8mo ago

Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’

www.tomshardware.com

The Linux creator is interested in AI, but the hype means he "basically ignores" it.

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8mo ago

Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’

www.tomshardware.com /tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/linus-torvalds-reckons-ai-is-90-percent-marketing-and-10-percent-reality

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8mo ago

Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’

www.tomshardware.com /tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/linus-torvalds-reckons-ai-is-90-percent-marketing-and-10-percent-reality

22 comments

10% is being generous. The parts of “AI” that aren’t just an expensive way of getting exciting-looking but unreliable results are mundane things like autocorrect, image upscaling models, handwriting recognition and such: unglamorous statistical learning in narrowly constrained domains nobody would claim is on the verge of becoming sentient and spawning the Singularity.
- LLMs can be very useful if you understand how they work. The danger is when you assume that its correct.
  
  This. Sorry but I'm a web developer and one of my colleagues obviously uses it without checking if it is correct, then bugs me or others when he doesn't understand why it doesn't work as expected. It is frustrating as hell and I've explained it to him multiple times:
  Over prompt the AI if you are going to use it. Long lengthy prompts that are very succinct but give as much context as possible.
  It is highly preferable to check other sources first like Stack Overflow. Even Medium articles can be better than using AI sometimes.
  Type out what the AI output rather than just copy and paste. As you type line by line, explain to yourself what is happening.
  Question everything. Do you think this code will work. Why will it work?
  Test the code. If it doesn't work as expected, trouble shoot it.
  Don't be afraid to scrap the whole thing and start over. Even open another prompt and try again if you really think the AI can answer the question (there are many cases where your problem is just too specific and the AI can't).
  He does none of these things. I swear he is the laziest developer I've ever met, and I've met my fair share.
- I dunno, it helped me with excel formulas quite a bit. I only had to use non ai sources multiple times to correct the errors the ai kept giving me, but it still set the ground work for standard forum users to fix.
- Honestly, AI is super useful if what you need doesn't require much creativity. For example, if I want to know how to setup an eDiscovery case in Exchange Online then I can probably trust Copilot to tell me the correct answer.
  If I need to write a block of code to check for XSS or CSRF, then no, AI is not going to be trustworthy.
  
  If it's something that's been done and written about dozens of times before, an LLM will probably barf up something resembling it.
I think it has potential and will get better. My concern is the private sector wants to use it now like its fully matured and its just not. Got to work out the energy usage to.
Linus Torvalds out here describing capitalism.
Damn he is old
- He's 54. Middle-aged, sure, but old?
  
  That photo makes him look like he is in his 70s.
  Anyway 54 is still kind of old assuming 65 is the goal retirement age.
I disagree on the only 10%. But I see why he believes so. If you've been into similar topics for a while, like machine learning, AI doesn't objectively do so much more. Then you have countless examples of AI providing wrong informations. However this understates how often real people give wrong informations and how often we have to work with them and fix the issues, be it in our head of by trial and error. People really need to practice awareness to notice how often we correct errors automatically without thinking or being aware. Brains are amazing.
AI like LLMs are so new, we neither have peaked in quality nor used them long enough to understand the quirks. For a lot of people it will be like learning to drive a bike, learn swimming or learn inner peace and patient with the annoying coworker. Some won't make it.
Also understanding AI takes time which I suspect most busy people don't have. And I don't even mean understanding the technical side, I mean learning on using them correctly. AI is a tool and to believe it solves all our problems now, is a bit utopic, yet it will become better and better by the day.
- Language models are improving so quickly that we're starting to take their amazing abilities for granted. Tasks that used to seem really difficult for computers, like understanding complex language or writing creatively, now feel normal and expected. We're getting used to this advanced technology and forgetting how impressive it truly is.

22 comments