Well all I will say is that I do understand the usefulness of LLMs as tools, though I only really use them passively through search results, and always verify the results separately. And I have a fundamental understanding of how they work. While I understand what Linus is getting at in a practical sense, I worry he is putting his head in the sand regarding the heavy handed agendas at work in the implementation of AI as we know it now. And I think that is a definite bad thing to be ignorant of. I personally won’t embrace “AI” until it is liberated from the agenda of power and inequality. Though, I cannot but accept its level of influence in daily life, and will attempt to understand and recognize if it fundamentally evolves or changes.
Edit: “they’re just new and selfish people will try to find an angle with them, same as it’s always been.” Just wanted to add that yeah, its pretty highly focused in that way. And until society can fundamentally change, that is and always will be a huge problem applying such technologies. I mean shit, look at the fuckin internet.
Yes the oligarchs at the top are the most evil and corrupted people ever. Sure. Ok. Understood.
But what does it have to do with Linus and the kernel project ? He is not like vouching for them or even for their specific models. And it’s not like there isn’t open source AI models too. There is, and pretty good one at that.
But no, AI is the obligatory Claude code or chatgpt obviously…
Damn if only Lemmynautes could understand that we can’t be dumb enough to consider AI as one big proprietary monolotic block. It is not and Linus is well aware of that.
And by the way, Linus I’m sure understand very well the agenda of the big evil corps. It’s just not his problem. He is leading the kernel open source project. He is not involved in a crusade against AI and I’m so glad he will focus on that instead of “picking a side”. If there is anybody I trust to use the tech effectively and pragmatically it’s the kernel open source project.
It’s not complicated truly, all AI models are not the same. They dont come from the same business, the same country, they don’t have the same licence.
If we used half the energy we use to vociferate about big corps AI to actually create open source (and copyright respecting) models that would really improve the situation in the future.
It’s more than time for the open source community to wake up and actually create their own models, built ethically and in accord with the OSS ethos.
Obviously, I’m well aware of the destruction of our planet by AI datacenters but again that is a problem for politicians, not freaking Linus Torvald.
I think if we, as a community, really put our heads together, we could figure out how to define and make useful user-respecting tools that incorporate LLMs. There are a lot of hard problems, like the massive power consumption, and the ethical use of data, that I don’t really know how to solve.
I think a start would be to focus on making smaller, lower-complexity models that are built for purpose, rather than trying to make a jillion-parameter jack-of-all-trades trades model. I think it would also make sense to focus initially on areas where there are already large corpuses of freely available text, like all the writings in the public domain. But I don’t really have a good idea of what these tools would be used for, exactly, which is where I’m stuck.
I understand and appreciate where you desire to go with it, I just don’t see a current system to support it. Afaik people do make their own AIs/LLMs (recalling an artist’s court case regarding the legitimacy of their work), but large scale LLMs do their thing by running roughshod and stealing tons of data and driving up hardware and electricity prices. It is difficult to see an environment where small models prosper compared their lawless corpo counterparts. It would probably be more beneficial to humankind, though.
Yeah, you put your finger on maybe the biggest problem that I don’t have a good answer to yet. The ability to interact with LLMs in natural language comes from an analysis of huge tracts of contemporary human writing, and there’s not an ethical corpus that can compare in scope to the corpus of just snatching the whole internet. Maybe they don’t need to be strictly “natural” language interactions? Maybe a sufficient ethical corpus could be compiled and maintained somehow? I don’t know, this is kinda where I get out of my depth.
The energy consumption can be measured, very approximately, by the cost of the tokens. If you design agentic tools to make use of fewer, cheaper tokens then you’re likely also minimizing the energy usage.
Well all I will say is that I do understand the usefulness of LLMs as tools, though I only really use them passively through search results, and always verify the results separately. And I have a fundamental understanding of how they work. While I understand what Linus is getting at in a practical sense, I worry he is putting his head in the sand regarding the heavy handed agendas at work in the implementation of AI as we know it now. And I think that is a definite bad thing to be ignorant of. I personally won’t embrace “AI” until it is liberated from the agenda of power and inequality. Though, I cannot but accept its level of influence in daily life, and will attempt to understand and recognize if it fundamentally evolves or changes.
Edit: “they’re just new and selfish people will try to find an angle with them, same as it’s always been.” Just wanted to add that yeah, its pretty highly focused in that way. And until society can fundamentally change, that is and always will be a huge problem applying such technologies. I mean shit, look at the fuckin internet.
I had enough of this “Big AI agenda”.
Yes the oligarchs at the top are the most evil and corrupted people ever. Sure. Ok. Understood.
But what does it have to do with Linus and the kernel project ? He is not like vouching for them or even for their specific models. And it’s not like there isn’t open source AI models too. There is, and pretty good one at that.
But no, AI is the obligatory Claude code or chatgpt obviously…
Damn if only Lemmynautes could understand that we can’t be dumb enough to consider AI as one big proprietary monolotic block. It is not and Linus is well aware of that.
And by the way, Linus I’m sure understand very well the agenda of the big evil corps. It’s just not his problem. He is leading the kernel open source project. He is not involved in a crusade against AI and I’m so glad he will focus on that instead of “picking a side”. If there is anybody I trust to use the tech effectively and pragmatically it’s the kernel open source project.
It’s not complicated truly, all AI models are not the same. They dont come from the same business, the same country, they don’t have the same licence.
If we used half the energy we use to vociferate about big corps AI to actually create open source (and copyright respecting) models that would really improve the situation in the future.
It’s more than time for the open source community to wake up and actually create their own models, built ethically and in accord with the OSS ethos.
Obviously, I’m well aware of the destruction of our planet by AI datacenters but again that is a problem for politicians, not freaking Linus Torvald.
I think if we, as a community, really put our heads together, we could figure out how to define and make useful user-respecting tools that incorporate LLMs. There are a lot of hard problems, like the massive power consumption, and the ethical use of data, that I don’t really know how to solve.
I think a start would be to focus on making smaller, lower-complexity models that are built for purpose, rather than trying to make a jillion-parameter jack-of-all-trades trades model. I think it would also make sense to focus initially on areas where there are already large corpuses of freely available text, like all the writings in the public domain. But I don’t really have a good idea of what these tools would be used for, exactly, which is where I’m stuck.
I understand and appreciate where you desire to go with it, I just don’t see a current system to support it. Afaik people do make their own AIs/LLMs (recalling an artist’s court case regarding the legitimacy of their work), but large scale LLMs do their thing by running roughshod and stealing tons of data and driving up hardware and electricity prices. It is difficult to see an environment where small models prosper compared their lawless corpo counterparts. It would probably be more beneficial to humankind, though.
Yeah, you put your finger on maybe the biggest problem that I don’t have a good answer to yet. The ability to interact with LLMs in natural language comes from an analysis of huge tracts of contemporary human writing, and there’s not an ethical corpus that can compare in scope to the corpus of just snatching the whole internet. Maybe they don’t need to be strictly “natural” language interactions? Maybe a sufficient ethical corpus could be compiled and maintained somehow? I don’t know, this is kinda where I get out of my depth.
The energy consumption can be measured, very approximately, by the cost of the tokens. If you design agentic tools to make use of fewer, cheaper tokens then you’re likely also minimizing the energy usage.