Indeed... As far as I know at least the Thunderbird donations are not going towards this, its Mozilla funded. I just cannot see that anyone asked or needed this, such a waste of time that should have gonw towards Thunderbird.

This is actually funded by Mozilla, not Thunderbird donations.

Omg take my money!! 💸💸💸💸

Seriously loosing whatever faith i had left in Mozilla... I want to love them so badly, but this just hurts.

AND all caps “trusted by organisations that don’t compromise”

TBH that sounds like a warning.

It sounds like a step further than open-webui; it’s an enterprise grade client-server model for access to agents, workflows, and centralized knowledge repositories for RAG.

In addition to local chatbot for executive/admin use, I can see this being the backend for developers running Cursor or some other AI enhanced IDE, with local knowledge stores holding proprietary documents and running against local large models.

I am also curious about time share and prioritization of resources; I assume it would queue simultaneous requests. Presumably this would let you more effectively pool local compute, rather than providing A100 GPUs to each developer that may sit unused when they’re not working.

Edit: Somewhat impressively, this whole stack does not even include a local inference provider; so it does everything except local models right now, and requests are forwarded to cloud inference providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc). But it does have the backend started for rate limiting and queuing, and true “fully offline/local” is on the roadmap, just not there yet.

At last a useful comment thread about the actual functionality in question.

While I am not moving back to reddit, Threadiverse is just terrible on any nuanced conversations on modern ML tools and approaches.

The tech is not the issue here. It has legitimate use cases and it is here to stay (this is not a blockchain pump and dump scheme ala Web 3.0). The issue here are American tech companies and broader support for crime/corruption in US society (as of today, doesn't mean that this can't/won't change in 20-30 years). We need truly independent open source systems and tools.

I am aware OpenWebUI is based in San Francisco and Mozilla Foundation is based in the US. I am always on the lookout for alternatives.

It looks like it, it doesn't seem to be doing any self-referencing/agentic things out of the box so the end user would need to build a bit to cover their specific use cases.

They seem to be aiming more at the startup/small company demographic than at self-hosters. This is just based on a skim of the repo and their product page, I haven't looked at it too hard yet.

It really eats.. the llamas ass

I don't think their market share/relevance would start rising if they just maintained the status quo.

Which isn't to say this direction is great or the way to go about it, but they can't do nothing either.

But its kinda taken....

From what I can see, this is something the Thunderbird team had developed for their own internal tooling, and they’re open sourcing it.

However an AI by a nonprofit is the only kind of AI I would potentially use.

I'm not against the LLM tech, it's that by using it I would support the shittiest of megacorps that use their power for evil (from training data to direct politics, and let's not forget markets disruptions).

AI by a for-profit has guaranteed enshitification built into the business model, otherwise they wouldn't get any capital.

Could you explain what email summaries have to do with this announcement? Thunderbird and Thunderbolt are separate applications. Thunderbolt doesn't include AI models, it is merely a frontend to an AI API of choice, similar to how Thunderbird is a frontend to an email server of choice.

Supposedly, this is a new and different team that will be taking a grant from the Mozilla Foundation. (I have no idea where these new resources came from, but in the best case scenario, they will appear out of thin air and not slow down work on Thunderbird...)