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.
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.
It may be that Linus Torvalds has the political literacy of a doorstop.
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.
ETA: Upon re-reading I see that my “nimrod” comparison can read as an insult. I meant it more in how Bugs Bunny altered the colloquial meaning. I was not trying to be disparaging in any way and apologize if I offended.
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.
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.
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.
DRM is inherently political. Flock cameras are inherently 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.
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.)
obligatory Fuck John Deere
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
More or less, yeah. It produces text that reads like it would fit in its training model.
What do LLMs summarize, though…? The internet. Reddit.4chan.
Garbage in, garbage out.
No it can’t. It can produce text that looks like it fits with it, but it has no knowledge of what its training data, its prompt, or its output mean.
LLMs don’t operate on meaning or information, they operate on the shape of texts.
The fact that they look like they work (as long as you aren’t an expert on the supposed subject matter of their output) would tell us much more about the nature of language and its readers, if we bothered to look, than the apparent meaning of their outputs, but of course the capitalist mind couldn’t care less about that, and given a dumb oracle that appears to give “good enough” answers can’t help but sell it as a superintelligent one that always gives perfectly accurate and correct ones, no matter the consequences.
Not really, no. Maybe as a substitute for lorem ipsum if it weren’t so damn inefficient and morally unsustainable, but that’s about it.
“But the one remaining overworked not yet fired expert can review the output!” you’ll say, falling into the trap of treating the machine as a dumb but hard working intern instead of what it is.
Because the thing with interns is that when they produce garbage it looks like garbage, and the expert can immediately see it and teach the intern why it’s garbage and how to fix it. And eventually the intern will become an expert, and review and train new interns, and society will progress.
But when an LLM produces garbage it’s indistinguishable from correct output at first, second, and even third glance, even by the best experts.
Because LLMs might not have the slightest idea of what a text means, but if they’re good at something it’s at producing correct looking texts.
So the expert ends up wasting orders of magnitude more time trying to determine whether the output is safe or garbage… or simply gives up.
What’s worse, the LLM won’t learn. It won’t become an expert capable of replacing the old one and reviewing and teaching new interns, or obviously LLMs.
The expert will be fired, or retire, or die of overworking and heartbreak, and there will be no one to replace them.
No one to write new content to train new LLMs on.
And even if LLMs were capable of producing new content instead of merely lossly regurgitating their training data, which they aren’t, you can’t train LLMs on their own output. The model collapses. Photocopy of a photocopy, JPEG of a JPEG.
At the point in history when we need progress the most, to face and survive our own hubris from past abuses of nature, science, society, everything will stagnate, and then collapse, and the ignorant wretches who’ll have grown up in a world without teachers, not having to had to use their atrophied brains once in their lives, will ask their oracles “save us, what do we do!?” and the LLMs will reply “You’re right, I was mistaken. I apologize for the confusion. Delegating thought and knowledge to a machine inherently incapable of either might have been a mistake. My bad.”.
Doesn’t look very useful to me, really, quite the contrary… but I suppose I’m just not thinking in terms of the next quarter.
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?