Speaker 1: I want to get to our conversations from the c
Speaker 1: suite continuing on this Monday, and something that caught our
Speaker 1: attention was from our Bloomberg law team, and they wrote
Speaker 1: about open ai and its most recent update to its
Speaker 1: usage policies for Chatchipt that provides kind of a window
Speaker 1: into the company's efforts to insulate itself from potential liability
Speaker 1: for handing out legal advice to its users. Tim the
Speaker 1: company's update, they teaked policies about how chatchipt and other
Speaker 1: products can be used to provide legal and medical device
Speaker 1: and although some lawyers prematurely and inaccurately celebrate the changes
Speaker 1: as an outright ban on giving legal advice, the update
Speaker 1: was more a change in wording. Chatchipt still produces legal advice,
Speaker 1: including drafting contracts if asked to do so.
Speaker 2: Okay, so a brave new world. Don't take legal advice
Speaker 2: from us. Now choose whether or not you want to
Speaker 2: take it from a large language model. Here's what Laura
Speaker 2: Chambers has to say about this and sort of everything
Speaker 2: that is this layer of technology that's kind of underlying
Speaker 2: everything in our ecosystem right now. She's CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
Speaker 2: She joins us from San Francisco. Mozilla's the global nonprofit
Speaker 2: dedicated to ensuring the Internet remains open, inclusive, and equitable.
Speaker 2: And you might know the company from its Firefox web browser,
Speaker 2: And that's really where I want to start and sort
Speaker 2: of understanding this layer of technology that we're talking about
Speaker 2: so much that so many of us are using. And
Speaker 2: I wonder how you look at it as a way
Speaker 2: that it's part of the ecosystem. Now, Laura, is this
Speaker 2: like is it a web browser? Is it like internet
Speaker 2: access was in the nineteen nineties. Are there going to
Speaker 2: be no such thing as, like, you know, AI companies
Speaker 2: because everything is going to be an AI company? How
Speaker 2: should we be thinking about it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a moment of tremendous change. One of the
Speaker 3: big shifts we're seeing is a really renewed interest in
Speaker 3: browsers as a category. Perplexity just launched their Comet browser.
Speaker 3: Open Ai just launched their Atlas browser, and it makes sense.
Speaker 3: The browser has been around for decades and it's a
Speaker 3: product we use all the time, but we don't think
Speaker 3: about it very often, and it's not surprising that AI
Speaker 3: companies are getting into this space. The browser has incredible
Speaker 3: access into credentials, your tabs, where you're browsing, how you're
Speaker 3: spending your time, and as you know, AI companies are
Speaker 3: very hungry for that information. So it is it is
Speaker 3: sort of a moment of resurgence for the browser right now.
Speaker 2: Is the browser the gateway to all of this or
Speaker 2: is it not? Because we're using apps like Claude or
Speaker 2: chat GPT.
Speaker 3: What we're finding is that the folks that created those
Speaker 3: apps are feeling that the interface is a little clunky
Speaker 3: right now. That you might be in a browser and
Speaker 3: then you have to go to another tab and back
Speaker 3: and forth a little bit. And so I think that
Speaker 3: there will be a role to play for apps. But
Speaker 3: what we're certainly seeing from open ai and others is
Speaker 3: that they're really interested in getting into the browser space.
Speaker 3: But I think the browser is changing. The browser has
Speaker 3: traditionally been a container. You know, you have a URL
Speaker 3: and a search bar, you have some tabs, and the
Speaker 3: browser renders content on the web for you. The shift
Speaker 3: that we're expecting to see is that the browser will
Speaker 3: become more of an agent to actually do work on
Speaker 3: your behalf in that browser interface. But with that shift
Speaker 3: becomes a big shift in power of data as well.
Speaker 3: You know, the AIS now have more information about your credentials,
Speaker 3: where you're spending your time, while you're spending your money,
Speaker 3: and we know that people are worried about that. Sixty
Speaker 3: percent of people in the US are really worried about
Speaker 3: privacy with AI, and the other forty percent probably should
Speaker 3: be as well. And so I think to be successful
Speaker 3: in this space, people are going to have to go
Speaker 3: back to those values that Mozilla and Firefox are really
Speaker 3: built on, which is around privacy and choice and control
Speaker 3: over your experience and your data.
Speaker 1: Do you feel like it's it's difficult to compete against
Speaker 1: the behemoths that are out there.
Speaker 3: It's always challenging to be a smaller company. The big
Speaker 3: tech companies consolidate a lot of power, They lock you in,
Speaker 3: they have vertical integration. But it's something that is incredibly
Speaker 3: important to do. The Internet, if left to its own
Speaker 3: devices would always trend to be inclosed, to being expensive,
Speaker 3: and to just have a few players. And that's why
Speaker 3: it's important to have open source solutions. It's important for
Speaker 3: alternatives for Firefox like Firefox to be there. You know,
Speaker 3: we have our own browser engine called Gecko. There are
Speaker 3: only three browser engines left microsoften Opera, everyone else moved
Speaker 3: over to Chromium. It's expensive to run a browser engine.
Speaker 3: I know why they did it, but we think it's
Speaker 3: incredibly important to invest in options like that because very quickly,
Speaker 3: otherwise you end up in a very very sort of
Speaker 3: monopolistic world, which is bad for the health of the
Speaker 3: Internet and it's bad for the users of the Internet.
Speaker 2: So is are you creating a web browser? Are you
Speaker 2: changing Firefox in order to be an AI first browser
Speaker 2: so it can compete with whatever browser OpenAI ultimately has
Speaker 2: whatever browser perplexity ultimately offers in the way Chrome change
Speaker 2: is from Alphabet's Google.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Firefox. We always adapt to where users are going
Speaker 3: and what they need. And not all of users want AI.
Speaker 3: About twelve percent of users in the US actually don't
Speaker 3: want AI, so they'll always be an experience for them.
Speaker 3: But we are actually we just launched smart Windows. We
Speaker 3: have sign ups for those available right now, which will
Speaker 3: be our version of AI. But it's going to be
Speaker 3: centered on privacy, on trust, and on transparency, So it
Speaker 3: will be you'll be able to have a great eye
Speaker 3: experience in the five Fox browser, but it's going to
Speaker 3: be one that is really oriented around what users really
Speaker 3: need and how we can do a great job of
Speaker 3: protecting the data.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I am curious too about you know, you're thinking
Speaker 1: about who actually owns the data. We know the data
Speaker 1: is what's going to make AI and ll m's really powerful.
Speaker 1: So I'm just thinking about you know, is some of
Speaker 1: your concerns too about certain companies again going back to
Speaker 1: the big guys, the big players, that they will have
Speaker 1: the access to most data out there as more and
Speaker 1: more folks use their search within their their AI chat engines, if.
Speaker 3: You will, Yeah, I think the users should be really
Speaker 3: thoughtful about the data. Now. The good news about data
Speaker 3: is it can create great experiences, right, You've seamless, faster experiences.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of good things that data can can do.
Speaker 3: But as you give away more and more data, you're
Speaker 3: actually giving away control. And so the big tech companies
Speaker 3: control what you see, you know, where you spend your time,
Speaker 3: how you spend your money, by sort of the algorithms
Speaker 3: of what they decide to show you. And so even
Speaker 3: though on the Internet it feels like you have a
Speaker 3: lot of choice, actually that choice has already been pre
Speaker 3: narrowed and it's pre narrowed by the data that's been
Speaker 3: collected for you. So I think it's incredibly important for
Speaker 3: users to think about who's got my data, how is
Speaker 3: it shaping what I'm seeing, what I'm buying, how I'm
Speaker 3: spending my time, how I'm spending my money, and to
Speaker 3: not sort of give that data away without really thinking
Speaker 3: it through, and to make choices that help to preserve privacy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, certainly lots of issues. We're kind of finding our
Speaker 1: way through all of this. Really good to get your perspective.
Speaker 1: Laura Chambers. She's chief executive officer of Mozilla, joining us
Speaker 1: from San Francisco