DeepSpeech Is Discontinued (2020)

It was discontinued 5 years ago - I’m not sure why it took so long to archive the repo.

https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/future-of-deepspeech-stt-aft...

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.

Firefox is already an excellent and fast browser and people just don't use it. I think it's a marketing problem. Google, Microsoft, Brave, etc all put a lot of money and resources into promoting their browsers, pushing them at an OS level (with legal care), using ads etc. For Firefox to compete they'd need to spend a lot more of their money marketing and end up building far fewer fun toys and experiments, and they could still never achieve the same level as MS or Google.

I think I'd rather they keep innovating