Can mozilla just stop doing whatever they are doing?
I personally do not use firefox (i use qutebrowser), but if it were not for some other things, firefox (or librewolf) would be my favorite browser. This does not directly affect me but this still seems so dumb.
for more context as to why this is not that good of an idea as it may seem - please look at curl project and barrage of false security reports made. and curl is a cli project which just handles many protocols, and does not practically do any processing. firefox and any modern browser is basically a operating system and even a hardware (in forms of wasm allowing you to run arbitrary assembly written in systems programming language).
If firefox pays for it, they would loose lots of money, and if anthropicdoes it for free, they get clout (for supporting open projects), and without doing something that productive, they just put more strain on firefox devs to handle with false positive reports.
I am not a time traveller, so can not tell how this will go, but it does not seem that good
please look at curl project and barrage of false security reports made. it got so bad because they do a paid bug bounty, and people would ask some llm to find bugs, llms would conjure something out of thin air, and people will post that. mozilla will now have to handle this junk.
Curl is getting a slew of amatuer programmers throwing non-tuned AI at the project and just saying "go find problems" then throwing it as pull requests at curl when the pull creators have no ability to understand what the AI found or the code it generated. Curl never asked for it, and they aren't self identifying as AI generated.
In contrast, Mozilla is actively working with Anthropic on this, which implies at least some amount of coordination and intent with this. That would mean professionals from Anthropic and Mozilla fine tuning these AIs to reduce false positives. They will also be clearly labeled as AI generated. If it results in needless busywork, they're free to cut the agreement at any time.
I'm not a particular fan of this either, and I think that there's plenty of ground to cover with less resource intensive pattern matching bug and error detection schemes that should be focused on first, but this is absolutely not the same situation that happened to curl.
i mostly agree with you, but i just do not trust closed ai labs. sorry. and yes most western ai labs are closed (meta and google used to release open stuff, even microsoft, but they do not do it anymore). if it were some open lab, mozilla could set up their own inference with specialised tiny - mid scale models. with closed labs, i do not expect them to give them access to models to run.