The titel is clickbaitish. It’s good that Linus is open to new things and updates his views. As pointed out by the article he is no ai evangelist, but rather pragmatic.
AI help over text isn’t that bad…or it’s not as bad as the shitty images and videos that people are pumping out. I’m not above asking it for help with something linux-y 'cause I’m a noob and people on forums tend to be a little mean sometimes. :P But I actually attempt to memorize and learn what it’s telling me and also I check its sources.
But “90% marketing” and AI being useful isn’t mutually exclusive.
I’d say AI is even 95% marketing but I still use it for the other 5%, where it’s actually useful. It’s just waaaaaay too expensive for the 5% use case usually.
I’d go for smaller, more specialised models instead of trying to fit everything in a broadly incompetent jack of all trades, master of none type of LLM like they’re currently doing.
For aiding programming it beats stackoverflow (thank goldness I dislike SO …)
But be prepared for it to lie, make stuff up, loose context etc. AI works best if you show it the way. Hold its hand and lead it to where it should go.
Otherwise it’ll cry in the corner talking to itself.
Also it cannot create real new data, only glue old datasets together with pva
Being slightly more useful isn’t the only problem AI needs to solve. What about morality issue? Sure, slavery is very useful, but some of you, including me, ban Nestlé products. Why do you not have the same standard with products that are produced by, or assisted in production with AI?
If you take (read: steal) a little its a crime. If you pilfer the internets EnTiRe Dataset, its an innovation.
Wat
Because AI used to suck and it no longer sucks as hard.
Oh it does, especially in the wrong hands
The point is that in the correct hands it does not.
Then how do you stop its wrong-hand usage ?
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If you want it to be used by the right hands just cut everyone’s left hand. /j
Insisting on high standards for code readability and quality - even higher than before GenAI was a thing - could help.
Ofc, but even before LLMs, executives wanted to get things fast in any way possible, allowing for crappy code to get shipped. LLMs made it far easier and likable since “AI SMART”
That’s why the Linux Kernel isn’t run by executives. They want quality.
Thankfully, Linux doesn’t have executives and shareholders like Windows does… right?
If they fork, they leave the main branch AI free, doing their own thing. This way the main branch does not go down the toilet with AI. This is good.
I think you may be misunderstanding the situation. He’s telling AI critics to stop complaining or fork. If that happens, the main branch will still have AI submissions, and the fork will be the AI-free one.
Important to note: Torvalds is not an LLM evangelist, nor does he just accept AI slop uncritically. The official policy is that LLM written/assisted code is fine, but the quality must hit the bar expected of Linux kernel submissions, and the submitter takes full responsibility for the code correctness whether they personally wrote it or not. Just submitting LLM code with no verification or tests is a great way of getting banned from submitting pull requests and getting a very angry email from Linus.
And soon we’ll learn he has an AI girlfriend/chatbot. These big ego types are low hanging fruit for the lying, ego inflation machines.
