Mozilla has launched a new ‘Pioneers’ program that’s looking to pay people to “work with our New Products leaders to build tools and products for the next version of the web” for a short amount of time. The idea seems to be to lean into a shift in direction that the company’s been talking about for quite some time, towards a more open but more AI-centric web.

Well, actually, I’ll let Mozilla’s New Products SVP, Peter Rojas, tell you: “Our mission at Mozilla is to ensure the internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all.” Selected Pioneers will work on new products that help move towards this, as the program is for “a supporter of Mozilla and its mission as the end goal is to build with us full time.”

In addition to gelling with its controversial decision to have Firefox “evolve into a modern AI browser”, this also aligns with the company’s recent announcement of its “open-source AI strategy.” Closed AI systems, Mozilla’s CTO Raffi Krikorian says, are currently winning: “I understand the appeal firsthand, because I’ve made the same choice myself on late-night side projects when I just wanted the fastest path from an idea in my head to something I could actually play with.

“What we’re dealing with isn’t a values problem where developers are choosing convenience over principle. It’s a developer experience problem. And developer experience problems can be solved.”

The solution, according to Mozilla, is to tackle the problem by improving developer experience so they can “build the open ecosystem themselves”, giving people and communities who create data “a say in how it’s used and a share in the value it creates”, moving towards edge rather than centralised AI models, and trying to tackle the compute “choke point”.

It’s the former two that the company is working on right away, though, and to this end, in addition to some more general and vague directives, the company currently has a couple of concrete programs.

The first, any-suite is a “unified open-source stack that simplifies building and testing modern AI agents and apps”, which fits right into what Mozilla seems to be going for, vying for its own open-source stack to compete with the current dominant proprietary ones. Presumably, some of the Pioneers that Mozilla is looking for will be ones that work towards tools that slot into the any-suite or at least complement it.

The second relevant program is the Mozilla Data Collective, which is a collection of AI training datasets “built by and for the community in a transparent and ethical way … A marketplace for data that is properly licensed, clearly sourced, and aligned with the values of the communities it comes from.”

This all rings a lot better to my ears than “AI browser” does, although I suppose this is all apart from Firefox, concerning new products. That might mean less of a problem of funding, which Mozilla has long faced with Firefox.

Almost all of Firefox’s funding comes from its partnership with Google, which raises questions about just how free Mozilla is to make meaningful changes to the browser. That might not be the case here, though, with new products and a whole AI stack.

I suppose there’s an element of techno-deterministic ‘if it’s happening, it might as well happen ethically’ reasoning slipping through the cracks in my thinking here, too, though. Who says the next version of the web has to be AI-centric?

Still, it is a positive step to move towards open-source software and more ethical data scraping and use. If it follows through, Mozilla will certainly be in good company. The EU has recently started pushing towards open-sourcing Europe’s software, and I’m sure Wikipedia will be happy with Mozilla’s focus on transparent and ethical datasets, given its recent focus on pushing for proper data and content attribution.