For those unaware, Linus Torvalds this year has deeply cast his lot with the hyperscale LLMs for development of Linux code, dismissing arguments that this is an abdication of responsibility over that code base.
For those unaware, Linus Torvalds this year has deeply cast his lot with the hyperscale LLMs for development of Linux code, dismissing arguments that this is an abdication of responsibility over that code base.
Copying my comment from another post that cherry-picked a specific quote of his, but ultimately I believe still applies.
My last use of AI is in my post history and was fairly down voted because I was being foolishly ironic.
This said, I don’t really disagree with his take here despite keeping away from AI as much as I am reasonably able. I do my own critical thinking and hate that I have to jump through hoops on the internet to have a simple question answered without some layman’s AI summary that may or may not be even remotely correct or actionable. Even still, when I asked it to check on local real estate laws and provide summaries of possible actions based on a very strict set of parameters, it gave me information that my wife and I were able to bring to a human agent and have things work out better than we had actually expected.
I think a better way of putting it - and I’m still gonna ruffle feathers - is that AI is becoming the new electricity.
Put down your pitchfork and lemme explain.
When electricity came out, people rather reasonably pointed out that simply coming into contact with an electrical device could result in death if one wasn’t careful. On top of that, the infrastructure required for it was expensive, unsightly, and at the time incredibly disruptive to daily life. It was going to ruin and disrupt entire industries that had existed for centuries because it could do things a human could not do unaided.
All of this is to one degree or another entirely true even through to modern times, but electricity has become a ubiquitous resource that humanity would now deeply struggle to live without. I won’t dare compare AI that far as i genuinely believe humans would be significantly better off without it, but the initial Luddite response to electricity has a historical echo here.
I think Linus’ point is more that it can undoubtedly be a useful tool when used in a measured, controlled, intelligent manner, and that it is a genie that is very clearly unwilling to be put back in its bottle. Like it or not it exists, and while we can absolutely be unhappy about it, being blind to its actual real world beneficial uses because the companies that make it are actual festering waste is a bit silly - especially when in the hands of the right chaotic neutral parties these companies are about to have a massive lesson in just how messy their tools have made things.
First I was going to reply with the “I ain’t going to read all of that” meme.
Then I realized you’d use that as an argument later on to defend AI, so I read it.
I have read the same exact arguments so many times, that I just wasted my time on nothing. I’m won’t bother to write the same exact rebuttals I (and others) already have.
Yet AI bros get all angry if we artists dare to draw fanart, because we draw something that already existed. Maybe their brains got cooked by the promise of “infinite, original, and personalized” content…
Meanwhile I actually said:
Your reading comprehension needs work.
My literal only point in all of this has become that tools exist independent of politics. I also think guns are abhorrent, but they exist and we have to deal with them. So it is with AI. The gun and AI are neither independently political items. It is their use which turns them into political topics well worth discussing.
If I were able to Thanos snap both guns and AI off the face of the earth along with all capability to ever produce their like again I would do it without a second thought or care for any of the consequences for it as I believe both are indeed net negatives for humanity.
As i lack that capability, I am going to have to learn how to live my life in a world where these things do exist. I also don’t blame the items themselves for existing, but rather the evil people who build them in the name of ever greater profits.
But you keep putting words and beliefs in other people’s mouths if it makes you feel better, I guess.
You’re falling for the AI vendor propaganda, which paints people who solely not wanting to use the AI, or engage with its output, as extremists, and the furthest thing that can be done about AI. You’re defending AI, you just don’t know it, thanks to popaganda.
Again, you’re the only one saying those things. I literally just finished saying I’d burn it down if I could and you’re telling me I’m defending it.
Learn to read better, please.
I’ll also copy my comment from another thread that defended LLMs as a neutral tool
I never suggested it isn’t problematic, but it is here and apparently here to stay. We can stamp our feet and cry about it or we can learn to live with it and maybe even take advantage of it in what ways it can benefit the intelligent person.
Again, I personally believe AI is a net negative for humanity. But it isn’t up to me any more than its up to you, the existence of this crap.
I heard the same thing about cryoto, nfts, Google glasses, the list goes on.
not sure about NFTs, but crypto revolutionized buying drugs online and the google glass has plenty of corperate copycats (some more like the hololens)
AFAIK silk road and all their clones have been shut down. Maybe you still can? But when was the last time you heard someone doing that?
Also, meta glasses are still getting huge pushback socially.
was mostly thinking about hrt, and things like the epson moverio/Microsoft hololens
Your the first person to say hololense since before the pandemic to me.
I think that says everything I need to. They’re not relevant.
Here’s the thing. What is it that an LLM does? I would argue, it sumarizes. It’s a probabilistic model of human language. Give it a corpus of text, and it can “understand” that data and extract “meaning” from it. Is that useful? Totally. For a number of uses. Many coding tasks, research, translation, etc are really an effort in summarization. Is it going to solve every problem humans ever had? I doubt it. Language is the human model of reality, and we have a tendency to equivocate our model with the real thing. We’re just THAT hard wired for words. I think the hype and the marketing has overshadowed what I think is a very useful application for machine learning. I think Torvalds is overall correct. I feel his position is inconvenient for political reasons. I think that open source stands in stark contrast to the world the big tech “AI” class want to build. But I don’t really think he’s wrong perse.
in a vacuum i would agree with his take but the entire thing is inextricably linked to theft and massive copyright infringement. until the matter is settled in court there’s no way to know if using these things professionally is even legal. it’s a potential poison pill for the kernel and the fact that he’s not acknowledging that is insane to me.
I mean, it’s already been settled in the US that AI slop cannot be copyrighted, so every fucking brainless moron still pushing for it in any professional capacity (including Linus) is being a fucking dumb pile of shit poisoning the codebase with things that cannot be copyrighted or otherwise restricted such as Linux’ current license…
There’s absolutely zero chance AI use ‘becomes a poison pill’ in code at this point. That would implicate effectively every major company on the planet right now, so there’s zero chance any government would ever do something to bring about that scenario. At absolute worst it would simply stop future AI development while letting anything already built go.
the linux foundation is not a major company and it’s in the interest of some of those aforementioned major companies to get the foundation into legal trouble.
Edit: besides, most major corporations don’t license gplv2.
AI is a quarter as old as electricity at this rate, nothing has changed over the past 5 decades nor will. No one smart is arguing anything otherwise.
LLMs are just an expensive ass marketing campaign covering up the largest scale piracy we’ve seen since copyright was invented.
So some people want to take ownership of others work and feel entitled cause its way easier than actually paying people for their work, but that concept is older than humanity.
Add in the lack of reliability and its a joke to use AI in anything other than a hobby project (which Linux technically is I guess)
AI still doesn’t actually exist. Weird how you claim it’s been around fifty years… It hasn’t. At all. Ever. That is the ELIZA effect, which is distinctly NOT “AI”.
You’re still right in that it is effectively a joke being played on the world, though.
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmouth.html
Yes, ‘Artificial Intelligence [AI]’ was literally conjured as a marketing term with the motivation of seeking funding.
Just because there’s a label invoked to encompass an area of research, doesn’t make it legitimate. There’s plenty of pseudoscientific fields that practitioners believe are worthy, like economics or cryptozoology.
that’s really not fair. not every practitioner is from the Austrian School of Cryptids
Is there a reason you insist on using a different definition than people who actually work in the field and then loudly claim they’re the ones using their own terms incorrectly
The professionals use specific terms, like LLM or neural network. Most aren’t buffoons suffering from the ELIZA effect.
They also use “AI” to refer to things more generally when they need to refer to the whole group of technologies. This does not imply they think AI is conscious or whatever; that correlation is entirely a consequence of you using an incorrect definition of AI.
lol no. Sure, THEY know what they’re talking about when they say AI, but you have to be such a clown failing to pay attention if you think they’re immune to the ELIZA effect or that the execs trying to sell this aren’t willingly falling for it. They need it to be more capable than the technology actually is to justify their insane upset of the economy burning trillions on this BS.
I don’t consider executives to be professionals or experts in AI in any sense of the words. For engineers, we agree they use AI to refer to the field generally. I don’t know why you’re bringing up the ELIZA effect, that doesn’t really have anything to do with this unless you think AI = conscious or something similar.
Again, this problem only exists because you are redefining AI to mean something that it doesn’t. Engineers use it to refer to the field in general, and (usually) don’t have any delusions about it meaning the AI is conscious. Executives say whatever they want to get as much money as possible and I don’t care how they’re using the term. Only you, incongruously using it to mean something beyond what the field is today, are getting confused when engineers use it to refer to the field’s current capabilities.
You should read up on thr Luddites, because you’re mischaracterising them. They weren’t anti technology, they were anti capitalist.
IMO, this is the think Linus is missing - the shit has massive political implications in multiple dimensions (it’s being built by fascists and capitalists bent on control of broader business, government, and social systems) and he’s just treating it as if it’s as politically agnostic as a screwdriver.
Yes, though it goes further than that even if you ignore the politics.
Linus is undoubtedly talking about when an LLM is used in a very specific way in his imagination where it’s helping a competent programmer spot some things they might have missed, but the programmer is still diligent and professional and genuinely does take responsibility for ensuring the quality of their commits. Where the delusion comes in is grossly overestimating how many people are actually like that outside of his inner circle of world-level experts. What’s happening in all the other open-source projects is a flood of low quality garbage PRs from meat proxies.
It may be that Linus Torvalds has the politica literacy of a doorstop
He’s a rich, middle-aged, white man from the Nordics.
As a white man from the Nordics, my observation is that his particular demographic doesn’t tend to care much. They have theirs.
Possibly. It would be sad and maybe a little surprising (but not that much). I’ve certainly never seen anything that contradicts that…
I am familiar with their actual history, but the colloquialism has taken on its own life just as the term “nimrod” no longer describes the famous hunter of that name but rather a bumbling buffoon.
As regards the politics of it, we can split these hairs all day. Where do we draw the line between a tool and a weapon? Which tools are acceptable to use and in what ways?
That AI is being used as a political bludgeon is not the fault of AI any more than gunshot wounds are the direct fault of the gun; they are tools being used for particular aims. I consider both equally dangerous in the right (wrong) hands, but by that same token a gun can be used to feed a family when used for hunting just as AI has provided monetary benefits to regular working people.
A tool cannot in and of itself be political. Its use and application absolutely can.
If a tool cannot in and off itself be political then why has Apple removed the “neutral tool” of ice block?
Because Apple is a political entity and have their own agenda.
Any tracking tool of any description can be used for personal safety or nefarious means.
Rocks aren’t political, but they can still be used to split somebody’s skull open as easily as they can be used to drive a nail. They’re tools, and the hands that use them determine their politics. That still doesn’t make the tool inherently political.
If you cannot tell the difference between a rock and ice block I’m not sure what to tell you.
elmer fudd isn’t a bumbling buffoon.
you’d seem like a bumbling buffoon around this too. i mean c’mon.
Not trying to kink shame, but furry is the opposite of a turn on for me.
You do you, though.
First of all how dare you
There is no such thing as, “just a tool”, just as there is no topic that cannot be made political.
Stop being a willfully ignorant fuckface.
Sure thing, spanky…
You’ve already been linked to valid ideas. Ignore them to everyones’ detriment.
I disagree, and I’m not alone: https://gomakethings.com/articles/all-tech-is-political/
I wouldn’t dare do the disservice of judging the article (in full) purely on title, but “technology” includes the hammer, the wheel, and all the way around to sticks and fire.
Again, I am willing to debate the ethics of use of any given technology all day as that is absolutely a conversation worth having, especially with some technologies like spy satellites and permanently-connected IOT devices alongside LLMs.
But technology itself isn’t inherently political.
Now I’m clicking the link.
Edit: Upon reading, I fully take their point, but my own lens of it is more that everything is within the realm of politics rather than innately political itself. Tractors aren’t inherently political, but John Deere managed to make them so. Actors using, to my earlier point, any technology as a lever for politics doesn’t inherently make that technology political.
I appreciate that viewpoint immensely however, even though I don’t fully align with it myself.
DRM is inherently political. Flock cameras are intentionally political. AI data centers are inherently political. Many tools and technologies are inherently political.
DRM is a tool to protect IP and can (though often does not) protect the individual who created the IP.
Flock cameras are really just cameras that are utilizing other tools to track people. The company using them in that way are the political ones. The tool being used as it is just happens to be the point of contention.
Data centers weren’t really a (Big) problem til they started being used for AI. So again, it is the use case rather than the tool itself.
I want to be abundantly clear that I am not actually arguing for any of these things as i think Flock et al should be slow-roasted one inch at a time just as a starter and our warm-up round for what happens to Meta and Google and Palantir and so on.
The semantic/pedantic part of me just kicks against blanket statements that, when analyzed, tend to be on shakier ground than it first appeared.
How about grok? Apolitical?
Hilariously yes. The fact that primarily Nazis feed it and warp its data and output continuously to suit their needs is what makes it a political tool rather than being innately political.
I will absolutely die on this hill.
What possible beneficial use can it have? Teaching rational humans like you and me how to recognize dog whistle bullshit and how to deal with it properly - up to and including RUD and permanent disposal.
obligatory Fuck John Deere
I think you’re assigning too much free will to people and societies. If you take the Marxist perspective that technology creates its own social infrastructure - who owns what, who does what, who gets the benefits, who receives power and who is disposessed - then technology can be seen as inherently political. If and when a technology appears, that reshapes society in ways that significantly change the benefits distribution of society’s labour, the distinction between the inert technology itself and its effects on society becomes an academic discussion. Even if this technology can only reshape society when that society exists and is combined with the technology. So rather than focusing on the academic distinction, I think people would care more about focusing on the social effects, which are political, and whether there are opportunities to make these effects benefit them (us).
I think we are ultimately in agreement with a subtly different perspective on things.
Nothing is inherently political, but everything is ultimately within the realm of politics. Land itself isn’t political until people draw lines on it and start making claims.
Inert, lifeless things are not themselves inherently political. Their uses and the people who decide such make them so.
Get out of here with your nuanced takes and reading entire articles!
This is Lemmy good sir, and we crucify people based on general vibes and extreme positions!
Off to the downvotes!
My bad, I’ll go punch a libertarian to make up for it now.
Oh shit, I think that was a Lemmy user who went so far left they Pac-Man’d their way to the lib right!
Legalize nuclear bombs
legalize the weed grenade
Obviously there is a spectrum between sewing needles and nuclear weapons… But I think it’s clear that even e.g. stone axes have had meaningful impacts on the structure of society and also on politics as a subset of that (e.g. their use had implications for power relationships, perhaps as a weapon, perhaps as a way to increase socioeconomic status, etc.)
Which makes it about as politically agnostic as a computer. Technology doesn’t have morality.
I don’t know automated turrets that target children in Gaza sounds pretty immoral. I could say the baby skull seeking bullets them selves aren’t nessisarly immoral but its the use of said bullets that makes them evil, but I don’t see the need to make a distinction.
Algorithms that face book used for no reason other than to make you feel depressed to sell more ads feels pretty immoral too. Systems and tools developed to perpetuate slavery, is another one.
There’s so much technology that was explicitly made for evil intent that serves no purpose outside of its original intent, where I feel I can blanketly call it immoral.
I could nitpick most of these, but it seems we don’t actually disagree here since if an “immoral” technology were to get a morally good or neutral use it’d suddenly be moral under your definition.
My point was some technologies are made in such a way that they can only be immoral, or was made in a way where the only use from said technology is to do as much damage as possible. I am not sure we are on the same page.
Maybe in 1000 years we will find a use for all the land mines that are in the ground after wars. Its not the mines themselves that are immoral, its the people that lay the mines that are evil. We should leave the mines because they might serve a valueable purpose later and suddenly start saving lives. Despite the fact that mines are known as the most destructive vindictive thing you can do to acivilian population. They are only made to harm people, and often innocent people generations later long detatched from the original conflict.
If there was a machine that launched baby corpses at our targets, and required the blood of virgins to run and was only used to psychologically traumatize anyone who seen it, would my point be more clear? I could argue that sure maybe the machine isn’t technically immoral if you don’t run it. But we all know why the machine was made for, and I don’t see any reason to try to make a distinction between who is immoral when it seems pretty straight forward.
Sorry I’m one of those insufferable well aclhuuually guys we are kind of on the same page and arguing over words and how to use them when I can barely spell.
You know what that’s a good point. I guess there are technologies with no plausible non-evil purpose (thinking of torture implements and the like here).
Technology use does though, and technology without use is… Nothing?
I don’t know, computers are pretty neat as long as you don’t turn them on.
Sure, but that means that ultimately use is what decides morality, so who developed a certain product or technology doesn’t matter for using it.
Who developed it: no, probably not that much. Who is selling it/pushing it, absolutely. And users also inherently interact with those social and political structures, e.g. through working within a capitalist organisation (as most of us do), and influencing it’s evolution (as most of us do, though often unintentionally)
But products have, and in our society, can we separate technology from products?
No they don’t? Climate concerns aside, how is that even supposed to work?
A nuanced and rational take on AI on MY Lemmy?! Unacceptable!!
I can, uh, go read some Marx if you need? Would that make it better?