JohnPDickerson

Author here. The reason I joined the Mozilla ecosystem, and the reason I want to help Mozilla's mission succeed in the era of AI, is identical to the reason I supported Mozilla in my teens and college years during the early browser wars. Then, we had MSFT coming in to create a single point of failure (and control) for your access to the Internet via IE - Firefox combatted that. We're in the same situation now, with your access to the Internet - commerce, social networking, information - going through a walled garden of Gemini or OAI or Ant or Perplexity.

Mozilla is nowhere near large enough to solve this problem on its own, but: (i) Mozilla AI, which I'm leading, is pushing to solve this at the infra and maybe platform layer by providing developers the ability to choose to use their own AI tooling and (ii) Mozilla writ large is a big enough machine that it can create a community and alliance across dozens or hundreds of players to create a viable alternative to a bleaker, non-open Internet. That's my hope!

Common question, thanks for asking! We’re a public benefit corporation spun out from, and primarily owned by, the Mozilla Foundation. We're focused on democratizing access to AI tech, on enabling non-AI experts to benefit from and control their own AI tools, and on empowering the open source AI ecosystem. We're a small team relative to the "main" Mozilla, which lets us experiment a bit more easily.

We do run into this branding question frequently, and will add some clarity to the website.

Good feedback. Some of this is intentional - as an independent and growing ~20-person company, we're able to operate more quickly than the larger Mozilla organizations, and we're purposefully distancing ourselves from the associated bureaucracy that comes with any large organization. We are very much in line with the Mozilla ethos around personal ownership, privacy, control, and agency. We're figuring out how to best push on those principles in the world of AI, and appreciate feedback and contributions from the community.

Common question, thanks for asking! We’re a public benefit corporation focused on democratizing access to AI tech, on enabling non-AI experts to benefit from and control their own AI tools, and on empowering the open source AI ecosystem. Our majority shareholder is the Mozilla Foundation - the other shareholders being our employees, soon :). As access to knowledge and people shifts due to AI, we’re working to make sure people retain choice, ownership, privacy, and dignity.

We're very small compared to the Mozilla mothership, but moving quickly to support open source AI in any way we can.

Oh, you're right! Good catch, I agree that the numbers are accurately reflected as you had originally written them. Thanks again for compiling all this information, really helpful service to the broad community.

Jeff, thanks so much for putting that stipend information together; I'm sure your list has started discussions amongst students and amongst faculty at many institutions. The variance in stipends was eye-opening to me, and clearly they all need to go up.

The posted numbers for my home institution, the University of Maryland, are a bit off; current offers are $25k for 9-month and up to $36k for 12-month, if funded on an RA over the summer. That RA summer funding is not guaranteed. Again, clearly, this needs to go up.