Linus going beastmmode
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Linus Torvalds responded with an emphatic rejection of tool usage declarations.
He wrote:
What you are about is something entirely different. It has nothing to do with “expectations”, and it has everything to do with your hangups.
I don’t understand this whole idiotic concept of “don’t use AI for X”.
Here’s a new rule just for you: don’t use compilers for any of your kernel submissions.
Because if you can’t show that you really understand what the machine is actually doing by writing your code in assembler, then I don’t want to see your code contribution. You clearly aren’t competent if you can’t write it that way.
And btw, you had better not use an editor to write that commit message either.
Because I need you to show me that you can actually write a good commit message without using tools that make it easy to backspace and hide the mistakes you made while typing.
Ok?
Because otherwise those tool-assisted commits of yours clearly aren’t showing that you know what you are doing.
Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be?
So no. We’re not going to make stupid rules that say “you can’t use tools for X”.
The kind of expectations I have is that people do their best and I expect people to understand what they are doing.
But that understanding has very little to do with what tools they use.
And quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools. ®
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The open source software movement was very much founded on the idea of being concerned about what kinds of tools we use as a society. Software that’s “just a tool” can lock you down and out of what you can do with it. Same argument can just as well be made that people were “shying away from using new and interesting tools” by running free software instead of Microsoft’s new priority stuff that locks you in
AI similarly gives massive control to a handful of companies. They have already used that leverage to intentionally sandbag tasks without telling you, when they think it’s against their economic interests (model distillation and AI research). Is it not possible to imagine that goes further, they would use that leverage to slip in backdoor, not report classes of bugs, etc.?
Torvalds has never been a Free Software guy. Open source is a convenience to him. Why should he allow blobs in the kernel otherwise? They do the job and arguably don’t violate the GPL. That’s all he’s ever been concerned with.
Torvalds has never been a Free Software guy.
That’s all I need to know.
Do explain how open models like Qwen that you can run locally give massive control to handful of companies. In fact, what seems obvious is that using and improving these models is precisely what takes control away from these companies. People who started the free software movement didn’t cry like a bunch children about how much they hated software. They had the brains to understand the problem wasn’t the software itself, but rather who controls it. So, they went out and built open versions of the software that weren’t corporate owned. And try guess what tools they used initially to do that since open software didn’t exist yet. Your mind is about to be blown.
Only a handful of companies make open weight models, and those models are not made for charity. They want either market share and/or control. Making your own model is not like making your own software because the capital cost are extraordinarily high. The masses will not have the billions in funds they would need need to train these models
Unlike open source code, you cannot check what’s actually in the open weight models. Worse still, you can hide things that trigger on very specific words (poison attacks can be intentional by the model maker or put by other actors in the public data). Fine tuning attempts are also no escape from hidden features you don’t even know to look for
The reason Chinese companies are making open models is very simple actually, and has fuck all to do with charity. LLMs are a form of a general commodity, and it’s not a viable business model to monetize them directly. Trying to compete on model quality is a race to the bottom. Anything one lab can do, others can figure out a few months later. So, you have to keep investing more and more money just to keep ahead. Chinese companies realized this early, and that’s why they release the model in the open, aiming for the high end of the value chain building customized services and integrations tha capture the market. My expectation is that LLMs will become like Linux where nobody really makes any money off the tech directly. But you’ll see platforms like AWS built on top of it.
Also, not sure what the rationale for companies releasing open models would be to trigger some unspecified poisoning in a coding model. Like what exactly is it gonna do when running locally?
Meanwhile, you absolutely can inspect the weights and there are now plenty of tools for doing just that. It’s an active area of research, but these things aren’t black boxes people make them out to be.
Finally, there are completely open models as well with training data, and source released in the open. None of them are frontier quality, but they are certainly a starting point.
There also projects like petals for doing distributed training. There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t have something like SETI@home for training models on a network. This is what people should be putting their energy into instead of whinging endlessly, as if OpenAI or Anthropic give a flying fuck that some brave lib made yet another ‘AI slop’ comment on a niche social media platform.
and has fuck all to do with charity
That’s what I said?
you absolutely can inspect the weights
Current techniques cannot give you anything close to the level of inspection you can with software. Worse still, techniques of frontier AI labs are moving in the opposite direction with it getting harder to understand over time and less going into things like chain of thought
There also projects like petals for doing distributed training
You always be at a massive disadvantage because of the severally more limited compute available. Additionally, distributed computing not inside the same data center adds massively increased latency
Training a model also does nothing for the environmental side of things and just makes things worse
instead of whinging endlessly as if OpenAI or Anthropic give a flying fuck that some brave lib made yet another ‘AI slop’ comment on a niche social media platform.
That’s 100% missing the point. The point is to not encourage more people to use the tool that gives control to Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. Social stigma and pushback is the point. People use things less when it’s seen as uncool. Normalizing AI use just means it’s going to be used more against your interests
Fuck.
Let’s hope for a slop-free fork or the old man changing his mind on this bullshit.
or maybe just time to grow up
“Grow up, join the sect. If not you’ll be left out when we all become AI-augmented and fly to Mars”
join the sect says the person who’s against a glorified calculator?
My calculator has 100% accuracy, always, it’s never wrong. If AI were like that it’d be great.
And calculators can’t be tweaked to subtly change messaging to push a narrative, or a product, or whatever.
Calculators didn’t steal the work of all humanity to try to put them out of a job.
Calculators don’t really get used for scams by cloning people’s voices.
Could go on and on how calculators and LLMs are different.
This is the kind of arguments people made against the free-software movement in the first place. That it’s somehow more mature to not care about consequences of what we do and how we do it
I think it’s exactly the other way around
The difference is that free-software movement is about rolling up your sleeves and actually making alternatives as opposed to throwing a tantrum like spoiled children which is what you all are. You lot are just a modern day iteration of Luddites who were raging against the technology as opposed to social relations that resulted in the technology being used in abusive ways. And lacking basic understanding of the problem you are doomed to fail the same way as your predecessors.
The comparison to the luddites is interesting as you’re tacitly saying “no you guys are right but your fucked anyway”.
There is no good end with this technology. None. It will be used to abuse the working class, it will alienate workers from their labor, and it will bring an enormous amount of harm to vast numbers of people. This technology gives nothing in return for this loss except the ability to consume faster.
These discussions never focus on the fact that this tool optimizes the, already, most efficient part of the human supply chain, ideation and design. This tool does not make any of the other bottlenecks that slow human progress faster, those being implementation, adoption, and translation of solutions to different environments. The human race had the tools to solve world hunger shortly after the invention of nitrogenated fertilizer; yet here we are. The human race created a source of nearly infinite clean energy with negative temperature-coefficient fission reactors; yet here we are.
But you’re ultimately right. The luddites lost, we’ll lose, and we’re fucked.
No, that’s not what I’m saying at all. The Luddites were highly skilled workers, who saw a few capitalists growing rich by introducing machinery to substitute for their own skill. So, they set to work to burn the factories down thinking that if they could destroy the machines, the problem would be solved. But technological advances could not be stopped by mere vandalism. The Luddites ultimately failed in their efforts because they failed to grasp the material forces driving the march of history. The machines prevailed because the ruling class wanted to cut costs and increase profits. The evils of the Industrial Revolution grew out of the possession of the means of production which grants the power to determine how technology is used. The same is true today, and it is why similar attempts to boycott AI are doomed to fail. Those who want to stop these systems from being put into production are merely attacking the symptoms of the underlying material relations.
It is not the inherent qualities of machinery that should be condemned here, but rather the class relations within which it happens to be applied. This is precisely what Marx articulated showing that technology does not exist as an isolated phenomenon, but is dominated by the social structure of the society in which it happens to occur. To control the means of production collectively is to make technology serve human needs rather than merely increase the profits of the rich. That is the very lesson that the Luddites missed, and that a great many critics of AI are missing today as well.
The rational strategy for those who have come to the conclusion that corporate AI cannot be trusted, which is itself very much a correct one, should be to focus their energy on ways to develop this technology outside the stranglehold of corporations. We already have a powerful example in the form of open source software. And with the release of Chinese model weights, there is a solid foundation to build upon.
The more open models are used, the less demand there will be for the proprietary ones. These models are the tools that people can run on their own machines, and under their own control. Developing and using open alternatives to paid APIs cuts directly into the profits of the corporations renting out LLMs. A mere boycott will not alter the balance of economic forces or change the status quo. If you want to resist, do it constructively by encouraging the use and development of this technology in the open.
While I agree with your materialist assessment here comrade my primary point of contention is the incentive structure present in these tools. As Iris best put it in her comparison to Heidegger’s human-gestalt model, the human-llm gestalt is an ugly one.
We are on the same page as to the failures of the luddites, my argument is that these tools are anti-worker at their core. Even if the tools are cheap and abundant that would not resolve the fact that they alienate workers from their labor to a degree that can only be mitigated with heavy amounts of regulation and restriction. In contrast your position my take is not that an abundance of the tool will democratize its use, its that the only way to use it safely is with a dictatorship of the proletariat.
This is fun :)
