Raffi Krikorian is Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla, where he leads the organization's strategy to increase adoption and usage of open source AI throughout the world. He has spent his career scaling systems that serve millions - as Vice President of Platform Engineering at Twitter, as Director of Uber's self-driving car program, as the first CTO of the Democratic National Committee, and as CTO of Emerson Collective, where he focused on technology for social good. Raffi also created Technically Optimistic, a podcast exploring technology's impact on society that reached #2 on Apple's tech charts. His work centers on a core belief: that powerful AI tools should be transparent, open, and owned by the people who use them - not rented from corporations.

Presentations

23x

Owners, not Renters: Mozilla’s open source AI strategy

“Owners, not Renters: Mozilla’s Open Source AI Strategy” digs into what it would actually take to move from renting AI from a few platforms to owning intelligence on our own terms. Raffi Krikorian, CTO of Mozilla, will unpack Mozilla’s 2026 roadmap for an open AI stack, explaining why they believe the current trajectory—closed models, opaque data pipelines, and centralized compute—locks users and developers into “AI landlord” relationships.
 

See Presentation
23x

Panel: Owning AI - Hard Questions on Power, Trust and Who Decides

In this closing conversation, Daniela Barbosa, General Manager of Decentralized Technologies at the Linux Foundation and Executive Director of LF Decentralized Trust, puts a series of uncomfortable questions to an all‑star—mostly male—lineup of AI visionaries. She will press them on where ownership really sits in their visions of AGI, open‑source AI, decentralized trust, and user‑set terms: with platforms, with protocols, or with people.

See Presentation