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. ®
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.
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”.
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?
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.
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
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:
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
That’s not really beast mode. That’s a guy with a god complex not understanding the problem after refusing to acknowledge he’s not the only one who cares about Linux for the past twenty years.
the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools.
You know who else isn’t shying away from the new tools? Trump and his cronies. Like this argument means literally nothing. People like Peter Thiel have said they want the world to end, these are the lines of people not shying away from the tools that Torvalds is aligning himself with.
Dude needs to fuck off and stop being a single point of failure.
You know who else isn’t shying away from the new tools? Trump and his cronies.
Hard to think of a poorer argument against AI use.
In line with the rest of the comments here so far where there’s lots of anti AI rage but little to no coherent arguments that specify how Linus using AI to code is a bad thing. No specifics, lots of vague beating around the bush, highly emotive language.
My point wasn’t to lay out every argument against using LLMs. That’s been done ad nauseum elsewhere (not this comment thread no but other communities).
My point was his supposed beast mode was a poor argument for them by pointing out the exact same argument works both ways. Both smart people and dumb people are using them.
What the fuck are you on about?
There is so much myopia here from you it’s not even funny.
These tools are not going to go away.
This is like saying Peter Thiel uses Javascript
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.
Nah, Linus’s entire point is that LLMs are just a tool people use to build things, and drawing some arbitrary line between the tools you’re used to and ones you’re not is idiotic.
Linus going beastmmode
"
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. ®
"
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.
That’s all I need to know.
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”.
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.
That’s what I said?
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
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
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
No, I’m countering what you said by pointing out that there are rational reasons for companies to put models out in the open.
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.
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.
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.
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
amazing counterpoint as always
based linus
That’s not really beast mode. That’s a guy with a god complex not understanding the problem after refusing to acknowledge he’s not the only one who cares about Linux for the past twenty years.
You know who else isn’t shying away from the new tools? Trump and his cronies. Like this argument means literally nothing. People like Peter Thiel have said they want the world to end, these are the lines of people not shying away from the tools that Torvalds is aligning himself with.
Dude needs to fuck off and stop being a single point of failure.
Hard to think of a poorer argument against AI use.
In line with the rest of the comments here so far where there’s lots of anti AI rage but little to no coherent arguments that specify how Linus using AI to code is a bad thing. No specifics, lots of vague beating around the bush, highly emotive language.
My point wasn’t to lay out every argument against using LLMs. That’s been done ad nauseum elsewhere (not this comment thread no but other communities).
My point was his supposed beast mode was a poor argument for them by pointing out the exact same argument works both ways. Both smart people and dumb people are using them.
This is not the gotcha you seem to think it is…
What the fuck are you on about? There is so much myopia here from you it’s not even funny. These tools are not going to go away. This is like saying Peter Thiel uses Javascript
If you think I’m arguing here that they’re gonna go away then please, please, please, go take a reading comprehension class.
I’m arguing Linus’s point that smart people use LLMs is a piss take that shows zero understanding of the world around him. That’s it.
I just also happen to wish LLMs would go away for moral and ecological reasons.
That itself is a piss take from you. What projects have you used LLM’s in for code assist activities (and I’m not talking vibecode slop)?
Ahhhhh fuck bro. I didn’t know trump used AI. Does he use computers too? I already stopped using a phone and diapers because I saw him using them.
Ahhhh fuck bro. I’m sorry you’re too busy meming to comprehend a point.
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
“Everyone who disagrees with me is stupid” - your brain on slop machines
Like that’s Linus’s entire point. “I’m smart, you’re dumb. Fall in line”. Not great
Nah, Linus’s entire point is that LLMs are just a tool people use to build things, and drawing some arbitrary line between the tools you’re used to and ones you’re not is idiotic.
Wow, he’s such an asshole.