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