My personal little conspiracy theory is that Google pays Mozilla as an antitrust shield.
A lot of us pretty much assume that much, but I think it goes much deeper.
I think Google pays and maintains a working relationship with the CEO of Mozilla (current and former) to purposely keep the organization rudderless, uncompetitive, and shrinking.
Mozilla spends its money building a 3D VR metaverse here, a bunch of AI models it later scraps over there, a web3 / distributed social program, etc. It scraps Rust, doesn't invest into Firefox. Just silly toys and experiments.
That nice CEO salary is hush money.
Just a fun little pet theory, totally not based on evidence.
CamouflagedKiwi · 27m ago
Has a nice sound to it but Hanlon's razor says: never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence. I'd be impressed if this was the case but I expect neither side is sufficiently competent or malicious to explain it.
Teever · 51m ago
I don't know if there's a direct quid pro quo relationship between the CEO of Mozilla and Google but I feel quite confident that Google absolutely influences the organization in ways beyond just the cash injection to make it rudderless, uncompetitive and shrinking as you say.
It could be as simple as ex-Google employees at lower levels than CEO who are paid by Google take positions at Mozilla, or more subtle things like guiding the direction of the organization through standards boards.
It would be really fascinating to look at the org charts of Mozilla past and present and try and build the network between people who worked at Google or Google related organizations before, during, and after their time at Mozilla.
Because you're absolutely right that the organization is so absolutely dysfunctional that it can't just be incompetence, it has to be absolute malice.
xeonmc · 2h ago
Imagine an alternate timeline where Mozilla had named this project “FreeSpeech” instead as a free and open TTS solution.
ipsum2 · 4h ago
I've been using Nvidia's parakeet model, it's been better than Whisper v3 large and smaller. Only supports English.
Does it need a newer GPU? Or can it run on just CPU?
Would it run on a raspberry pi?
lupusreal · 18m ago
Best CPU TTS that can run on something like a raspberry pi is Piper. It can do real time synthesis on a raspberry pi and on a real computer it runs several times faster with negligible performance cost. I use it for 'reading' ebooks when my eyes get tired. The quality is roughly on par with where Mac OS's TTS was ~10 years ago (the last time I used it.) You can tell it's TTS, but it's good enough that you can become accustomed to it fairly easily.
They are talking about STT, not TTS, but as a TTS piper is very good and works nicely on a raspberry pi, I agree.
ipsum2 · 3h ago
If you want real-time, it requires a GPU, but can be underpowered. CPU is a little slower but works fine.
GaggiX · 4h ago
Look up for faster whisper or distilled whisper models, smaller models run quite nicely but perform poorly outside of English, if you are interested in a different language it's better to finetune it (HuggingFace has a huge amount of finetuned Whisper models).
100xlong · 2h ago
are there any linux/mac apps that allow people to use parakeet for daily dictation like SuperWhisper?
https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/future-of-deepspeech-stt-aft...
A lot of us pretty much assume that much, but I think it goes much deeper.
I think Google pays and maintains a working relationship with the CEO of Mozilla (current and former) to purposely keep the organization rudderless, uncompetitive, and shrinking.
Mozilla spends its money building a 3D VR metaverse here, a bunch of AI models it later scraps over there, a web3 / distributed social program, etc. It scraps Rust, doesn't invest into Firefox. Just silly toys and experiments.
That nice CEO salary is hush money.
Just a fun little pet theory, totally not based on evidence.
It could be as simple as ex-Google employees at lower levels than CEO who are paid by Google take positions at Mozilla, or more subtle things like guiding the direction of the organization through standards boards.
It would be really fascinating to look at the org charts of Mozilla past and present and try and build the network between people who worked at Google or Google related organizations before, during, and after their time at Mozilla.
Because you're absolutely right that the organization is so absolutely dysfunctional that it can't just be incompetence, it has to be absolute malice.
https://huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2
Would it run on a raspberry pi?
https://github.com/rhasspy/piper