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Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off: Linux supremo says contributors opposed to AI use can 'just walk away' (lore.kernel.org)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1264750/linus-torvalds-tells-ai-haters-to-fork-off-linux-supremo-says-contributors-opposed-to-ai

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[–] 57 points 2 months ago (26 children)

Lemmy users are sure to have a reasonable reaction to this take.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago (23 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 22 points 2 months ago (19 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    I don't know, what was stopping us from solving world hunger and housing before LLMs? There's always some fresh new way for assholes to make life difficult for all of us, for the benefit of the wealthy few. I don't really see what LLMs have to do with that, other than being in vogue at the moment among the grifter class. It's like seeing a pyramid scheme and deciding that the solution is to ban pyramids. The focus should be on the actual malicious behavior, not whatever trinket they're using to disguise it nowadays.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (11 children)

    Well all I will say is that I do understand the usefulness of LLMs as tools, though I only really use them passively through search results, and always verify the results separately. And I have a fundamental understanding of how they work. While I understand what Linus is getting at in a practical sense, I worry he is putting his head in the sand regarding the heavy handed agendas at work in the implementation of AI as we know it now. And I think that is a definite bad thing to be ignorant of. I personally won't embrace "AI" until it is liberated from the agenda of power and inequality. Though, I cannot but accept its level of influence in daily life, and will attempt to understand and recognize if it fundamentally evolves or changes.

    Edit: "they’re just new and selfish people will try to find an angle with them, same as it’s always been." Just wanted to add that yeah, its pretty highly focused in that way. And until society can fundamentally change, that is and always will be a huge problem applying such technologies. I mean shit, look at the fuckin internet.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (8 children)

    I think if we, as a community, really put our heads together, we could figure out how to define and make useful user-respecting tools that incorporate LLMs. There are a lot of hard problems, like the massive power consumption, and the ethical use of data, that I don't really know how to solve.

    I think a start would be to focus on making smaller, lower-complexity models that are built for purpose, rather than trying to make a jillion-parameter jack-of-all-trades trades model. I think it would also make sense to focus initially on areas where there are already large corpuses of freely available text, like all the writings in the public domain. But I don't really have a good idea of what these tools would be used for, exactly, which is where I'm stuck.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I understand and appreciate where you desire to go with it, I just don't see a current system to support it. Afaik people do make their own AIs/LLMs (recalling an artist's court case regarding the legitimacy of their work), but large scale LLMs do their thing by running roughshod and stealing tons of data and driving up hardware and electricity prices. It is difficult to see an environment where small models prosper compared their lawless corpo counterparts. It would probably be more beneficial to humankind, though.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    Yeah, you put your finger on maybe the biggest problem that I don't have a good answer to yet. The ability to interact with LLMs in natural language comes from an analysis of huge tracts of contemporary human writing, and there's not an ethical corpus that can compare in scope to the corpus of just snatching the whole internet. Maybe they don't need to be strictly "natural" language interactions? Maybe a sufficient ethical corpus could be compiled and maintained somehow? I don't know, this is kinda where I get out of my depth.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    The energy consumption can be measured, very approximately, by the cost of the tokens. If you design agentic tools to make use of fewer, cheaper tokens then you're likely also minimizing the energy usage.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    How vague of a guess is that when people rely on those closed systems? We all know Corporate AI is hiding the actual costs with creative accounting while they enjoy abusing the environment...

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (3 children)

    Comparisons can be made using open AI models. I run some locally on my own hardware, I know exactly how much energy they use.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    I wasn't talking about the closed source models you use. I was talking about the cloud ones you were just discussing.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    And I said comparisons can be made.

    If those cloud models are getting comparable results but using way more electricity, why would companies be running them? They like making profit, don't they? They're not some kind of Captain Planet villains chortling at being maximally wasteful.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    I had enough of this "Big AI agenda".

    Yes the oligarchs at the top are the most evil and corrupted people ever. Sure. Ok. Understood.

    But what does it have to do with Linus and the kernel project ? He is not like vouching for them or even for their specific models. And it's not like there isn't open source AI models too. There is, and pretty good one at that.

    But no, AI is the obligatory Claude code or chatgpt obviously...

    Damn if only Lemmynautes could understand that we can't be dumb enough to consider AI as one big proprietary monolotic block. It is not and Linus is well aware of that.

    And by the way, Linus I'm sure understand very well the agenda of the big evil corps. It's just not his problem. He is leading the kernel open source project. He is not involved in a crusade against AI and I'm so glad he will focus on that instead of "picking a side". If there is anybody I trust to use the tech effectively and pragmatically it's the kernel open source project.

    It's not complicated truly, all AI models are not the same. They dont come from the same business, the same country, they don't have the same licence.

    If we used half the energy we use to vociferate about big corps AI to actually create open source (and copyright respecting) models that would really improve the situation in the future.

    It's more than time for the open source community to wake up and actually create their own models, built ethically and in accord with the OSS ethos.

    Obviously, I'm well aware of the destruction of our planet by AI datacenters but again that is a problem for politicians, not freaking Linus Torvald.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    This is such a bullshit take. Yeah, "open source models" exist, and someone probably uses them for something. Most of the slop being commited is generated by the big ones though. Because, as any sloperator will tell you, only the latest and greatest claude is actually good, and all the problems with your slop is because you didn't use the latest the bestest. So while most of the slop is generated by big corpos, we need to talk about evils of big slopgen corpos, and how they impact the world.
    And when you say "yeah, who cares, if we can use it we need to use it", you're vouching for this shit, you're putting your voice, your money, your support, to worst people that own the worst companies.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    So they are going to autocomplete their takes based on the headline, I hope the irony isn't lost on them.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    He doesn't really specify use cases beyond Sashiko (I believe that's the project they're discussing), which, if I understand correctly, uses an LLM to review kernel patches using a pre-set list of prompts. The output of those prompts presumably gets added to the PR for anyone who cares to read it.

    These outputs sometimes have mistakes in them, so the maintainers must read them with a critical eye, but I think Linus is arguing here that it's sufficiently... "good enough" that including them is helpful to the maintainers, that it catches enough real stuff without wasting too much time on fake stuff. There are always tradeoffs when adding a tool to the stack, and sufficiently rare misfires are probably worth the times it catches real problems that humans miss.

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