Mozilla releasing a fluffy press release as usual while others are releasing product.
They definitely have fewer resources than OpenAI, and they do not produce SOTA research (their publications have plummeted to 1/year anyway[2]). So the only way for them to make progress is to seek government grants or make challenges like these.
This challenge is unlikely to be profitable for the winning team: the expected value of winnings are likely around $1K when taking into account the probability that another team gets a better rank, but ML research projects are often more expensive (recently, Alpaca spent upwards of $600 on computation alone; and of course pretraining large models is much more expensive). So the main gain will be publicity.
[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/deepspeech
Mozilla hasn't kept up on their end at all. Year after year of malinvestment. Rust was the one remaining great thing about them, and they axed it.
But now it appears Google isn't keeping up and the web itself might get leapfrogged / replaced by AI tools anyway. The need to publish will change. Consumption will change.
In any case, Mozilla doesn't have the DNA to be a part of it. They let a lot of their AI folks go and instead built VR apps. They're a ghost of wrong decisions past.
How is rust supposed to help?
The free market isn’t interested in much that Mozilla does or could offer. Hopefully that changes but when it does it might not be Mozilla that’s around to heed the call.
One revenue stream down, the business model itself potentially getting automated away.
This movement is likely to be a huge boon for Apple as they can finally have their walled garden powered by AI. Apple can now worry less about the Internet encroaching it's users and app developers.
1. Browse the internet with places like HN & Youtube 2. Use apps in the browser for work (Miro, Slack, Klaviyo, etc) 3. Ask search engines a question to find an answer
Where does AI replace these? If it's #3 I can tell you that's not for me. I don't want an answer scraped from the internet from an amalgamated source. When I use a search engine I'm able to see what looks fishy and what doesn't.
What am I missing out on?
How would it work on a site like this?
Imagine though, you visited reddit or yahoo or anandtech or any other site filled with trash and it looked like HN. (Believe it or not there is a good site inside reddit if you took away the "install the app" crap, the image memes, the dark pattern designs that blend ads with the content, etc.) Imagine the first 50 spam search results on Google were gone and you just got content.
What if you followed a link to the New York Times or Wired magazine and it looked like archive.today?
People find it about as hard to imagine as the world that John Lennon asked you to imagine but "it's easy if you try".
I think of the line from a David Byrne song... "Say something once, why say it again?" My motto is "see something once, why see it again?" If I had a complaint about HN it is that a news article is going to get posted once but people who are slow on the draw will still be posting other articles about the same news item for the next six month. What if all the "me too" junk was gone? Why do I have to keep scanning ebay or craiglist and ignore the listings I've seen already? Why can't I get notified when a Sony MDS-NT1 is available? Why can't I just get notified when something I want is available at a good price?
There are numerous technical reasons why it hasn't happened (search ranking algorithms not being calibrated) but people are so used to the advertising corrupted web that a true user-centric web is almost unimaginable.