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- Armand1@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I’m willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away. AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one.
I think broadly speaking what he says is reasonable. If you don’t want to use AI, then don’t, but I think it can be used somewhat responsibly.
I have all sorts of issues with AI tooling:
- the centralization of power
- the load it adds on maintainers because of the amount of slop bad developers (and non-devs) produce with it
- the environmental impacts of using larger models
- the data centers causing health risks
- the impact on the PC industry
- the degeneration of skills and knowledge.
That said, it’s a tool, and can be used to amplify good work too.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish11 days
It’s really weird for Linus to reference “the open source thing” while encouraging people to use legally dubious closed-source software with legally dubious output
- Armand1@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
This seems to be his view:
In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.
He doesn’t seem to subscribe to the idea that everything you use MUST be open source, as some more radical open source advocates do, but instead that more software SHOULD be open source.
I would definitely prefer if AI was open source and self-hosted (or at least E2EE if cloud hosted). Sometimes though the best tool for the job as things stand is closed source.
Aa for the legally dubious output, while AI can exactly replicate training data, it rarely does nowadays. It’s usually an amalgam of stuff.
- evadersnack@sopuli.xyzEnglish11 days
I highly doubt E2EE cloud LLMs are even theoretically possible. Let alone the computational overheads for said theoretical zero knowledge computing.
- Nalivai@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
and can be used to amplify good work too.
But at this point I would argue the downsides aren’t worth it. Especially when the bubble pops, subsidies run out, and people will be forced to pay the actual price
- Armand1@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
Yeah, it is effectively subsidized by VC right now.
I expect what will happen after the bubble bursts is that the only affordable models will be quite small ones, not the energy chugging behemoths we have now.
They’ve already started cranking up prices in enterprise.
- 11 days
Remember everyone, everyone is human. There is no person with all the right opinions and there never will be. Never idolize, you will be burned
11 daysFunny how the loudest AI debates often happen without asking the people shipping the biggest software projects on Earth. Torvalds is basically saying: judge the tool by whether it reduces friction. That feels a lot more practical than treating every LLM like either magic or the end of civilization.
- miseducator@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
Lemmy users are sure to have a reasonable reaction to this take.
- killea@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
Well most of them won’t read beyond the headline; they’ll likely just make massive assumptions based on title and their own predispositions. Sounds to me like Linus is trying to leave room for some of the practical nature of LLMs and implement them as useful tools, but it seems like he may be a little ignorant of the various agendas of LLM developers themselves. Just my stupid take.
- 11 days
The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There’s no question on that side.
We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.
And no, AI isn’t perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.
Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.
The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.
Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that’s a side benefit, not the point of the project.
This is NOT some kind of “social warrior” project, never has been, and never will be.
In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.
And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools.IMO it’s a pretty clear eyed take. LLMs are tools and, like all tools, are more fit for some purposes than others. And, like many tools, they’re hard to understand, easy to misuse, and dangerous when they are misused (intentionally or otherwise). And, like any tool, they can be used for evil if the user has a mind to do so. Just because they are currently being used to do great harm doesn’t mean they can’t also be put to good use.
I think the FOSS community, in particular the Fediverse community, does itself a disservice by refusing to engage with them at all. They aren’t evil in and of themselves, they’re just new and selfish people will try to find an angle with them, same as it’s always been. I think it’s up to us to understand them and try to find a way to use them ethically. Show the world that it’s not that we invented scary Artificial Intelligence, it’s just that we created a cool, if wonky, search interface for text. Wonky in what way? Well, I think it’d be nice if there were robust FOSS tools and documentation I could use and/or contribute to, and learn about them with a community of my peers working for the common good, instead of having to either take the megacorps at their word or just renounce anything “AI branded” altogether, which doesn’t feel like a good long term strategy.
- Nalivai@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
LLMs are tools and, like all tools, are more fit for some purposes than others
This is the whole problem, this take is disingenuous. Nobody who actually argues in good faith and knows what they’re talking about, argues that LLM isn’t a tool, or it’s something bigger than that. The argument that is being ignored is that LLM is a tool that inherently has downsides that are bringing more “bad” than it brings “good” when it’s useful. But proponents successfully argue that they can use LLM with some benefits, and act like they answered something, and any retaliation to that is unreasonable.
My favourite analogy is asbestos, and I say it as a huge disservice to asbestos. Asbestos is an amazing material that legit has many very important uses (way more than any LLM will ever have), but we’re not using it because we understand that no matter how great of a insulator it is, and how nice it looks as snow replacement on a movie set, and how wonderful it is in a cigarette filter, the supercancer it causes kinda nullifies all that.- 10 days
I think asbestos is a good analogy, but I think your claims that the inherent downsides of LLMs outweigh any possible upsides are as-yet unfounded. I also think it’s kind of strange that you assume anyone who thinks otherwise is being disingenuous.
Maybe they are too dangerous for broad use, and we need to regulate them like asbestos, or uranium. Maybe they shouldn’t be used outside of a laboratory setting or by anyone who doesn’t have extensive training with how to interact with them safely. It seems pretty clear that Torvalds has decided they’re worth the downside, and while I don’t know if that’s a good call, I don’t think he’s operating in bad faith to the detriment of the kernel project. That doesn’t sound like something he would do.
I feel confident that I don’t have the expertise to say for certain one way or the other, though the experience I do have with software tools makes me think there’s probably an application for them where the downsides can be mitigated to the point where they become worthwhile. I think there’s probably some single-purpose or tailored application of LLMs related to textual analysis that don’t require the theft of the whole internet, and don’t require insane amounts of energy to run. I don’t think we have discovered them yet (at least I haven’t), but saying “this kind of software is only bad and can have no ethical uses, ever” seems premature.
- Nalivai@lemmy.worldEnglish9 days
There are, broadly speaking, two categories of problems with LLM generated code (well, everything, but code here specifically). One is purely technical, does it bring anything to the process, does it broadly speaking saves you time or effort. And the second is everything else: environmental impact, the bubble of it all, the consolidation of power to all the worst people, erosion of skills, death of education, inflation of prices of consumer electronics, psychological impact, and so so so much more, all lumped together as non-technical downsides.
A bunch of llm-proponents, and here we sadly have to include even Linus, are only engaged with the first category of problems, throwing the whole second category aside as “irrelevant”. And a lot of those people are smart enough so I don’t believe they don’t see this.
If there was only the problem of the tool being kinda shitty but useful for some people, I wouldn’t be so against it. I still don’t believe they actually benefit from it, but if they think they do, I’m not going to argue with them about it.
But it’s fundamentally not true. You can’t ignore the second category in your evaluation. To quote Linus himself,But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing “La La La, I can’t hear you” at the top of your voice like some people seem to do
about the fact that even one of the downsides from the second category makes the whole “but I, a person with 40 years of experience, can use llm in such a way that it sometimes produces some benefit” not worth it. No benefit of it is worth the fact that the new generation of junior developers don’t know how to write code on a fundamental level, while elon mask owns all of humanity’s personal data and can do whatever he wants with it. Even if those benefits were kinda big, it wouldn’t worth it, but they aren’t.
- 8 days
I think you’re missing the trees for the forest. Yes, all those downsides make the current crop of LLM implementations pretty shitty for humanity, on balance, but none of them are intrinsic to LLMs, they are intrinsic to the current business practices that are attempting to profit from LLMs. LLMs are just math. Often computationally expensive math, sure, though they needn’t be. But I don’t think it helps anyone to say “LLMs are intrinsically bad and no one should use them” any more than it makes sense to say that blockchains are intrinsically bad and no one should use them (a common sentiment about a decade ago). I think a more realistic approach is to find out what real benefit can be had by using LLMs, and see if that benefit can be realized without all the downsides you mentioned.
To take the case at hand, I think open source code review is probably a pretty good candidate domain for exploration, because there’s a large corpus of available text that could be obtained ethically, if LLM trainers bothered to put in the work. It seems like Torvalds isn’t concerned with that, and it looks like sashiko only supports LLMs that are known to have been trained on stolen data, which is shitty and I think Torvalds and the Linux maintainers should be taken to task for that. I think LLM makers should get permission from project maintainers before training on their codebases, just as natural-language rightsholders should be asked for permission before using their works for training. I think LLMs trained on ethically sourced data should be permissively licensed and, if they collect revenue, should be expected to kick some of that revenue upstream to the projects they benefit from. I also think such projects could be powered ethically: I have some plans for my own small solar powered server that will run batch jobs when production is higher than my storage capacity. Right now I’m mostly targeting Folding at Home, but I might well run my own LLM trainer if I get enough capacity, and I could see a similar distributed processing network for high-cost jobs from trusted open source LLM projects.
I don’t think you’re wrong about the scope of the downsides, but I also don’t think it makes sense to take them all as a singular block and judge all possible LLM tools by all possible downsides. I think they are problems that can be engineered around with technical and social guidelines for use. And I think it will be down to the open source community to set those guidelines, because I don’t know of any other group that has the expertise and the motivation to do so.
- msage@programming.devEnglish5 days
How about we stop using LLMs and solve world hunger and housing first? With that money being spent on a dead-end technology, we could have had billion developers instead. Instead we burn the planet for… protecting us from AI impact?
- heh@lemmy.worldEnglish11 days
I believe most people’s problem with AI comes from the potentially massive financial bubble and economical damage to come from over-adoption of the technology where it should not be used.
Many people, like Torvalds, know that AI is useful for certain things when used responsibly. Low level programming is one of the best places for it. You’re not solving business problems. These are usually optimization and security problems with verifiable outcomes(ex AI finds bug, you can actually confirm bug exists).
Unfortunately the ease of which you can produce crap with AI causes big problems for everyone trying to actually improve things.
- airgapped@piefed.socialEnglish8 hours
AI can be both a bubble and a useful tool at the same time, a crash won’t make us forget all about it, instead I have a feeling a crash would help mature AI the way dotcom boom did web 2.0
- floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish11 days
Economic damage, environmental damage, concentration of power with multi-billionaire fascists, cultural damage due to huge quantities of slop crowding out everything else, mass unemployment and the exploitation of remaining workers, disempowerment of everyone who doesn’t have the resources to control this technology, destruction of ordinary people’s access to suitably powerful computing machinery so that we’re all forced to either rent access to AI from its corporate gatekeepers or not use it, total surveillance by the state and its favoured corporations, profiling and predictive policing, marketing, etc. That’s quite a lot to object to, and I’m sure there’s more.
- 11 days
AI can also be run and trained locally, on hardware and data you own. The fascist-owned AI is not the only AI in existance
I felt the message was OK-ish but it bothered me that he used the term “social warrior”, which is an older term used by right-wing chuds before they got married to “woke”
