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.?
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.
I have given up trying to have this conversation, especially on Lemmy, but even in general. There is a mass hysteria surrounding anything even tangentiality related to AI. I think there must be something innately human that makes people ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’ when it comes to change and the fear that comes with it.
What I find more productive is to just leave the naysayers and doomers to there own devices. Most people just don’t get it, and that’s okay.
I generally agree, there is a lot of hysteria over this tech, and it will eventually burn itself out. I just find it really disappointing that people on the left refuse to engage in a rational fashion with what’s happening, and what is to be done.
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
That’s what I said?
No, I’m countering what you said by pointing out that there are rational reasons for companies to put models out in the open.
Current techniques cannot give you anything close to the level of inspection you can with software.
So, that just means people need to put the work into improving the techniques. That’s how problems are solved. Last I looked, models like Qwen are actually becoming easier to understand as the article I linked explains.
You always be at a massive disadvantage because of the severally more limited compute available.
Not really because you’d be leveraging a global compute cluster and amortizing the work. But the thing is that it’s not even a competition. Local models just need to be good enough to use. The same way my I don’t need to have a supercomputer at home for my needs, I don’t need a frontier model either. A model like Qwen is already plenty useful, and they will only get better.
raining a model also does nothing for the environmental side of things and just makes things worse
That’s going to continue to happen regardless of how much whinging you do. The question is whether models will be owned by corps or by the public.
The point is to not encourage more people to use the tool that gives control to Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.
You already lost this battle. And on top of that, as you so glibly pointed out in your other reply, an insane amount of money is going into these companies. So these models will obviously continue to be trained and operated. This is the reality:
Normalizing whinging about AI without doing anything productive just means that people who share none of your concerns will be the ones developing it.
I don’t think this is a good faith conversation if we are going to continue to call it being massively used against workers and our overall society just “whining”. I was going to respond with all the other negative effects on human cognition from AI which do not go away no matter who makes it, but I see little point to continuing this
These risks are not different from before and still open source has the advantage of being open to anyone and any agent.
Kernel modules written by US employees with unknown ties to US intelligence was just as much at risk for containing a backdoor as if written by an agent using an LLM with US intelligence ties.
And in both cases intelligence actors or security researchers from around the world can review it all and try to spot backdoors. So can agents with different LLMs behind them.
It would be an issue if there was only one state sanctioned LLM available, but as long as there is world wide competition in training LLMs, opensource will be “reviewed” with competing interests in “mind”.
Software that’s “just a tool” can lock you down and out of what you can do with it.
AI is not “just a tool”. It is highly unethical.
It harms the environment, it harms actual developers, it introduces all sorts of legal issues where copyright is only one of them, it locks you in to a vendor, it makes you dependent of giant tech companies that steal your data and want to monetize your work.
Linus seems to ignore that or does not care about it.
It harms the environment, it harms actual developers, it introduces all sorts of legal issues where copyright is only one of them, it locks you in to a vendor, it makes you dependent of giant tech companies that steal your data and want to monetize your work.
Could you elaborate on this a little? I came here as I’m not very knowledgable when it comes to AI and am genuinely curious. Sadly you’re the only person I’ve seen so far that has made coherent (even if broad) arguments against AI.
I know the environment argument is probably the enormous power demand of AI, and as far as the copyright thing goes, I’ve seen first hand how people abuse voice actors’ livelihoods with shitty imitations of their voices that are also completely devoid of anything resembling skill. But how does AI harm developers, lock you in to a specific vendor or make you dependant on giant tech companies?
based linus
Wow, that’s an incredibly stupid take. Like, the kind that you generally expect from brainwashed dumbasses that don’t even know what is the difference between a screen and a computer.
That’s scary that people would listen to a guy that completely lost his understanding of reality.
“Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid” - your brain on idealism
Isn’t that basically what Linus is saying too, in this quote?
This was only keeping honest people honest.
Linuslop Rustokenvalds
Fuck.
Let’s hope for a slop-free fork or the old man changing his mind on this bullshit.
The former seems unlikely to happen (or at least for the long term).
Edit: other relevant post
Somehow doubt that a bunch of whingers are going to fork Linux successfully, but I’ll wait to be proven wrong.
If people are hurt enough, they will push towards it.
While I totally disagree with both, there are distributions without systemd and there are NEW projects that keep X11 alive and shun Wayland.
Something like this could happen with the Kernel. I’m not the one doing it because while I dislike Linus’ pro-slop stance I don’t really care enough for actively working on something like that…
But if available I’d install it instead of the slop Kernel.
or maybe just time to grow up
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.
They were not “against technology”, that was the propaganda of the ruling class which still gets repeated today. The Luddites were put down by militarily and violently killed. They didn’t fail because they weren’t publicly supported (they were wildly popular) or weren’t against the social relations (they very much were)
Building frontier AI models cost billions of dollars in capital. Any solution involves raising that kind of money, the forces of the money will be put right back against you. It’s also just as likely to be banned if it’s seen as a big enough threat.
The Luddites were skilled artisans, who saw a few capitalists growing rich by introducing machinery to destroy their guilds. So, they set to work to smash the machines thinking that if they could destroy the technology, their artisanal guilds would be saved. And they were predictably crushed by state violence. The machines prevailed because the ruling class wanted to cut costs and increase profits. The same is true today, and those who want to stop these systems from being put into production are merely attacking the symptoms of the underlying material relations.
Also, you’re simply confusing the fact that the US is in a bubble with what it takes to develop new technology. Listening to you, one would think Linux could have never been developed because Microsoft put billions into Windows.
https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeaways-from-the-2026-report
Also, highly unlikely they would get banned, because there’s a huge amount of capital in the US now being invested in companies using open models already. But even if the burger reich banned them why should I give a fuck, I don’t live in that shithole.
Compute is the bottleneck for AI, not labor. Linux was able to develop more because of the labor being done by huge number of people for free and from those employed by other companies working on it. If AI keeps accelerating on the same trajectory, there is little reason to hope for it to get better as the models get larger and training costs get higher
The Luddites were not just smashing machines, they had a list of demands they were trying to build pressure for. They were also trying to get the rights for unions, strikes, abolishing child labor, minimum wages and the things like that which shifted powers back into the favor of workers. They had tried petitioning governments for that for a while before they started smashing things
If the US bans open-weight models, you don’t think a large number of countries would be heavily pressured by industry to do the same?
What part of distributed systems are you still struggling with here? Also, models are getting incredibly more efficient every few months. Qwen 3.8 that runs on a laptop today is comparable to Opus 4.6 from around half a year ago which needed a whole data centre.
People working on local models don’t need to compete with whatever the big corps are doing, they just need to make tools that are good enough to use on your machine. Just the same way Linux didn’t have to do everything Windows did to become usable.
And yeah, Luddites had lists of demands just you do, how’s that work out for them?
And if the US somehow did ban open models, I’m sure the vassals would as well, but again who gives a fuck? The whole west is like 13% of the global population. And it’s imploding economically and politically in real time. Who cares what goes on in this genocidal cesspool?
“Grow up, join the sect. If not you’ll be left out when we all become AI-augmented and fly to Mars”
Thank you for taking your valuable time away from huffing gas to share your invaluable insights.
join the sect says the person who’s against a glorified calculator?
