As chair of the Mozilla Foundation and CEO of Mozilla Corporation, Mitchell Baker monitors the state of the Internet. So how are things going these days? As she says: “Mixed!” »
In a world where “engagement drives revenue and outrage drives engagement,” she says, the Internet proves questionable for our health, our happiness and the maintenance of democracy. “The question is what to do about it.”
“Sam Altman described himself as being in the middle, but there are a lot of people who have left and feel that the middle is too far down the line”
Baker reflects on the lessons she learned as an intellectual property attorney for Netscape and a pioneer in building the Mozilla community. Although Netscape Navigator was the dominant browser in the early days of the Internet in the 1990s, its market share fell when Microsoft bundled rival Internet Explorer into Windows. To survive, the team created what eventually became a nonprofit Mozilla Foundation to make its technology open source, which ultimately led to the creation of Firefox, along with other applications, code, and tools.
Last year he adapted this model for creating a startup called Mozilla.aiinvesting $30 million to help create an independent open source AI ecosystem that would be inclusive and ethical in its approach.
According to Baker, GenAI technology is too important to be left to the whims of free market capitalism. She knows that tech titans don’t have a strong track record of prioritizing diversity and ethics. “The question arises as to where you think the middle of the road is,” says Baker. “Sam Altman (of OpenAI) described himself as being in the middle, but many people have left, feeling that the middle is too far away.”
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