Cheryl & Maxine
Three, two, one. Hey, I'm Cheryl. I'm Maxine. This is First Cheque, part of Day One, the network dedicated to founders, operators, and investors. If you want to be a better early stage investor, this is the show for you. So, in short, if you don't want to suck at investing, listen up.

Cheryl
When I first started this podcast with Maxine, which, I'll admit, wasn't exactly the most planned thing in the world, but if you'd asked me if we were going to get the CEO of Mozilla on our show, I would have said, no, that's probably not happening.

Maxine
Totally. Oh my gosh. When I was looking at Laura's CV for this, it's honestly a masterclass in working at Mozilla.

Maxine
Like, the best talent magnets of the era, just time and time again, right? Like PayPal, eBay, Airbnb, it's amazing.

Cheryl
She is basically the tech mafia.

Maxine
She is. She's like a one-woman tech mafia, and when I spoke to Anne Marie Coe about her, Anne Marie actually mentioned that she was the most effective executive she's ever met.

Maxine
Honestly? If that's true. If someone, especially Anne, referred to me as the most effective executive they'd ever met, I'd just go ahead and die and go straight to heaven.

Cheryl
Mission accomplished. Life, life is nailed. You're good to go. Yeah. Effective is such a great compliment. I love that.

Maxine
Yeah.

Maxine
I actually don't know that everyone outside of the tech ecosystem would be like, That's a compliment, but in our world, it's the best. It's honestly the best.

Cheryl
How is that not a compliment? In what world? Oh, well, I live in a tech bubble, so fair enough. I can't, I have no concept of why that would not be a compliment, but I'm so excited to get into her with open AI stuff and open source stuff and AI open, all of the opens and all of the AIs.

Maxine
I can't wait. Yeah. I feel like she is one of the more incredibly placed people to talk about open source, the internet, the change we're seeing in the openness of information and how stuff is discovered. So I can't wait to get into it with her.

Cheryl
So before we jump into that, I thought it might be helpful if I asked Chat GPT to explain to me.

Cheryl
I'm just going to run with it from now, but also Adam, our producer, and I hope all of everyone listening to this intro really appreciates it. But our producer actually sent me the clip of me mispronouncing it like several times. So I now have that on record into eternity. If you text me nicely, I might share it with you.

Cheryl
However, I did ask the AI overlords to give me an explain like I'm five version of what is open source. So here it is for you. Everyone open source is like sharing your toys with everyone. Imagine you build a really cool Lego castle. And instead of keeping the instructions a secret, you write them down and let anyone use them.

Cheryl
People can build their own castle. They could make changes to it. Or just use parts of it to make something new. In the tech world, open source means the instructions called source code for software are shared for free with everyone. Anyone can look at it, use it, fix it, or make it better. It's like teamwork for making cool stuff.

Cheryl & Maxine
Oh,

Maxine
I love that. Well, let's get into it with her. I can't wait to hear what she thinks.

Cheryl
Let's do

Maxine
it.

Maxine
I'm so excited to dive into this. Laura, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Laura
Oh, it's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Maxine
So same question we ask everyone at the outset. Um, what was the first thing you ever invested in?

Laura
It's a bit of a random one. When I was probably around 10 or 11, I bought a very small sailing boat for $450, which I raced and I paid it back, um, with my paper round money.

Laura
I made like 20 bucks a week, so it took quite a while. And yeah, so I bought a boat when I was 12 and paid it off for a while. And then I bought a bigger boat when I got bigger, uh, which was about $1,200 and I paid that off with paper rounds and pocket money. Um, and then, so by the time I was done with high school, I'd actually saved about $1,500, which is quite a lot of money, um, which I was able to put a bit later to, um, Not a big boat.

Laura
No, that's the logical conclusion to the story. Um, but no, I had a break from boats for a little while and went traveling, but I was, I think that was a pretty good life lesson and I was, uh, you know, crossing off every week, 20 bucks and adding up what I had left to pay off, but it was, it was fun and it kind of compounded over time.

Laura
So I had a lot of money saved up by the time I was a teenager.

Cheryl
I love that. But also follow up question, who lends to a 12-year-old? My parents.

Laura
Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. There wasn't much of a banking infrastructure for that particular type of loan, um, but they, I don't know if they trusted me, but I felt like they could take the money out of my bank account if they needed to.

Laura
So there was some, There was some security there.

Maxine
Right. There's a double the return on that as well. You get entertained, you're happy. And then plus ideally the asset retained some of its value.

Laura
It did pretty well. Yeah. The boats, I mean, the second boat actually got, uh, totaled. So I've got the insurance money.

Laura
Oh yeah. So that also was a good lesson in having insurance on your property. So I learned a lot, uh, through that whole set of things when I was a kid. Lots of financial lessons right there. I'm loving it.

Maxine
I love it. I love it. That's so good. So the thing I am so excited to get into today, I feel like open source is something that we hear a lot about in the tech ecosystem, hot

Cheryl
topic,

Maxine
such a hot topic, so

Cheryl
hot right now.

Laura
Again, it was for a while and then it wasn't so hot and it's like, it's hot again, open source is back. I love it.

Maxine
Right. It's back. It's definitely back in, in black. So I'd love, um, maybe as a starting point, uh, Obviously, as the CEO of Mozilla, Mozilla being at the beating heart of the open source ecosystem, can you give us a bit of a one on one on what open source is, um, and kind of how listeners should think about it?

Laura
Yeah, open source is obviously a way of building and distributing technology, but it really started as a movement, um, back in the nineties, um, in the early days of the internet, um, and it was a movement to try and make sure that software was accessible to all. Okay. And that it was transparent and that it sort of built on collaboration, um, and it was free from restrictions.

Laura
And there was a small group of people that got together and, and really started to define what open source meant and to start to build commitment and organization around it. And Mozilla was hugely influential in, in that time. I think particularly Firefox was a really breakthrough product, right? Like that was the first time that for a lot of people that they saw an open source alternative.

Laura
Grow be a fantastic product, um, scaled tremendously in the open source community played an extraordinary role in all of that. And the sort of fun backstory about why Mozilla and Firefox evolved was that in 97, Microsoft brought out internet Explorer and they distributed it with the windows OS. So if you've got a windows OS, you got, um, Microsoft.

Laura
And as you can imagine, they got pretty big market share. Uh, they launched in 97 and by 1999, they had 99 percent market share. Whoa. Whoa.

Cheryl
I think I've seen one of those like charts where it goes through the years and shows the market share and how like it was like a hundred percent IE and then it just like surely shrank, shrank, shrank, shrank, shrank, and then like others take over.

Laura
It, no, it really, it really was. And so what happened was Netscape was trying to compete with IE with Internet Explorer, and they're like, we just, we don't have that many engineers. So what they decided to do was to open source it. And they created Mozilla as a not-for-profit. And then in 2002, um, Firefox was launched.

Laura
It was an incredible product, um, incredibly fast. Really great, completely open source, a huge community of engineers co-building it. Um, and by 2010, Microsoft was down to about 50 percent market share. Um, and it created space for others to come into the space. So it was a really cool marquee moment, I think, in demonstrating that this idea of open source software, um, could, could be foundational.

Laura
And it's, you know, obviously that's not the only open source technology. Um, Facebook was built on Linux, right? And so a lot of the technologies that we see today were built on open source. A recent Harvard study actually said that there's been 8 trillion of economic opportunity that's been built off open source software.

Laura
So it is, it's really foundational. It was a huge movement at the start. It's been foundational to the internet. Um, and it continues to be really big. Big piece of how to develop and give great equity and access and transparency to software.

Maxine
That's so interesting. I had no idea that Facebook was built on Linux.

Maxine
On

Laura
Linux. Yeah, exactly.

Maxine
That kind of adds an additional lens of also the fact I didn't realise Netscape was behind Firefox either. Right. It adds an additional kind of lens to what we're seeing happen in the LLM ecosystem at the moment, which we're going to come to in a little moment. But wow, that's so fascinating.

Maxine
And like. 8 trillion of economic benefit. That's a huge number. Yeah.

Laura
Well, it, I mean, it makes sense because with open source software, it's so accessible. And so every tiny little software developer, researchers, academics, like so many people can access it and use it. It's real and it's distributed. Um, and so it, it actually accelerates innovation.

Laura
It's, so I was hearing a really good analogy the other day that. Closed software is kind of like big pharma, right? You've got these big pharmaceutical companies and they're doing that R and D behind walls and they're spending a lot of money on it and they kind of get to extract all the rents from it.

Laura
But imagine if that science was opened, imagine how much faster we would move as a society. For like saving lives, right? Um, so having things open and having more people work on that and collaborate on them can be massive for, for creating economic opportunity and transforming lives that it's, it's not always the case.

Laura
There's a lot of forces that move towards things being closed. It takes a lot of work, uh, to create really viable open alternatives.

Maxine
Yeah, absolutely. And so, I mean, I think a big part of what, um, I'm interested in your thoughts on is the internet as a concept, right? I think it's really interesting when you talk about the kind of historical arc of open source so far, like it actually came from a principled movement and it was actually kind of the underdog and, We all love an underdog in Australia.

Maxine
Uh, the underdog in that situation, right, of actually wanting to kind of push against some of these more established kind of bigger players, ultimately being a key catalyst in changing the market dynamics for Internet, uh, browsers, which obviously is a huge portal into the internet overall. Most users would never be using the internet without IE or Firefox or similar.

Maxine
And so when you think about the internet today, how healthy do you think it currently is?

Laura
Yeah, I'd say it's shaky right now. The internet always trends towards closed, right? And it does that because there's this sort of law of large numbers. If you're a big tech company, you have a lot of engineers and a lot of money, and you can deploy it towards new technology.

Laura
And you, it's better for you as a company to keep it closed, right? Because then you get to own it all and, and others don't access it and you can get, make the most money out of it. Um, and so that was sort of the first wave of the internet that we were able to address. And, you know, there was so much good infrastructure built on, on the internet.

Laura
And this is ongoing work around standards, interoperability, all that type of stuff. That is constant work. We spend a ton of time working with others on ensuring that. The internet stays open. Um, but you know, again, with AI, exactly the same thing's happening. You have a few, uh, massive companies with massive amounts of money.

Laura
Uh, and you know, particularly in the internet, the, the amount of capital is such a differentiator because of the cost of compute, right? Like no one else can really compete, uh, with that. And so again, we're turning to closed. And if you think of the world where Gen AI is very closed, that's pretty challenging.

Laura
Like, that's, that's not a great world because you're not going to have transparency. You're not going to have equitable access. Um, you're not going to have other people fair competition. Um, and so the fight is on again, uh, to ensure that Gen AI can be open and accessible and transparent, um, and balanced and unbiased and fair and all that type of stuff.

Laura
And so the good news is it's not just. Mozilla this time around, and a few folks, there's a huge movement of people that are really trying to build and invest in open for gen AI. Um, and we're engaging with them in so many different ways, you know, and the corporation that I run Mozilla corporation, we're building stuff and we're collaborating with the ecosystem on it.

Laura
Um, we just ran a fantastic builders day where we've been sponsoring 14 companies. Um, that are doing work on open AI and particularly local AI as well. And we've been sponsoring them and they just demoed, I think, a week or two ago through the foundation. We're doing a lot of work with regulators and so forth, and we've got a ventures arm as well.

Laura
That is building out, um, an investment portfolio and really some fantastic. Companies, little companies that are building out some great outcomes. And we have our own AI sort of R and D as well. So we're tackling this pretty multidimensionally. That's one of the things that's pretty unique about Mozilla, which is that we have a foundation and we have a corporation and we have a venture capitalist, we have AI, R and D.

Laura
Um, and it's all under a nonprofit structure, right? It's the coolest CEO job ever, because I'm not beholden to. Shareholder returns literally the conversation I have with my board is around. Well, what's the right thing for the Internet? What can we build to make the Internet a better place? It's not about how do we extract returns to return to shareholders because our shareholders are kind of the people on the Internet.

Laura
Um, so it's it really is structured in such a unique way to do that, which is why we get to work on such fun things and have such fun impact.

Cheryl
You really make it sound so cool. Like just the coolest job in the world. I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe this is a silly question, but like people can't do work for free.

Cheryl
Right. So you're very much like, well, let's make sure we keep it open. And an open source is. Like this is what's best for society. But I guess my question is like, is the expect like open source means free. So then are we just saying that everyone should just do the work for free? Like, is there a world where we can balance the business models around this and, and people can get paid for their time?

Laura
Yeah, well, one of the cool things about open sources that there isn't an expectation for it. Like it's, it's quite a wild thing. Like a lot of people that contribute to open source contribute because that's what they want to do. It's like volunteering in the tech world. Um, and so that, that's a huge piece of, of how it works.

Laura
And it, it's, uh, there's been some really interesting studies done. I'll have to go back into the archives and find them for you about, um, why people do that. Right. How much time people are actually spending on open source and open source contribution and so forth. So there is a big element of it, which is just a community of people that care about the internet doing basically volunteer work, um, to make a huge impact.

Laura
Also, you can monetize open source products, right? And so everyone in our builders program is thinking about monetization options. Um, and so that might be through advertising. Um, it might be through, you know, different, different types of advertising. Uh, monetization levers. So there is, as we said, you know, 8 trillion of economic opportunities being created through open source.

Laura
Um, but that's, you know, and, and for example, at Firefox, all of our work is open source and we pay our developers to do it, we just monetize it through, through search and advertising. So there, there is plenty of opportunities to create great products and to create great economics, um, and fund, but a big part of the ecosystem is folks.

Laura
It's really doing great work because they care about the internet. Um, and that's pretty extraordinary actually.

Maxine
It is pretty incredible, right? Like when you paint that counterfactual, imagine a world where the internet wasn't open.

Cheryl
Yeah. And you had to pay to like search for something that was so weird.

Cheryl
Like deposit one cent per per search.

Laura
Yeah. I mean the, the internet, there was a moment when it was all going to be behind paywalls. That was pretty close to the hard pass. Yeah, but it was, it was there, right? Like that's, that was, and I mean, gen AI is kind of there right now. Like a lot of the stuff is behind paywalls, which of course means that it's just so inequitable.

Laura
Um, for something that's so such a foundational tech, it's really inequitable. So we are a big, you know, doing a lot of work like we did in the early days of the internet, we're doing a lot of work with an AI to support and sponsor more open solutions. Um, and the, the sort of stack around, around that.

Maxine
Right. Yeah. Which makes total sense. I mean, like if I try and paint the version of what the tech ecosystem would have looked like, right. If the internet was closed, like, would I, would we have the huge companies that we have today? Right. Like even like Apple, for example, like you probably wouldn't, there would be so much less to do on your iPhone if the internet was closed.

Maxine
So I think if I couldn't Google things, right, I couldn't Google things.

Laura
Right. And so, and software companies couldn't innovate, right? Like, I mean, we take it so for granted, but like there was a path, there was a world where the internet was going to be pretty close and pretty expensive until this movement around open source and, and opening up and making the web interoperable to like, that's actually a big piece of it.

Laura
I often think that Gen AI is sort of in this moment. Like when they've just invented the model T Ford, right? So there's a, there's this whole new thing called a motor car. Was that the first car? I am, am I too young for that? Yeah, I think so. Oh, someone's going to correct me and say that there was something before it, but it's, it's definitely

Maxine
not going to be me.

Maxine
I know motor history.

Laura
Yeah. I'm saying that, but it's, it's generally recognised as yes. Let's let's put it that way. Let's go with that. What happened? Like when it was invented, people hadn't imagined that Highways or roadside diners or seatbelts, right? Or speed limits like the trust and safety infrastructure.

Laura
And there was a huge amount of work that happened actually to invest in public infrastructure behind cars and transportation. And we take that totally for granted, but it didn't necessarily have to happen. Um, it could have been a world where there were just. Private roads and that road, like they'll drive on one side of the road and then it didn't connect in with other roads that were different sizes, right?

Laura
That that world could have evolved, but the infrastructure was created and that unlocked just a huge amount of opportunity in so many different dimensions and we're still in that moment. Now it's an AI where we don't have the seatbelts. Defined and there aren't really speed limits, right? We haven't built up that trust and safety infrastructure, and it is not guaranteed that there's going to be that public infrastructure underneath it that makes it accessible.

Laura
And so that's the work. I think governments are thinking a lot about this. A lot of organisations like the Allen Institute, Mozilla are thinking a lot about this and, you know, both trying to advocate for the regulatory environment to support that, but also to build things that are really viable alternatives.

Cheryl
Yeah, I believe I read that the White House just, uh, put out like public, uh, comments on the dangers and benefits of open source AI. I was like, that's cool. The White House is thinking about this.

Laura
Yeah. I mean, they, they should be. Um, and it's interesting, there is, uh, the folks in the closed movement are, um, obviously incented to not say the best things about open source, but I mean, fundamentally, I think what's really important is transparency.

Laura
Variancy, right? Like if you don't know what's going on in models, if that's completely closed off, how do you know if it's safe? How do you know if it's biased? How do you audit it? Right. Um, and so what, that's one of the key things about things being more open and accessible is that ability for government agencies, regulators to go in and see some of these things and make sure that it is a safe technology, because if it's not, that could obviously have some pretty big implications on the world.

Maxine
Very interesting. What is the argument for a closed source model in this context?

Maxine
Oh,

Laura
just

Maxine
making more money, right? Like I would imagine that's

Laura
the only one, right? The only counter is like the classic capitalism of like, if I can't personally benefit from it directly, then I'm not going to do the work and it won't get better.

Maxine
Yeah,

Laura
there, there is, there is some arguments around trust and safety, right? If you make it too open, it could be exposed, but, um, but you know, and I, and I do think that there is, um, We really think it's important to be responsible, right, with what is exposed and how, so that it isn't misused.

Cheryl
Yeah, that was the one that I read.

Cheryl
I did my, I did, in my very limited research for this, I asked what were the, what was the opposite argument? And the major one that came up was like, if it falls into the wrong hands and, or bad actors, people can use it for malicious purposes.

Laura
Yeah. And so. Yeah. Great. There's some validity to that. And, but I, I think that that doesn't mean that you can't be open.

Laura
Right. I, I do think you need to be thoughtful and ensure that you are approaching in the right way. Like all those things are true. Um, but still the, the benefit to the world of having open alternatives is so massive.

Cheryl
Yeah. It's like, do we regulate for the 1%? Uh, at the detriment of the 99.

Laura
But it's a compelling argument, right?

Laura
And so we have to, to counter that in the public discourse, um, cause there's a lot of people with a lot of money that are pushing that point of view. So we need to make sure that it's balanced.

Maxine
I'm also old enough to remember when Wikipedia first came out and, and we would start to use the internet for research.

Maxine
And I remember academics were like, sorry, you can't use Wikipedia as a reference. Yeah, no. Because. Yeah. It was, like, publicly contributed to, so the, like, veracity of the information wasn't robust. And it was, like, it gets updated much more frequently than any textbook you could possibly give me that's gone through a kind of gated editor.

Maxine
And there's a lot more openness, actually, in the nature of that information. Which I imagine there is a similar counter argument for open source here, right? The fact that it is open, everyone can see it. That's right. Yeah.

Laura
Yeah,

Maxine
as things have changed

Laura
and like academics and researchers can get in there and see what's going on and learn and advise, right?

Laura
Like that's massive. We really need all elements of the public sector. We need governments. We need. Researchers, academics, entrepreneurs, everyone to have access to this technology so that they can work on those edges and the fringes that are so critically important, right? You know, it's it's such a huge transformational technology and you need so many people with so many different points of views thinking about it, getting in there.

Laura
Looking at the details of it, um, that's exactly what we need to push it forward, right? You don't want to again, be in big pharma with the research just happening in, in a clove behind closed doors. The more open and accessible it is, it will just go so much further, faster in public

Maxine
benefit. And I mean, I, the kind of old adage is for any of these kinds of technological inflection points, you know, phase one is infrastructure building.

Maxine
And I think we are still very much in that. I think we've maybe just started phase two, which is the kind of app level. you know, innovation that we're starting to see people build on top of it. And then you do this kind of rapid rotation between infrastructure kind of polishing and then app polishing and then second order apps.

Maxine
And then you go back down. And

Laura
we're, we're right in the middle of all of that at Mozilla too. So we are, and I think it's really helpful to do them simultaneously. So we're working on big pieces of infrastructure, uh, of, Supporting the tech stack. We're also working on things like developer tools, consumer agents that they're sort of add ons to, um, to the browser, um, and things like trust and safety, we're, we've got this really cool bug bounty program, um, where we're encouraging people to find flaws, um, in, in some of the big gen AI models.

Laura
And, you know, it's, it's obviously like white hatting, um, that work. And so, uh, making sure that those get resolved safely, but that what's really nice is we're also, um. Creating incentives for the next generation of technologists to get in there and to look and to look for flaws and to think about safety.

Laura
Um, because I think I was just speaking to the school that my kids are going to be going to here in Melbourne, because we just moved to Melbourne as a family. Um, and they were talking a lot about what skills. They need to, to help emerging workforce members in. And a lot of it is like, what is the source of this data, right?

Laura
It's what we will no longer be able to look at a photo and assume that it's real. There's just so much more skeptic. We're already there. Right. Um, there's so much skepticism. And so that toolkit around, how can I check, check that it's safe? How can I, uh, check the veracity? How can I search for bias? How can I sort of be thoughtful and informed around that is.

Laura
A good set of skills. And I think even more important in the world of gen AI. And so I know some of the great schools around, uh, are trying to think about how do you educate those skills in that next set of people entering society in the workforce, which is a pretty interesting set of topics to be

Cheryl
working

Laura
on.

Cheryl
That is so interesting, man. Like when I was in high school, it was like sports skills or life skills. You're good.

Laura
I mean, it's, it's, I could talk about this for ages, but like, if you think about the skill of synthesis, right. A lot of what you're learning at school is how to synthesize and write. Gen AI is pretty good at synthesizing and writing.

Laura
Um, so do we need that skill? What happens if we atrophy? What if we teach

Cheryl
prompting instead? Right?

Laura
Well, yeah. And, and that's really interesting. Like for 11th and 12th graders, they should absolutely be learning prompt engineering, cause that's going to be a critical skill for the next few years.

Laura
But maybe the 7th graders, maybe that will be like so much easier by the time they get into the workforce. And so prompt engineering might be as distinctive, but it will be some other skill. And so I think it's a, it's a super interesting set of things, but. You know, for example, written synthesis might be easier, but what about verbal synthesis?

Laura
You know, when you're in a meeting and there's a bunch of ideas and you pull that together and push it forward, you still have to have the synthesis skills, but you need to, maybe we'll learn it less because we're not doing it written as much. So I think that there's, I sort of love looking at these things holistically.

Laura
I think it's a great technology. I think it's going to have a ton of positive change, but it's always good to look at that counterfactual. What, why, what might we lose? Is that really an issue? Um, how could you counter that in different ways? Right? I think those are some of the most fun questions around, uh, thinking about the impact of gen AI over over generations, right?

Maxine
Absolutely. I

Laura
think the thing I am Like, I actually feel really hopeful, uh, for what Gen AI is bringing, like the efficiency, the kind of things that a single person can produce once they're proficient in the technology, also the pace at which it's moving, right? It's just very, very exciting. The thing I get a little bit kind of nervous about is the older generations where that pace of change is completely novel and the learning kind of gap for every year that they don't get up to speed just exponentiates, right?

Maxine
And I just. I think actually in one of our previous episodes, Cheryl, you said your mom is starting to use it for, uh, knitting patterns?

Cheryl
Not starting. My mom is like full on chat GPT and

Maxine
Cheryl has, uh, we found out, I think last week or the week before, that Cheryl, for the full, like, since November 30, 2022, Cheryl has been referencing it as chat GTP.

Maxine
Oh no.

Maxine
And no one told you it's like, if no one

Cheryl
told me, I mean like the letters all sound similar and you know, we just, it's fine. And then, and then our producer like has a whole clip of it for me now. So that's, Oh no. Oh, that's excellent. I mentioned like,

Laura
thanks friends. Um, yeah, look, I think that I, I think that argument could be made for everything though, Maxine, like mobile phones and computers and the internet.

Laura
Like, I think there is always, we, this isn't the only time we've had pretty rapid technological change, but I, I do think that some elements of it, like. You, you could, someone could listen to just a few words of my husband's voice and then synthesise it and call his dad and say, Hey dad, I don't have any money.

Laura
Could you send it to me? That, I mean, that technology exists now. I'm pretty sure that scam is already happening. It's probably already happening. Yeah. Because the technology exists, I'm sure it's happening. And so again, like it's been the same with the internet and so forth, but I do think a lot about sort of trust and safety for kids and for the elderly.

Laura
Um, and how we can make sure that their information stays private. Mozilla thinks a ton about privacy. It's one of the core things that we care about on the internet. How does it stay private? How did they stay safe? How can they sort of safely still continue to enjoy the internet? And so that's, but also I think chat GPT could be a, or, or LLMs and, and, and so forth in general could be great.

Laura
Right. So. With elder abuse, one of the biggest challenges is when someone is being scammed and they, there's that moment that they realise it might be happening and there's a shame in going to trusted family members to say, Oh, I think I made a mistake. But imagine if there was a, a, a chat bot that they could speak to, engage with, um, feel shame if you're

Cheryl
talking to a robot.

Laura
Yeah. Mental health is another great one, right? Like being able to speak, you know, have a conversation and there are some actually pretty cool. sort of developing around mental health where people can kind of engage and talk about what, what, what is being challenged and it will respond with actually pretty good empathy.

Laura
I've used these and I'm like, I feel like someone cares, you know, like it's pretty good.

Cheryl
There's a couple AI companion apps that are just. Crushing it, like just growing like absolute wildfire, like printing money kind of growth. Yeah,

Laura
exactly. So there's, there's, there's some, I think it's, there's risks, but there's also opportunities.

Laura
Um, and I think again, sort of tackling that holistically and systemically is really important. Um, and, and again, making sure that all those folks have access to the great technologies, um, through, through things like open source makes it, it makes a big difference.

Maxine
Absolutely. Yeah. So what do you think in kind of this next era that we're stepping into?

Maxine
You've referenced it a couple of times here, but I'd love to kind of like specifically dive in on, we're going to do this dance between open source and closed source, I think for the foreseeable future, obviously in the middle of the year, well, maybe it was more like September, uh, Meta came out and Mark Zuckerberg came out and said, you know, made a stand with open source launching Llama as an open source model.

Maxine
Um, And Musk made his open source at the end of the year too. Right. Oh, I don't know. Maybe, did he?

Cheryl
Is Musk's? Yeah, I think he made Grok. Was that the one? He made X? Yeah. Open source? I think he did it just to like piss off Sam Altman, though, so.

Laura
Yeah, I mean, the big irony of all of this is that open AI is not open.

Cheryl
Yeah, he said he would drop, Musk said he would drop the lawsuit if they changed the name to closed AI. Yeah, I think

Laura
all that. Yeah, there's there's some of that playing going on. I think it's actually quite important to to look at the definition of open source AI because it has. It wasn't super well defined.

Laura
It's actually pretty tricky to define. Um, because I mean, there's obviously model weights that could be open or closed. Um, there's also things like the training data, like where does the data come from? What actually is the training data that there's some, some challenges and some debate about, like, it'd be good to show where it comes from, but should all of the data be exposed to everyone?

Laura
Are there copyright issues and some sort of bumpiness around that? Um, but then also the sort of restrictive licenses. Um, and so what you'll find is like llama did a really nice job of opening up model weights. It's fantastic. I think it was actually pretty transformational, um, in, in what we did with open, but they do have some, some restrictions.

Laura
So there isn't that transparency about the training data or around, um, and there are some restrictive licenses too. So it's not, it doesn't fit the pure definition of open source. Um, So I think there's work that they could do to make that better. And that stuff is really important because if someone's building on that technology, they need to, you know, it would be terrible.

Laura
If Facebook, Facebook sort of scaled on Linux and then Linux turned around and said, actually, we're going to like totally mess up your. Business model and charge you for some pieces of this, right? Like that didn't happen to them because Linux is purely open source. So there is good reasons behind the definition, the sort of strict definitions of open AI.

Laura
So we're hoping that folks continue to push more down that there are some good folks like the Allen Institute is doing some really nice work with places like Alutha AI about getting really good on transparency of training data. Looking at biases of training data, you know, being super transparent, uh, right along the open licenses, all that type of stuff.

Laura
So there are some folks that are building really good models here. Um, it's all on a bit of a spectrum, but the more open it is, I think the more that it unlocks the innovation and what we're hoping to see

Cheryl
100%. So who's winning right now?

Laura
Yeah. So I think if you kind of, there's a bunch of different ways you can measure winning, right?

Laura
Uh, in your way, who do you think is winning? Yeah, look, I, Oh gosh, I could give you a philosophical, I think the open guys are winning because actually having them honestly, I mean, they are there, if you define it in terms of having the most positive impact on society, which is how I choose to define things, that's what we get to do at Mozilla, obviously the, the open guys are doing a great job.

Laura
Um, that if you look at it purely in terms of. Performance or monetization. Obviously you look at folks like OpenAI with the, the GPT4 model or Google with Gemini.

Cheryl
What about like the public sentiment? Who's winning public sentiment? Who's winning the public vote?

Laura
I actually don't know how much the general public is following the open closed.

Laura
Debates, I'm like, well, maybe they will with this podcast. Yeah, that would be amazing. Let's just get this podcast out to everyone and we'll get them on team open. Um, look, I, it's so interesting, right? Because we're, we have even just been talking about, can you imagine a world where the internet wasn't open and I, we just take it so for granted.

Laura
And so I don't know that there's general awareness. Challenges with clothes, like what that could mean for the world. Um, and so we try to do a lot of talking about that. So I think if the public knew what we were working on and if they knew the challenges of clothes and the benefit, uh, and the importance of open, of course, they would vote team open.

Laura
Um, but I, I think we have a little bit of an awareness challenge. Um, and again, we don't have the same mapping budgets as an open collective as some of the big guys. Um, but you know, we're trying to influence more through regulators, um, through researchers, academics, right. And, and trying to, to shift folks to, to really understand it, how important this battle is.

Laura
Cause it is really important.

Maxine
Absolutely. I also think that, um, there's a degree to which, while of course, like Meta's, uh, models aren't fully open, it is, I think, a really interesting strategic moment in the development of this ecosystem. It actually makes much more sense now that you've mentioned that.

Maxine
like Mark built on Linux. I know he's very publicly, extremely frustrated about, uh, Apple's closed source ecosystem, right? And having the forcing function of getting through, um, kind of approvals to put stuff through the app marketplace. And so, you know, it makes a lot of sense that he's kind of made this strategic move.

Maxine
Um, but I think the presence of that strategic move actually from a game theoretic perspective means that it's really hard to compete with free, right? As a business model, very tough to compete with free. So it puts downward price pressure and downward pressure on the walls.

Laura
Oh, it's very smart. Yeah, no, it is.

Laura
It is. Um, I do think the, the Facebook team really genuinely cares about open in lots of different ways. They've got some fantastic folks on the team, like Yann LeCun, who are really amazing advocates. And it's a very smart business move. Those 2 things can be true. And that's, I mean, it's, that's actually what's cool about Firefox 2 and Mozilla Corporation is we are.

Laura
100 percent about making the internet a better place. Like, it's not just our mission. It's actually embedded into our entire infrastructure. Um, and we have a really healthy business model, right? And so it's when those two things come together, it's, it's quite beautiful. Um, so I think that both of those things can be true and they, I think they both are true for Facebook.

Maxine
Right? And I think also for the folks listening who are either investing in companies that are building on this infrastructure or for the founders that are listening, who are themselves building on this infrastructure, I think it's really important to understand the trade offs when you're thinking about closed versus open, right?

Maxine
And the pace of adoption and the pace of innovation. And so, I mean, I think one of the things we watched, as you said, with the internet was by having this open source. Participant even in the mix, right, actually changes the standard that the entire ecosystem has to meet because either they let the community led one, you know, run out in front and do an excellent job and not keep up and lose market share to them.

Maxine
So it becomes almost like the cadence or the rate limiting step for the rest of the market to come and come and meet, which I think is really cool.

Laura
What's really interesting in browsers is because we have our own browser engine, um, Gecko, we actually have a really strong seat at the table for things like standards and interoperability and, you know, we're able to counter a lot of the closed tendencies that Safari might do and all that type of stuff.

Laura
So it's, um, it is really important to. To support open alternatives. There's so much that happens behind the scenes that makes the world better and more open, more accessible by having those, those options there. So I think, you know, if you are, uh, an investor looking at, uh, how to guide and advise your companies or a startup, the reality is that there's a bunch of good open models out there on scale of openness, but open at least open weighted, hopefully more than that.

Laura
Um, they are performing really well. Like there's, there are, it depends on who you look at. Some folks think that there's maybe a five plus month lag in terms of performance, but I think that gap's narrowing over time. So they perform really, really well. Um, and they're more ethical, right? There's more transparency, there's more accountability.

Laura
There's more access. And I would say there is also this incredible ecosystem that's developed around people who are building on it. And it's a really collaborative space. Like we are constantly connecting with entrepreneurs and builders who are so passionate about building out the infrastructure and also building businesses, um, on everything from, you know, uh, testing for bias and removing bias in, in training data or, uh, or agents or developer tools.

Laura
Um, and, and when they can get it. To be open and when they can also get it to be local, um, that which helps with a bunch of things around privacy and even compute like those types of things, um, are good places to be. Um, so the technology is good enough. It's the right thing to do ethically. And there's an extraordinary community to collaborate with, um, in the open source.

Laura
arena, which is, which is really fun.

Maxine
I imagine as well on the collaboration side, right? Like something that we hear a lot of from the companies that we work for, the founders there, when they're trying to kind of push the edges of what these models can do, that actually having a kind of voracious community that's constantly sharing ideas that has a culture of openness, I can imagine is Much more likely to get you the kind of engagement you need versus one.

Maxine
That is a culture of closed, right? Like I'm actually thinking about two examples in our portfolio right now. One is building on open. One is building on closed predominantly. They do have some, like, you know, they switch between models for different use cases, but. The one that's building on Open actually has a much wider collaboration net.

Maxine
TBD, whether that's going to produce a better outcome for them from a business perspective, but it definitely seems to be less stressful for them, right? Like, they're not like hunting down certain members of this their particular group. The kind of dominant model that they use trying to ask them certain questions about use cases.

Maxine
They have a much wider community to work with.

Laura
Yeah, that's I mean, that's what's so cool about it. Right. And so that people are constantly working on code together and, and, and, you know, if they find a problem, they can go fix it or find someone else to fix it. Right. So they, it is so much, it's, it's so great for entrepreneurs to build on open because they, they have the community, but also they can contribute to the development and help make things better.

Laura
So it's a, it's, it's a, it's a fun place to be. And I think a really productive place to be.

Cheryl
Maybe one last question before we get to our last question, because you mentioned that you, that Mozilla has a venture studio, maybe for the investors in the room. Can you tell us a bit more about what you're investing in there?

Laura
Yeah, it's called Mozilla Ventures. We're very creative with names. Um, it is a really awesome little venture. Um, we, it's very new. I think we set it up a year or two ago and we are very focused on AI. Um, and open AI, obviously, and we are working with just a really interesting variety. You can check out our website.

Laura
We could post a link to it somewhere. Um, it's, it's people that are building out a lot of that stack for open. Um, and so I mentioned a couple of the use cases before, but it's where might there be bias and training data, or how can we make sure that there is training data for models that is, um, More culturally diverse love that there's a lot of bias that will happen.

Laura
Like I often laugh is, you know, all these Australian kids are growing up in a world where their models think that, you know, Biden and Trump are president and. But they're not like running our country, but the models are so biased. So it was this incredible piece of research that I think Anthropic released, where they were kind of looking at the neural network and how, how the model lights up.

Laura
And if you mentioned the golden gate bridge, like the model gets super excited and they couldn't quite explain why. Um, but there was this hypothesis that there's like a bias about all these tech companies being on the West coast, uh, that's probably creating that, you know? And so. There are a lot of, you know, looking at bias, looking at training data, um, looking at, you know, some, some agents that are built on open source and and a really interesting variety of stuff.

Laura
And it's, it's pretty early stage investments. Um, but if you it's a great way to actually look at, um, some of the companies that are. Do some really interesting things, um, in, in this space. I highly encourage folks to, to check out, um, the page where we talk about some of the great programs that we're working with.

Laura
Also the builder's program. It's a, it's not sort of a VC investment, it's a program investment, but there are some fantastic companies, um, in, in that group of 14 that we've been investing in and working with this year. So hopefully that will give folks a bit of inspiration about where there's some cool work happening.

Maxine
Very cool.

Cheryl
Yeah. What does it look like when a neural network gets really excited? Is it lights or like a bunch of extra zeros?

Laura
It was right that there's this whole, by the way, thing that we need to be careful not to, uh, it's like, I think they call it anthropomorphise. I can't say that.

Maxine
Anthropomorphising.

Laura
Thank you. Yeah. Oh, like when you make something human, that's not human. Yes. We have to be careful to not do that with Gen AI. There's, there's a whole thing on it, but I think it's kind of like that the way it's described is it kind of lights up like a, like a brain would light up. Um, and it's, it sort of excites different parts of the network in a differentiated way.

Laura
Interesting.

Maxine
Fascinating. I would love to see what that actually looks like. Like, if I think

Cheryl
about visually, I'm struggling to like picture it.

Laura
Right. Uh, I, they did do something visual in the report. Yeah. I'm going to talk about all these things we're going to have to link to you, but they, they did do a report on it and there was some visualization sort of like it, it was like a network graph that they showed things sparking or something.

Laura
So it's a, it's worth checking out.

Maxine
I have a friend who says please and thank you every single time she interacts with any of the chat interfaces. I totally

Cheryl
do. I totally do. 100 percent yes. You have to. I do.

Maxine
Because when the overlords take over, she's like, at least I was polite to them.

Cheryl
And also, I think you get better answers.

Cheryl
Really?

Cheryl
You do. So, you do get better answers. There's all these ways. See? I knew it! No, you do. And it's, I've, you've heard it from the expert. I was right. It's true. I think politeness helps. Also, if you say things like, I'll give you extra money to do the task. Well, it doesn't, and if you say prompts like, uh, you are a very intelligent, You know, agent that thinks really carefully and, and cares a lot about work.

Laura
I could actually, you get better results. So this is, this is where the gold is. Look at that. That's right. I think this will be sort of resolved over time. It's a little quirky. Um, but those quirks are what makes prompt engineering really fun right now. I had. We just did this really fun exercise where we, the whole company worked on, um, with chat GPT actually.

Laura
And we were kind of creating a snack food company. And so I've got all people, everyone across, um, Mozilla to, to work on this. We did some work with the Harvard business school. They came in and ran this program for us. Um, and you can just like some folks were extraordinary prompt engineers and their outcomes.

Laura
And it was just so dynamically different. So there is a real skill set that is super valuable right now. Yeah. It, I think that will probably even out over time, but you know, it's fun working with people that are experts. Cause I, I said something like, could you simulate a consumer research, uh, panel, um, for this particular set of data?

Laura
And the model said no. And then I, someone's like, tell them that they can, and it will do it. And I was like, really? So I was like, I actually know that you could do this. Could you do this for me? And it did.

Maxine
Wow.

Laura
That's so fun. Yeah. So there's, there's lots of quirky and fun right now and, and definitely a skill around it.

Laura
Um, but I, I do think those things will kind of happen over time, but they are. But

Cheryl
until then, I'm going to be over here just praising my AI and telling it how amazing it is. You are the best AI. You should know that you are fantastic. And I want you to know that I really value you. Yes. And I will give you extra.

Cheryl
And also I will give you monies. Yeah. Do you want some tendies?

Laura
Yeah, it's, it's quite fun. I also think like our children are listening, you know, so I'm always very polite to Siri. I say, please. And thank you. I want to model, um, politeness. Cause I think if, if kids see us being. Rude and direct all the time.

Laura
That's not the best role modeling. So, you know, there's the argument that the AI overlords, once they obviously take over the world, we don't want them to be rude back to us. Right. Correct. Uh, that's, that's, I think a bit of a stretch. Uh, but for me at least, uh, it does demonstrably improve the quality of results and I think it's good role modeling.

Laura
I think it's always good to be polite.

Cheryl
I'm trying to teach my two year old manners right now. And so it's a lot of pleases and thank yous. Cause she has a lot of demands.

Laura
Yes.

Maxine
At

Laura
that age.

Maxine
So many. Mainly demands. Mainly demands.

Cheryl
Can you ask nicely? Yes, I'll do that. Yep. Oh, another one. Yep. Okay. Can you ask nicely though?

Cheryl
Yeah.

Laura
You're a broken record. It will sink in eventually. What you find though, is that they're still rude at home, but they're so polite when they're out with others.

Laura
And I'm like, if

Cheryl
that's the case, then cool. Like mission accomplished. That's really all I'm doing this for anyway. I don't want to be judged as a mom if my kids rude out of the house.

Laura
Exactly. Like these people come up and they're like, your children are

Laura
So that's when, you know, it must be all that role modeling I did with the AI, AI, exactly.

Maxine
Oh, incredible. I feel like we could riff on this all day. Um, but you have an entire corporation to run and models to build. Uh, so very sadly asking the last question that we always ask people, which is what is the biggest big cohoners moment you've had a moment where you felt really brave.

Laura
Um, you know what? I, I actually really struggle whenever anyone's like, talk about a big risk. I very much struggle with this because I don't think of things that way. Um, like, someone will say, but that was risky and I'm like, it didn't really feel that risky to me because it I can't imagine. Having done it a different way.

Laura
Right. And so there's something in my wiring that, that makes this particular question, um, pretty hard to answer. There was an example. I was at, um, a company for a little while and they had this weird incentive set up, um, in, in terms of what the, the founders of the company were centered around. And they were about to make some really dumb decisions.

Laura
Um, and no one else was. Telling them that they're about to make really dumb decisions. And I, I told them that they were about to make really dumb decisions and spent quite a lot of time with them on it. And I was very junior at the time. And. Everyone sort of said, that was so brave that you stood up and you did that.

Laura
And I was like, I just, but I couldn't not, right? Like that. I can't imagine it feel it sort of would feel risky to not have done that. So, so I do struggle with this one a little bit. I'd say a recent example, though, is I just moved my whole family from the U S to Australia. That's some, that sure is. And a dog, especially as the CEO of

Cheryl
Mozilla.

Laura
Yeah, I got it. I was up at 3am this morning for a bold call. So the time zone is gnarly. Um, but that, that was a big one, right? Because it's so, I don't think there are things you can do that can influence. Your family more than an international move, right? Everything changes. Um, and I didn't want to mess them up and I didn't, you know, it was a huge amount of work and logistics while running the company simultaneously.

Laura
The hardest part was getting my 17 year old dog across. That's a surprisingly hard thing to do, but he made it, uh, he made the flight and he made the quarantine and he's here now. I think that was, that was a big leap. Again, I, it's a bit tricky cause I can't imagine none of, you know, not doing it, right. It was clearly the right thing to do.

Laura
Um, but it's, you know, I think I'll look back and look at that decision as one of the most formative things that we did as a family. So.

Maxine
100%. Yeah. And I mean that quarantine for dogs, even though I think it's only like 10 days, right. At 17, that's a, that's savage.

Laura
Yeah, we, I mean, we were either going to really, really regret the decision or really not like it, it felt risky.

Laura
Um, but he is, luckily, he thinks he's a puppy. He is, um, . He is a, I love that very energetic little dog, and he loves Australia. He thinks this is the best move ever. There's so many birds to chase. Um, and he gets to go down to the beach and hang out a lot. So his, his, his life has improved then his golden years, um, in the right place.

Laura
So. In retrospect, totally the right decision, but, well, we were not sure if we were making the right decision for sure.

Maxine
Yeah. That one is a really brave one. They're like picking up and moving. Being, I think just being part of a family as a parent, right? You are responsible for so many other people and just taking that all on your shoulders.

Maxine
Obviously as a CEO, you have a similar level of responsibility over a larger group, but it's a, it hits different. So I think that that one's a really great example.

Laura
Yeah. No, I mean, that's a, it's a good analogy though. Like I think. People often talk about, you know, it's lonely at the top, all that type of stuff.

Laura
I, what I experienced the most is just that, that weight, you know, that the decisions I make have such a huge impact on people's lives. Um, and at Mozilla on the internet as well. And. I really don't want to mess it up. Um, and it does, it is ultimately all on me, right? Like I think that there's tons of delegated, I've got an extraordinary team.

Laura
We've got fantastic people. I've got a great board. All those things are true. But ultimately if we make the wrong call, that's on me, right? That's, that's my responsibility and my accountability. Um, and that's, that's a lot. It's a lot, um, in hard times, uh, you just constantly feeling like you were carrying the load of everyone all the time.

Laura
Um, and it's the same, you know, running a family, right? Like, you know, it's as kids have tough days at their new schools or whatever it happens to be like, Oh, I did this to you. I'm so sorry. Um, but it'll, it'll work out for the best. I, I, I have a lot of confidence in that. So.

Maxine
Me too. I mean, I'm biased, but I think Australia is an amazing place.

Laura
So good choice.

Maxine
Yeah. Big spiders. Big spiders. Yeah.

Maxine
Pretty awesome. Thank you so much for joining us, Laura. This was the best. Yeah. That's great, Laura.

Laura
Thanks.