Linus Torvalds: Speaks on Hype and the Future of AI

let's get lenus Tal's thoughts on recent hype around Ai and its implications on the future of development including claims that have been exaggerated where AI would seemingly make things better and let's also see in which areas AI may be considered for Linux development here's a recent conversation that lenus had with Dirk who is the head of the open source program office at Verizon let's get into what lenus thinks about Ai and the future of development yeah and no one is perfect so this is we we talked about all these depressing things and let's go for

something that's fun and entirely non-controversial so let's talk a little bit about Ai and large language models and W I like you you're as cynical as I am that's that's a good sign that's a good sign um so obviously this is this is the current hype kit on the blog and and if you want to double your salary add AI to your title and it's hilarious to watch the the self-description of of companies and every company on Earth has an AI angle to their story as of this year it is amazing U but what I

find so interesting is this idea that geni is going to be the end of you know insert whatever end of programmers the end of authors the end of movie creators the end of so many jobs so you are going to be replaced by an AI model finally yeah no I I don't know I I hate the hype at the same time I think AI is very interesting I when I went to University we were still talking about rule based expert systems and basian logic and and all of this kind of thing and it it was

called AI but it was not in any way intelligent um and and I do think that the last few years have to days yeah but uh I I don't want to be part of the hype and uh I will say that the AI revolution has had even on the Kernel level a few positives for example uh a company like Nvidia who is not exactly famous for being great at at interacting with the kernel Community has actually been much more active and and being involved in the Linux memory management code because suddenly they start caring about

Linux when when they are selling a lot of a hardware I mean it used to be crypto and and it's still obviously gpus and and it's being used in in big servers and running Linux so it has actually had a positive impact but my personal opinion is let's wait 10 years and see where it actually goes before we make all these crazy announcements of your job will be gone in five years well I I think we already see lasting and and almost irreversible change happen happening through many of these AI tools not on the hype

geni front but just at the in the tools that make our lives better and easier I I keep calling it autocorrect on steroids and people are mad at me but the if if you use an an gen and hopefully an slm tool to help you with with basically code completion in your editor isn't that a a huge opportunity so I'm I'm actually I mean I'm one of those people who are very optimistic about Ai and I'm looking forward to the tools to actually find bugs we have a lot of tools tooling around the caral and

around any software projects obviously uh and uh we use them religiously but making the tools smarter is not a bad thing and I to some degree compare it to writing things in assembly which literally I started doing with the initial kernel was I think about 50% Assembly Language and using a compiler and and using Smarter Tools is just the next inevitable step so that's going to happen but I don't think it's necessarily the gloom and doom that some people say it is and I definitely don't think it's the promised world that the people who are

having their hand out for cash say it is so I you need to be a bit cynical about this whole hype cycle in the tech industry I hope you all realize that before AI it was crypto before crypto it was whatever it's it's a cloud native Cloud native um so there's a loud voice in the front that's not hype okay I mean the hype there's always like a grain of reality behind it but you need to be careful about all the BS around that grain you can't say BS um so so the beautiful science is

what he meant yes um so the I look at these tools and I look at you said assembler and then we talk about compilers then we talk about things like sparse a compiler that tries to find certain kinds of bugs we talk about Julia to do code refactoring we have had for the last 30 plus years a sequence of tools that helped make development better and more robust and in in that lineage of things I I hope there is really cool stuff coming down yeah I mean um we have tools that do Colonel rewriting uh

with very complicated scripts and pattern recognition and things like that and and that is actually literally why I think um AI can be a huge help because some of these tools are very hard to use because you have to specify things at a low enough level that the natural reaction would be to hey can we make this a bit easier and automate more of it uh so so yes I one one of the interesting angles that this whole large language model and and the the training data brings up is the role that data plays in

in our modern world where it we all talk about open source about the source code the algorithms being available but open data really is kind of that the almost the more interesting question no it's not well I mean it's not to me and and actually I'd like to clarify that I mean the LF obviously has open data projects and to other people it's more interesting and that is I think the whole for me the point of Open Source is that different people are interested in different things and and uh I was always interested in the

lowlevel nitty-gritty of how the CPU actually works which is why I'm working on the Kernel still but uh but yes you're right that in many situations what is important is the is the data that you then use to generate pattern find patterns and generate new interesting information with but but to me that that's not what I tend to do and yeah there is that saying beautiful science in beautiful science out mhm please translate thanks to the Linux foundation for hosting this event and conversation if you want more of this video and conversation between lenus and

Durk check the link in the description below let me know what you think about the potential of AI overall it seems like a mixed bag here there's definitely interest by lenus in Ai and there's a few potential positives that have already been mentioned and SE including being able to leverage AI seemingly in complicated scripts or pattern recognition is what lenus mentioned would be a particular huge help but of course there is skepticism about all the hype before AI there was crypto and if you expect AI to double your salary well it just won't happen every

company right now is in a race to add AI to their story as mentioned by lenus and he doesn't seem to want to be part of that hype he's in it for the long game to see what's going to happen in 10 years and it will be an interesting future let me know what you think about this view on AI and the future of AI do you appreciate the advancements we've already had are you looking at it for a long game as well do you currently think we're in a hype cycle let me know all

that in the comment section below catch me in a great community on Discord and I'll catch you in another video thanks for watching