I’m glad Linus is pragmatic about this, ethical questions aside LLM’s are a highly valuable tool in software development and they are likely to continue to improve. Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are. Open weight LLM’s have also come a long way and are already good enough for daily use.
I think the better analogy is, the advances in rocketry made under hitler were pretty neat and just because Hitler was an evil guy who did evil shit doesn’t mean we should have thrown that away. By all means stop giving money and influence to the big AI companies, but the advances made can still be repurposed.
Yes so of course my actual opinion is a little more nuanced than this. I absolutely see the uses of AI, I won’t deny that. I just fundamentally disagree with the way it is being used right now (by which I mean the gas-turbine-powered datacenters it requires, the noise pollution they create, the unethical/outright illegal acquiring of training data.
If you’re using a local model, whose training did not deprive actual people of huge amounts of water or electricity, and did not use stolen data, I’m all for it. But most people aren’t, they’re using ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever Microsoft is making.
Continuing your analogy, this would be like flying rockets manufactured by the third reich, not other companies using the same technologies.
The main difference is that rockets are expressly for the purpose of murdering people, so I would argue that the research shouldn’t be continued or done at all.
Fortunately I’m pretty sure that people developing these computer programs are serious about trying not to murder people - even if just for legal reasons.
find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are
I’ve been reading this for 3 years and all I’ve seen so far is my peers making more work for me by going on wild goose chases and making me wade through slop. I do believe there are ways to use it responsibly and productively but that is definitely not what is happening on average.
I don’t understand why so many people decided to take “LLMs increase productivity” as an axiom instead of using their fucking eyes and looking at what is happening around them.
I think most misplaced critic comes from people not understanding or knowing the different types of AI. Some even hate all types of intelligence it seems.
You conflate one type of AI with all the other ones. Call it LLM or generative AI.
I programmed AI 20 years ago, it still is AI but doesn’t use datacenters. I programmed deep neural networks ten years ago, it did not use datacenters either.
You didn’t pirate the collective works of humanity to train on, while under a society that requires intellectual property rights to ensure those creators are compensated, in order to undercut them twice (once to train and once to replace them)
You didn’t pollute the sky, dry the soil, bulldoze people’s homes to make your chessbot.
You didn’t corner the market on components to brute force the solution to declare yourself computer god, where everyone must come to you for compute.
Gen AI seeks to replace humans and it’s not even sentient. I don’t give a single fuck how useful a fancy algorithm is, it’s not ok with me if it’s designed to destroy my life.
Well do the work and call it for what it is, not just “AI”.
Generative AI.
LLM
Is it truly that hard?
I mean you seem to want to, and thus we can have a discussion about it, which I favour instead of having people just being generally angry it seems.
The day when it doesn’t crush the environment, should we use gen AI to help us in our daily lives? Or should we not? Is there something good in it? Or isn’t it? I’d love seing constructive discussions but they just get globbed by people thinking with their gut it seems. Like if you don’t hate “AI” then you’re pro genocide.
Why should we indulge your hypothetical? They’re actively building fossil fuel powered data centers so it’s not even moving in that direction.
And most tech literate people that are anti-genAI would also prefer if it didn’t completely usurp the term AI or that everything historically called ML got also got sucked in. You’re acting like anti people made that happen but it was the boosters and now AI=chatgpt is in the common lexicon. Nitpicking their language when you obviously know damn well what they mean is just silly.
They did, just on a smaller scale, and they used all games ever played by high-level players. LLMs and image generators were stealing data years before they became viable. And nobody gave a shit.
Let’s not pretend most people give a shit about ethics or the environment. Those were impacted long before AI became viable in any way. People hate on AI because it’s affecting everyday prices and employment. Ethics and environment are just convenient shiny arguments few actually stand behind.
If tomorrow billionaires turned around and said “actually, here’s UBI for everyone, provided by AI!”, most people would be cheering on intellectual theft and destruction of this earth, and call everyone still against it selfish and regressive.
Ethics and environmental destruction are “convenient shiny arguments”?? Go fuck yourself you delusional shill. Praying for a billionaire saviour while gagging on their boots, fuck you.
Most people don’t give a shit about ethics and the environment. They care about the well being of themselves, the well being those close to them, and their comfort, ABOVE ALL ELSE. even if they won’t admit it to themselves.
Delusional? I wish I was. Look at the last 30 years, how many protested to get climate change taken seriously? How many raised their voices against various human rights violations around the world? A drop in a bucket, that’s how many. Most people just don’t give a shit about anything that doesn’t affect them and it’s plain to see.
So yes, for majority of people, ethics and environmental destruction are “convenient shiny arguments” that make them feel good about themselves when they virtue signal them on social media and then forget about them 5min later.
Curse me all you want, the world of today is of our collective making.
Please understand that ChatGPT was released in November 2022.
And also understand that the distinction between chess and ChatGPT is the point of the comment. These two things both use AI but one is harmless and useful while the other is not.
I’m glad Linus is pragmatic about this, ethical questions aside LLM’s are a highly valuable tool in software development and they are likely to continue to improve. Any engineer fighting the use of LLM’s will ultimately find that their peers are achieving more in a shorter time then they are. Open weight LLM’s have also come a long way and are already good enough for daily use.
And his here is the problem. Oh yeah lets just waive off the biggest critisicm on and issue of AI.
Hitler was a pretty neat guy, ethnic cleansing aside.
And before you say this, no, i am not comparing you to hitler, I’m only using an over the top example to hopefully make my point more clear.
I think the better analogy is, the advances in rocketry made under hitler were pretty neat and just because Hitler was an evil guy who did evil shit doesn’t mean we should have thrown that away. By all means stop giving money and influence to the big AI companies, but the advances made can still be repurposed.
Yes so of course my actual opinion is a little more nuanced than this. I absolutely see the uses of AI, I won’t deny that. I just fundamentally disagree with the way it is being used right now (by which I mean the gas-turbine-powered datacenters it requires, the noise pollution they create, the unethical/outright illegal acquiring of training data.
If you’re using a local model, whose training did not deprive actual people of huge amounts of water or electricity, and did not use stolen data, I’m all for it. But most people aren’t, they’re using ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever Microsoft is making.
Continuing your analogy, this would be like flying rockets manufactured by the third reich, not other companies using the same technologies.
Will the Tesla be the next Beetle?
The main difference is that rockets are expressly for the purpose of murdering people, so I would argue that the research shouldn’t be continued or done at all.
Fortunately I’m pretty sure that people developing these computer programs are serious about trying not to murder people - even if just for legal reasons.
Rockets literally got us to the moon what do you mean.
Wow, just speedrunning Godwin’s Law, aren’t we?
I guess I’m going to go back to work and talk to my five LLM sessions that are working on different tickets.
Wasting all that extra water will certainly teach him a lesson.
“Ai is literally Hitler”
-fediverse user, 2026
I hope you’re joking, but I did explicitly state that was not my intention.
Although that’s basically true…
Yeah, ethical, environmental, legal and fuck the consumer memory questions aside.
I remember people being angry at IDEs for making programming too easy and belittling code colourization as for children.
There will always be a crowd that wants everything to stay the way they know it.
Some people still think that digital artists aren’t real artists.
deleted by creator
I’ve been reading this for 3 years and all I’ve seen so far is my peers making more work for me by going on wild goose chases and making me wade through slop. I do believe there are ways to use it responsibly and productively but that is definitely not what is happening on average.
I don’t understand why so many people decided to take “LLMs increase productivity” as an axiom instead of using their fucking eyes and looking at what is happening around them.
No, pragmatically speaking, LLMs and in general AI will only make code worse each day.
Well it’s about time those slackers caught up. And all they needed was a slop machine.
I think most misplaced critic comes from people not understanding or knowing the different types of AI. Some even hate all types of intelligence it seems.
Especially their own. Every single day, the backlash looks more like garden-variety anti-intellectualism to me.
Chess engines have been using AI, specifically, neural networks, for years before ChatGPT or other LLMs. Nobody complained.
Chess engines didn’t require data centers that guzzle water and spit out pollution like an 18th century factory.
Exactly right. That is the distinction I’m trying to draw.
Here we go again!
You conflate one type of AI with all the other ones. Call it LLM or generative AI.
I programmed AI 20 years ago, it still is AI but doesn’t use datacenters. I programmed deep neural networks ten years ago, it did not use datacenters either.
And that’s why no one is opposed to those.
You didn’t pirate the collective works of humanity to train on, while under a society that requires intellectual property rights to ensure those creators are compensated, in order to undercut them twice (once to train and once to replace them)
You didn’t pollute the sky, dry the soil, bulldoze people’s homes to make your chessbot.
You didn’t corner the market on components to brute force the solution to declare yourself computer god, where everyone must come to you for compute.
Gen AI seeks to replace humans and it’s not even sentient. I don’t give a single fuck how useful a fancy algorithm is, it’s not ok with me if it’s designed to destroy my life.
Well do the work and call it for what it is, not just “AI”.
Generative AI.
LLM
Is it truly that hard?
I mean you seem to want to, and thus we can have a discussion about it, which I favour instead of having people just being generally angry it seems.
The day when it doesn’t crush the environment, should we use gen AI to help us in our daily lives? Or should we not? Is there something good in it? Or isn’t it? I’d love seing constructive discussions but they just get globbed by people thinking with their gut it seems. Like if you don’t hate “AI” then you’re pro genocide.
Sorry for the rant!
Why should we indulge your hypothetical? They’re actively building fossil fuel powered data centers so it’s not even moving in that direction.
And most tech literate people that are anti-genAI would also prefer if it didn’t completely usurp the term AI or that everything historically called ML got also got sucked in. You’re acting like anti people made that happen but it was the boosters and now AI=chatgpt is in the common lexicon. Nitpicking their language when you obviously know damn well what they mean is just silly.
What “hypothetical”? I couldn’t be more clear.
They did, just on a smaller scale, and they used all games ever played by high-level players. LLMs and image generators were stealing data years before they became viable. And nobody gave a shit.
Let’s not pretend most people give a shit about ethics or the environment. Those were impacted long before AI became viable in any way. People hate on AI because it’s affecting everyday prices and employment. Ethics and environment are just convenient shiny arguments few actually stand behind.
If tomorrow billionaires turned around and said “actually, here’s UBI for everyone, provided by AI!”, most people would be cheering on intellectual theft and destruction of this earth, and call everyone still against it selfish and regressive.
Ethics and environmental destruction are “convenient shiny arguments”?? Go fuck yourself you delusional shill. Praying for a billionaire saviour while gagging on their boots, fuck you.
Most people don’t give a shit about ethics and the environment. They care about the well being of themselves, the well being those close to them, and their comfort, ABOVE ALL ELSE. even if they won’t admit it to themselves.
Delusional? I wish I was. Look at the last 30 years, how many protested to get climate change taken seriously? How many raised their voices against various human rights violations around the world? A drop in a bucket, that’s how many. Most people just don’t give a shit about anything that doesn’t affect them and it’s plain to see.
So yes, for majority of people, ethics and environmental destruction are “convenient shiny arguments” that make them feel good about themselves when they virtue signal them on social media and then forget about them 5min later.
Curse me all you want, the world of today is of our collective making.
What are you talking about?
Chess using neural nets didn’t happen until around 2017 with Alpha Zero, based on Google DeepMind.
Ie… Two years after OpenAI was founded. ChatGPT is part of the exact same tech rush.
Nobody complained because chess is harmless, ChatGPT is not 🤷
Please understand that ChatGPT was released in November 2022.
And also understand that the distinction between chess and ChatGPT is the point of the comment. These two things both use AI but one is harmless and useful while the other is not.
Lol you angered the luddites lol.