Montréal AI research institute Mila is partnering with Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox web browser, to research and develop open-source AI tools.
“We are working to build a future where AI development is rooted in openness, privacy, and humanity.”
The two organizations announced the strategic partnership on Thursday. It aims to reduce dependence on closed AI systems and give humans more agency over the data they share with large language models (LLMs). Mozilla is investing an initial $1 million CAD for the first research project and providing extensive engineering collaboration, according to a Mila spokesperson.
In an interview with BetaKit, Mila president and CEO Valérie Pisano called this a “landmark” partnership that she hopes will be a multi-year collaboration.
“We think this is something that could open up a different way of building and thinking about AI,” Pisano said.
The first project the two organizations will collaborate on concerns memory architecture for AI agents, Pisano said. She explained that many LLM users find it difficult to switch between providers without losing all the context stored within one LLM conversation. Mila and Mozilla hope to build an open-source tool to ensure users can make their LLM conversation data portable so they can switch between models more easily.
“This is really important for making sure humans have agency and choice,” Pisano said.
Mila said it would bring its world-class research chops to the table, while Mozilla will provide its open-source experience and developer community.
“We are working to build a future where AI development is rooted in openness, privacy, and humanity,” Mark Surman, the Toronto-based president of Mozilla, said in a statement on Thursday.
Mila and Mozilla are hoping their partnership will deliver on AI sovereignty, too, by exploring a Canadian-made open source software stack across compute, models, and data. The Canadian government has positioned “AI sovereignty” as a key part of its innovation strategy as it seeks to reduce its dependence on US technology, including by exploring a sovereign cloud project.
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Founded in 1993 by Turing Award winner and leading computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, Mila has grown into a joint initiative between leading academic institutions in Québec, including Université de Montréal and McGill University, with more than 1,500 affiliated researchers.
Mila and its sister organizations, Toronto’s Vector Institute and Edmonton’s Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), are funded by the federal government through the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy.
San Francisco-based Mozilla develops and publishes free, open-source software, including the Firefox browser and the Thunderbird email manager, through its non-profit parent Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.
Feature image courtesy Mila via LinkedIn.