure they'll have it yeah

1:54:24Anil Dash:i'm gonna steal it if you don't mind let me ask you because it is an ai show are are you going to have your own models what is what is what are you going to do around ai that that is such a great

1:54:35Mozilla's president:question um i mean our view is there's a lot happening in models whether it's the closed models or open source models. And up to now, it's been very expensive to train them. And so us, our focus has really been about what do you build on top of it, like the developer experience layer, when I talk about any LLM and those kinds of things, or what do we do in terms of being able to fine tune them, like building this Mozilla data collective and not going into the model space, because there's so many people focused there. That said, there are some gaps and there are some changes. And so first the gaps, like you have more and more capable open weight models, whether it's GPT OSS or Quen, like, you know, from big tech or from the Chinese companies.

1:55:23Mozilla's president:And those are good, but the gap is there are no fully highly performance state of the art, what we call fully open models, which means these open weights models, you can tweak them and you can use them for free. It's like they used to talk about free as a beer, but they're not free as in speech in that you can't really modify them or see how they work. And that's real open source where you could see what's the training data? How did they actually do the training? What's the training code? Is it open source? How do I tweak it? And there are people like the Allen Institute in Seattle who their Olmo models are great and are truly open but we need to see more investment in what they're building and we need to see more people building these truly open models.

1:56:06Mozilla's president:So we are looking about how do we work in partnership with some of those players where we had closed LLMs, we have open weights LLMs. We think that we can get to the point working with the right people to have competitive, truly fully open LLMs. So it is a place that we're focused. Rafi, our CTO, is looking at who do we partner with around that. But then the other thing that is changing, this is more maybe where we will have our own models. is, you know, people working on small models that are highly performant for specific use cases. So you guys can have a small model you train, which, you know, there's a company that's going to come out of stealth next week that we're, we've invested in that is really focused on this, the model exactly for this show or the model exactly for, you know, my accented version of this language in the Basque region or pick your, pick your anything.

1:57:04Mozilla's president:And I think small models being orchestrated together is more what people are going to use. And we will get into that piece of the space. So a lot that will happen there. But I don't think that's the most interesting story. I think the most interesting story is how do people adopt and use that stuff? And how does open source win at that level? Much like kind of boring, in many ways, the Linux distribution or like package management in Linux, which is the thing that lets you pick which things you're installing but once we had those all of a sudden you had a whole world that you can pull together into anything that's the part of ai we're focused on firefox.com get the best browser support it

1:57:47Anil Dash:uh thunderbird.com if you want to get the best email what is thunderbird pro this is something new i don't do you know anything about this well i think i know a little bit about it yeah

1:57:58Mozilla's president:Do you know anything about this? So it's, you know, basically for years and years and years, Thunderbird was just a desktop email client. And now it has an amazing Android version and they're working on an iOS thing, but it's still like a client. It's not a web mail. It's not a server. And so what Thunderbird Pro is, is to give you email hosting and web mail that is encrypted. And so, you know, you're going to be able to go Go and get safe, secure email, move your domain there if you want, get a Thunderbird email address if you want. And, you know, it's kind of finally moving into that space, which, you know, maybe seems like 10 years, 15 years too late, 20 years too late, who knows?

1:58:42Mozilla's president:But there's still a demand for it. And I think especially as things like Gmail get junkified with AI and, you know, the AI can be helpful, but you don't get to turn it on or off there. I think people are going to be looking for alternatives. Interesting.

1:58:57Anil Dash:Where are the servers going to be?

1:58:59Mozilla's president:That's a good question. I don't know the answer to that.

1:59:02Anil Dash:There's been a lot of interest I see in Europe and elsewhere for servers that are not in the U.S. I use FastMail, and there are a lot of people who would like a FastMail replacement that's not run servers in the U.S. Maybe I'm one of them.

1:59:14Mozilla's president:Yeah. I know that the Thunderbird folks are looking at how they spread those things out and maybe give you those choices. I also know that Firefox people are looking at AI models that are European that would just work in Europe. I like it. There are plays like that we're looking at. I don't know exactly the answer for Thunderbird Pro and where it starts out of the gate.

1:59:33Anil Dash:I've signed up on the wait list. It says$9 a month. I'd be glad to support it. Very good tools. And we really appreciate this new manifesto in the same direction. I think you're really on the right track, Mark. And so glad we could have some time with you. Very impressed with everything.

1:59:50Mozilla's president:You guys are great. And anytime you want to talk more, with St. Anthony. Ryan, who makes Thunderbird, is also a great guy to talk to. So thank you guys for doing the work you do. I have to ask you one question.

2:00:02Anil Dash:You worked at Rogers Community Television up there in Toronto. I used to do Call for Help up there in that beautiful building right there on the water, that old kind of round stone building. Was that where you were?

2:00:14Mozilla's president:Wait, so where were you in that brown stone? No, that's not where I was. I was in Parkdale. Okay. Because they had,

2:00:22Anil Dash:that was in the in the like the second floor they had a news operation that was in like 30 languages

2:00:27Mozilla's president:oh that was the cfmt i did actually work in that building but not on community television okay so that that building is right by the island airport right um and that was the the the multicultural multilingual so cool i'm sure it's gone now and i worked upstairs when there was something launched called ytv which was youth television it was like the canadian equivalent of Nickelodeon. And that was, I was probably my third, I was, I don't know, 22, my third job in television. All my first part of my career was television. And I was the guy who played the old episodes of Bonanza or Lassie or Doctor Who, you know.

2:01:09Mozilla's president:Very important job.

2:01:10Anil Dash:We produced Call for Help in that building, probably in that same studio, 2005, 2004, four, six, seven, thereabouts.

2:01:19Mozilla's president:Yeah, I was in the early years of that.

2:01:21Anil Dash:Yeah, and I'm sure that was the studio and that they had replaced that. All I remember is there was a big pole right in the middle of the studio that we had to work around with the cameras. There always is. But it was fun working in that location. I really enjoyed it.

2:01:36Mozilla's president:I loved that building.

2:01:38Anil Dash:I loved going to Toronto, man, every month. I really enjoyed it.

2:01:43Mozilla's president:We got lots of good stuff there. Come on down.

2:01:45Anil Dash:Yeah, it's up for us mark that's true yeah above the 49th parallel that's where the good stuff is well you're

2:01:52Mozilla's president:always well are you are you based in toronto i am based in toronto i actually moved a little bit outside of toronto about two hours to toronto to a little farm five acre farm not a big farm here my mom what a delight i can go have dinner with her and you're probably freezing right now i'm sure it's pretty chilly how's the fiber pardon how's the fiber i unfortunately and behold on on connectivity as much as i hate that we are too but wait there's a story on that i am unfortunately on starlink uh for now which is expensive um but um there is a kind of partnership between the municipality and a small telco rolling up fiber so they've been watching the fiber trucks you know rolling the conduit like all last summer and this year it'll

2:02:43Anil Dash:turn on that's the way to do it from your street that's part of that should be part of the manifesto is municipal internet that's really yeah another piece of public private partnership is a small

2:02:53Mozilla's president:company and the and the municipality but yeah it's like that yeah thank you so much mark i

2:02:58Anil Dash:appreciate your time all right thanks everybody great to hang with you guys stuff all right so much mark sermon president of mozilla the mozilla's organization quick go to firefox.com and download Firefox. You know what? If you've got a bad memory of it from years gone by, it's better. It's so much better. It's phenomenal. It's phenomenal. It's really, really good. It's on all my machines. Thank you, Mark. Thanks, guys. We'll continue with Intelligent Machines in just a moment. This is I Am with Paris Martineau and Jeff Jarvis. well i think given jeff's uh enfeebled state we should

2:03:43Mozilla's president:given the amount of uh walking technology within arm's reach of jeff right now

2:03:51Anil Dash:we should we should probably wrap things up because poor guy is cacio and pepe do you get do you get cacio and pepe still or do you have to eat like jello for the rest of your life i mean

2:04:01Mozilla's president:I bet they have kajru pepe jello I had a roast beef on vex sandwich today that sounds good it's very good it's like an upstate New York sandwich what's vex? I forget the folder it's a kind of bread with caraway seeds and salt my wife's taking wonderful caraway nice Nice. No one.

2:04:33Anil Dash:No wine.

2:04:34Mozilla's president:Wineless.

2:04:35Anil Dash:I think wine's good for you. Yeah, he's on painkillers. Oh, that wouldn't be good for you. No, no. Very relaxed. We're going to let you relax because we are going to wrap up. Doesn't need the wine. Yeah, that's right. It's a good point. You got the pharmaceutical grade wine. We are going to wrap things up with our picks of the week. Wow. I know. If there was some big thing you wanted to talk about that I didn't mention.

2:05:03Mozilla's president:even though you're you're getting you're ending this on my behalf um well if you continue it that's your it's on you man it is on you you were the one who said he didn't want to do a three-hour

2:05:14Anil Dash:show we're struggling towards that i know but i am going to give you that opportunity absolutely

2:05:18Mozilla's president:what do you want to talk about lines 228 to 229 or 30.

2:05:23Anil Dash:lequin and demis have something to say

2:05:28Mozilla's president:So what's interesting here is I've talked often on the show about how Jan LeCun has talked about role models versus LLMs. That's actually the thing you're showing now is kind of a joke of his. That's not what I'm talking about. Oh. But it's the battle of scale and LLMs versus role models. and I saw a debate between Adam Brown from, what's the Google company?

2:06:03Anil Dash:DeepMind.

2:06:04Mozilla's president:DeepMind, thank you, from DeepMind against Jan Lacoon. And Jan told me afterwards about how so many people are LLM-pilled and they believe that it's all about the LLMs and the scale. Well, now you have Demis Hassabis, who is now saying that ChatGPT may be a dead end and that we have to focus on world models. I think that's a really important moment in the paradigm of where we head in the next year or so, where you've got OpenAI is going to be going at scale route. And you have NVIDIA, Yann LeCun, and maybe DeepMind heading toward a world model route. It's never been exclusive. But it's really interesting to me that I think that's a potential sea change there.

2:06:49Mozilla's president:So I just wanted to get that on the record. That was it. Yeah, and I don't think we know yet.

2:06:58Anil Dash:No, we don't. And also, it makes sense. It's reasonable. But remember, we're walking through a little bit of a minefield that has to do with history. That a lot of these are debates that have been going on since the 50s. We talked about this last week. And to some degree, what you're hearing is kind of the echoes of those debates as they've gone down through the ages. Remember we had when we talked with the author of Mathematica, Stephen Wolfram, about AI. And he said, well, it's not over for symbolic AI. that was the ai that was the one that you know if there was a ai winner the one that led us into that ai winner and was replaced by transformers which is what llms are and you know what i think steven was kind of saying is well don't give up on symbolic and i think that's kind of what these guys are saying in a different way don't don't give up on other kinds of models but what what's remarkable is how far transformers have gotten us in a way that i wouldn't have expected yes i don't know the counter argument might be and i've heard this expressed too we're nothing more than llms and our brains are just prediction machines uh in fact i think it was demisa sibis who said this at davos he said it's it's hard to prove otherwise that all that we're what we're doing as we talk what i'm doing right now as i talk is not exactly what an llm does where it's well what's the next word what's the next word what's the next word what's the next word and uh we've gotten pretty far with that it may back be that we can get as far as a human mind can get now i think it's it is absolutely true also humans definitely have a model of the physical world

2:08:46Mozilla's president:this though is a philosophical discussion that's been going on since the beginning of time

2:08:51Anil Dash:this is the original question you're right benito it's the original question is what is a human

2:08:57Mozilla's president:It's an original question, and I'd argue, listen, I was trying to decide between two different things for my pick of the week, but this segues perfect into my second one, which is, I think, an unusual pairing. I think I've mentioned I've been trying to watch all the Matrix, all four Matrix movies with a friend. I watched Matrix 3, the most maligned Matrix. One, I thought it was great. But two, I think it pairs excellently with reading Claude's new constitution. And this debate, because the core premise of Matrix Revolutions, the third Matrix, and what I think is the most interesting part of it is it's an intense exploration of what is the end state if you take the idea that software programs or a large language model in this case is essentially capable of doing the sort of thought that humans are.

2:09:54Mozilla's president:It's kind of a significant part of it explores like what would it mean for a machine to feel something like love and does the idea of it feeling something it doesn't. The argument the matrix makes is that that doesn't even matter because that's simply just a word that we have just have come up with to describe like inputs and outputs. And couldn't a machine be able to do the same thing? anyway i i've been really enjoying watching all the old matrix films one because i think two and three are way better than the internet in the last 20 years has led me to believe isn't there four as well there is four as well and i saw i'm excited to see four it's been four years

2:10:38Anil Dash:five years where do you stand on the simulation hypothesis because that's the central theme of

2:10:44Mozilla's president:all of this what do you mean uh that life is a simulation yeah that we aren't that we think we're in a real world when in fact well in case of the matrix well i don't want to spoil it for anybody who hasn't seen okay no if you're worried about be having the matrix be spoiled turn off the podcast watch all four matrix movies then turn it back on they've had 20 years leo they've had 20 years you've had you've had 25 years i just remember that i saw the matrix without any i had no idea

2:11:12Anil Dash:what i was going in to see i just thought it was a canon raves movie and i came out of it with out of it with my eyes like this like oh i mean i think that's the thing about the matrix that has

2:11:24Mozilla's president:resulted in having such a disjointed reputation as a originally a trilogy and now as a as four movies a quadrangle um whatever you may say is that the first movie was literally i mean just a leap forward in terms of so many the first one was a revolution action that's why it was a revolution in cinema technically as well as ideologically it um i there is this very interesting so i'm also watching these all on blu-ray and there is this very isn't it nice by

2:11:57Anil Dash:the way i just want to say doesn't it look good on that tv it looks phenomenal on that tv and it

2:12:03Mozilla's president:looks i would i mean this is a recommendation she has i would really recommend watching it on a fancy TV on a Blu-ray disc because I mean the the first time I when I watched the first Matrix movie like a a year or a couple months ago it's not the first time I watched it but the first time in this thing I watched on streaming and I bought decided to buy Blu-rays because the sound was so off on streaming but the visuals of it are also off um but this is all to say one of the things you get when you buy movies in physical disc form is all the extras. And the Wachowskis have this, they kind of have both, both the Wachowski sisters are now faded from life and have faded from life, public life since the first one.

2:12:50Mozilla's president:But they did, instead of doing a traditional audio commentary, wrote like a little essay that goes with the second and third Matrix movies that I found quite interesting in part just because of, let me try and find the line, I took photos of it. To be honest, it being the Matrix didn't look like other stories, owing perhaps the dangers of fraternal conjugation. It did, however, look a lot like us, reflecting our own particular genealogy of interests. And while to some it may appear a hideous convoluted mistake, to us, a chop-socky film that comments in the Hegelian dialectic, while having a guy who can fly and stop bullets, is something that we are, well, pretty darn proud of.

2:13:32Anil Dash:As they should be, wow.

2:13:34Mozilla's president:and i'm just saying it's i would recommend it's a true delight to revisit the matrix movies but especially the headier more philosophical two and three in the age of ai because the wakowskis were grappling with a lot of the kind of core debates we're seeing major frontier ai companies like anthropic grapple with today but they were doing that 23 years or earlier and it's fascinating uh are you watching a blu-ray or uhd uhd yes so you have a uhd player that's the way to watch it isn't it a uhd blu-ray isn't that the full name for it they're two different things okay it's

2:14:12Anil Dash:just the medium blu-ray is just like the the disc yeah what you want is the uhd 4k on blu-ray yes

2:14:18Mozilla's president:that's what i've got a uhd you can get a blu-ray that's not oh i know but i got the uhd for and i've got the deja vu that's the one which is 99.99 on amazon i'm gonna buy it right now because of you because i have to give two three and four and i will say yeah i would maybe watching them all together will help me i will say also watching two and three together as one movie is also the move because you may not remember when it was released matrix 2 came in i think like two or three years after matrix one and then six months later matrix three came out and matrix two ends on a cliffhanger it's like basically just two and three are one big movie that in today's world would be a three hour oppenheimer-esque uh a mega movie but they couldn't do it they were split because that would have been insane um you can't just make two but it is three you can't just make two yeah that's It's true.

2:15:17Mozilla's president:You do kind of have to. And it's very interesting because I think my Matrix 1 is all about the action and the conceit and the stylistic nature of it. Matrix 2 starts off a bit muddled because they then try to pull out towards Zion, which is like the machine city outside of, or like the people city outside of the Matrix, and try to, they start to introduce all these complex philosophical notions. and part of you is being like, but I just want my big battles. And they're there. They're the back two thirds of the movie.

2:15:47Anil Dash:I don't want big battles. I'm into the Hegelian.

2:15:50Mozilla's president:The reason why I would argue for Matrix 3, honestly, I could watch a YouTube summary is because Matrix 3, so much of it is like, let's explore how these programs are now people and their whole family relationships and talk about philosophy and Hegel. And then we go to a big battle set and I'm like, no give me back my quiet philosophical musings please well i just bought all four of them and

2:16:15Anil Dash:i'm gonna watch them one after the other and then i'm gonna read infinite jest and i'll talk to you

2:16:22Mozilla's president:in about four years i was about to say my other pick was that infinite jest is turning 30 and i'm trying to decide whether or not i should miss out in this show next week i've read it i've read it i finished it once in college and i read like two-thirds of it last year it has been sitting

2:16:36Anil Dash:on my bedside table for at least 10 years. I keep meaning to read it. Yeah. Well, you have the hardcover. I have a paperback. I carry it with me on trips. I carry it with me, hoping that someday...

2:16:50Mozilla's president:Are you using a two bookmark system?

2:16:53Anil Dash:Oh.

2:16:53Mozilla's president:That's the cold thing. Because of the footnotes. You got to get a one bookmark up here and then a bookmark in the back for the footnotes.

2:17:00Anil Dash:There's a lot of subtext.

2:17:01Mozilla's president:And the footnotes are important.

2:17:03Anil Dash:You probably can't do it on an e-reader very well. and you certainly can't do it in audiobooks.

2:17:08Mozilla's president:I mean, an e-reader would be great if they were, had you just be able to skip, tap, and go to the footnotes and then tap back, but I don't believe in them. Anyway, my Infinite Jest is turning 30 and the 92nd Street Y is doing a big event to celebrate that I want to go to, but it's next Wednesday, and so I don't know if I'm going to go or not.

2:17:27Anil Dash:Are they reading the entire book? Because that's what they do I mean, they should. That would be great. For Ulysses on um bloomsday which is in june i can't remember when bloomsday is but we even have it here where they and they do it all over the world where they'll read the entire book on bloomsday because as you know ulysses takes the entire novel takes place on one day i think how many pages is ulysses it's long it's long you're glad when it's over well it takes them june 16th it takes them i think 12 hours uh to read the whole thing but almost as long as it was take to watch all four matrix

2:18:06Mozilla's president:movies well so if i really if i really cared about being a completionist my original thought was to watch all four matrix movies and the animatrix which is after the first matrix movie the wachowskis commissioned because they kind of based the matrix based on anime ghost in the machine they commissioned some of their favorite anime directors to do four like mini films exploring the other themes and backgrounds in the matrix have you seen dark city no should i yeah this is the other movie that came out in the late 90s that's kind of like the matrix that got overshadowed by the matrix is it animated or is it no i love this already because it's a photo of a man very blurry strapped to a clock you should watch that that reminds me of that other movie

2:18:52Anil Dash:you like a lot. The guy jumps off the building at the clock.

2:18:57Mozilla's president:Oh, yeah. Hudsucker Proxy. You hate that. That's fine. It's not for everyone I've since learned.

2:19:04Anil Dash:Alright, I've never seen Dark City, a neo-noir science fiction film. This sounds good. This is great. Jennifer Conley, Rufus Sewell. It's like they built the

2:19:12Mozilla's president:city to see what makes us tick. It's kind of like the Matrix without the action. Last night, one of us went off. Ooh!

2:19:19Anil Dash:Should I order this on UHD? yeah 159 bucks for the limited edition one that tells you there's something going on with dark city like there's a big cult i love that the hud sucker proxy clan is mobbing up in the just for a chat it is a great movie it's too weird for me um you can stream it on prime video so maybe i'll stream it first and then if i really like it buy the 160 uhd version that's crazy the blu-ray is

2:19:51Mozilla's president:only eight dollars i'm shocked it has a uhd version uh but only for 150 bucks which makes

2:20:00Anil Dash:no sense that must be uh aftermarket or something that's crazy i think you can get it on oh yeah it's because it's on like ebay only there's a two disc four you can get it from

2:20:14Mozilla's president:limited edition get it from aero video us for for 35 dollars oh this is the guy directed the crow

2:20:23Anil Dash:can you direct crows don't they fly where the wind goes it's murder i tell you murder jeff jarvis you poor fellow i'm gonna do i'm gonna do a quick one here.

2:20:36Mozilla's president:You're doing a pick? Didn't you already do one? No. I could do my pick line as a pick, but I won't. No. So I think this should have made more news. Paris, our child, back in the day, we had American television brands. We bought RCA, Zenith, Motorola. I'm a little too young for Philco. Leo, did you ever have a Philco?

2:21:02Anil Dash:I did not have a Philco. We went straight to Sony. We went straight to Sony. Oh, that's where I'm headed. My first color TV. Yep. That's where I'm headed.

2:21:10Mozilla's president:So we had our American brands and then Japanese manufacturing, of course, was known for cheap stuff, including cheap transistor radios. But then Sony television came and it became the gold standard, I think, of television. It became the color television you wanted to have. Everyone had that orange dot sticker at the corner of their TV. Everyone had that. yes well so this happened today which just amazed me i didn't see that more news sony's tv and audio business has now been taken over by tcl

2:21:41Anil Dash:it didn't happen today we talked about it on sunday on twit oh you did oh well i've seen news all week is what i'm saying tcl is now the largest tv manufacturer in the world the chinese manufacturer and that's really the story it was an american actually it's the 100th anniversary of television which was invented in scotland of all places so monday was the 100th anniversary of

2:22:06Mozilla's president:the first television broadcast what did they broadcast oh that's a good question oh i'm

2:22:13Anil Dash:trying to remember oh that's right you're a tv critic this should be right up your alley it's got to be someone playing the piano or something right um i think i i have a youtube video no no uh john logie baird's first tv set yes it doesn't they don't say what he broadcast

2:22:33Mozilla's president:with it but in any event google ai overview which is possibly wrong it says go ahead says that it is john logie baird's mechanical silhouette demos in london in 1925 okay a ventriloquist dummy named stooky bill here it is here's a picture of the dummy and john logie baird look i've invented television it's great come watch it i've got a dummy on the second working from his frith street laboratory baird managed to transmit the first television picture with tone gradation first using the head of a ventriloquist dummy and then moving on to a human face baird's subject was william edward tanton 20 year old office boy that's a job title you never get anymore later recalled mr baird rushed downstairs in baggy flannels a pair of carpet slippers and no socks he almost dragged me into his work room and stuck me in front of his machine i'm gonna put you on tv boy enormous electronic bulb so it's 100 years old today or monday so this is a perfect time

2:23:45Anil Dash:to talk about this and as you say it was really an american in fact philo t farnsworth kind of is celebrated as the inventor of tv he's not and there's all kinds of drama with rca involved right all that yes so far in fact i think there's a plaque to philo t farnsworth's lab in san francisco because i think that was where he just did his work uh but it was an american technology zenith philco rca uh the japanese came along stole our business sony particularly but there was improved it and it made it much better and of course it went solid state remember and then uh and then and then the koreans took a look at what sony had done to the americans and they said well wait a minute and uh along comes samsung and a little uh television company called lucky gold star which made 90 tvs you'd find in the back of the drug store uh lucky gold star changed their name to lg and i think that's what you have is an lg paris and uh and well it stands for lucky gold star well now they say life is good no no no no that's huge knowledge for this

2:24:56Mozilla's president:yeah yeah hey come see me i gotta look at that as a fun fact one thousand times but then what happened

2:25:03Anil Dash:in the last decade is the chinese saw how the koreans stole it from the japanese and the chinese undercut the koreans with hisense and tcl and now today especially i think thanks to this sony deal uh because tcl is taking all of sony's television 51 yep uh all of the bravias are now going to be made by TCL. They are officially the largest TV manufacturer in the world by far. So does TCL stand for anything fun? Oh, that's, that's a good question. What does TCL stand for? Let's ask chat GPT. It stands for the tool command language. No, wrong. Yeah, I don't know. It's, it's originally abbreviation for the creative life according to oh that's not bad yeah it's uh it's uh in guangdong province wow and so the the sorry they were in 2010 they were the world's 25th largest consumer electronics producer by this year they are number one the lucky of lucky gold star originated from

2:26:17Mozilla's president:the lucky chemical industrial corporation which managed manufactured cosmetics wow now it is the largest korean chemical company and it was the ninth largest chemical company in the world by sales in 2021 there you go it's three main business areas are petrochemicals advanced materials and life sciences and advanced materials sounds like the sort of vague name for something that people

2:26:43Anil Dash:would use in war advanced materials blow you up good originally tcl was called ttk they made audio cassettes but tdk sued them saying you can't call yourself ttk so they changed their name to tcl taking the initials from telecom corporation limited but now again it's a little bit of a retronym they say no that's the creative life anyway yeah that's a good story hello gizmo speaking of gizmo her eyes are very wide she says I don't want to see those guys

2:27:17Mozilla's president:she's like who are you

2:27:19Anil Dash:where's my tuna fish

2:27:23Mozilla's president:she wants to show as always

2:27:27Anil Dash:we will leave you with this story of the original television set here we go

2:27:35Mozilla's president:this is him in the earliest known photograph of a television that's great

2:27:40Anil Dash:it's the matrix the earliest known television oh it's great it's a puppet i've transmitted a puppet's face across the world well no it's gonna be stuck in there forever it's stuck forever in my mind uh ladies and gentlemen this concludes this thrilling edition of intelligent machines we wanted to make it a two-hour show but because of you jeff it's two and a half hours sorry Jeff can now rest his weary bones. Will you be back next week, you think?

2:28:15Mozilla's president:Yeah, yeah. I'm going anywhere now. I've had to cancel. I should be in Austin right now. I canceled that.

2:28:20Anil Dash:Oh, I'm so sorry. That's fine. Well, I'm so glad you could be here. I am too. Without you. So thank you, Jeff. Feel better. Take care of the coccyx. Coccyx.

2:28:32Mozilla's president:Hey.

2:28:32Anil Dash:My L3. Your L3, which I think is connected to the coccyx.

2:28:37Mozilla's president:I think it stands for Lucky Industrial Chemical Companies 3. Paris, I have one departing request. Can we hear how right we are, please?

2:28:55Mozilla's president:I couldn't agree with you more completely.

2:28:59Anil Dash:Thank you. I love it. I needed that. Can we, let's feed that to QN and get a digitized version of the Yes Man. I couldn't agree with you more completely. The funniest thing is I can see Paris as a six-year-old wandering around the house saying, I couldn't agree with you more completely. When you're right, you're right. When you're right, you're right, Dad. Oh, yeah, I'm behind you all the way.

2:29:28Anil Dash:Thank you for joining us on Intelligent Machines. We do this show every Wednesday at 1400 Pacific time. That's 1700 East Coast time. That's 2200 UTC. You can watch us live, twitch, x.com, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kik. Or, of course, if you're a club member, thank you, club members in the Club Twit Discord. On-demand versions of the show available at your favorite podcast client or on our website, twit.tv slash IAM, or on YouTube, audio or video. Please subscribe. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to leave the final word to the yes man.

2:30:06Mozilla's president:I'm sure whatever you're thinking is correct.

2:30:09Anil Dash:Bye-bye. Hey, everybody. It's Leo Laporte. It's the last week to take our annual survey. This is so important for us to get to know you better. We thank everybody who's already taken the survey. And if you're one of the few who has not, you have a few days left. Visit our website, twit.tv slash survey26 and fill it out before January 31st. Thank you so much. We appreciate it.