Do the Boring Stuff to Make Open Source AI Win

"Open source AI just isn’t as good as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini.” Needing to reach performance parity with closed source frontier models is the prevailing north star for open source AI - and this is an important goal! Here, I’ll make the case for a different north star: ease of use. Open source AI can win if it becomes dead easy to use, the simple default option for the 99% of AI use cases that don’t require the newest frontier mega-model. The missing piece is being so easy to install, maintain, and use that customers aren’t tempted to default elsewhere. That means our community moving beyond benchmarks to beautifying UI/UX, reducing jargon, building catchy apps, and meeting the modal end-user where they are - *not* just on GitHub or Hugging Face, but rather in the address bar of a browser or the app store. Throughout, I’ll talk about some of the decisions we are making at Mozilla to support our “choice-first stack,” a portfolio of commercially-licensed open source AI projects meant to take steps toward making open source AI more approachable, maintainable, and usable.