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Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’
(www.tomshardware.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2024
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Honestly, he's wrong though.
I know tons of full stack developers who use AI to GREATLY speed up their workflow. I've used AI image generators to put something I wanted into the concept stage before I paid an artist to do the work with the revisions I wanted that I couldn't get AI to produce properly.
And first and foremost, they're a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it. They are terrible at deducing things themselves, because they can't 'think', or coming up with solutions that others haven't already - but so long as people are aware of those limitations, then they're a pretty good tool to have.
It's a reactionary opinion when people jump to the 'but they're stealing art!' -- isn't your brain also stealing art when it's inspired by others art? Artists don't just POOF, and have the capability to be artists. They learn slowly over time, using others as inspiration or as training to improve. That's all stable diffusors do - just a lot faster.
How’s he wrong?
Did you actually listen to what he said or are you just reading the headline and making it fit another narrative to respond to?
Because he also said he thinks it’s going to change the world, he just hates the marketing BS that’s overhyping it.
Probably because, as anyone who’s actually used AI knows, it has some core weaknesses. But the marketers are happy to ~~gloss over that~~ lie and just say that it will be able to do nearly anything.
He said it’s interesting, but to give it five years to see how it’s actually useful, which is probably the most sane take you can have about AI imo.
It will be interesting when the bubble pops, because that's probably when we'll see the useful things it is actually good at
Summarizing documents, writing documents you don't want to (within reason), and... whatever the hell Neuro-sama is doing on Vedal's channel, are like the only ones i've found so far that kind of work. And I guess image generation.
It's amazingly good at moderating user content to flag for moderator review. Existing text analysis completely falls down beyond keyword filtering tbh.
It's really good at sentiment analysis. Which is great for things like user reviews. The Amazon ai notes on products are actually brilliant at summarizing the pros and cons of a product. I work for a holiday let company and we experimented with using it to find customers we need to follow up with and the results were amazing.
It smashes other automated translating services as well.
I use it a lot as a programmer to very quickly learn new topics. Also as an interactive docs that you can ask follow up questions to. I can pick up a new language as I go much faster than with traditional resources.
It's honestly a complete game changer.
The one place where I sincerely hope it takes root and succeeds is in medicine. Having better drugs, helping to identify potential problems or diseases, identifying health patterns (all with human review and proper trials, naturally)...
It's not even close to the magical AGI that tech bros are promising, but it is good at digesting data, and science and medicine are full of that. Plus, given how overworked doctors and nurses can be, having a preliminary analysis from a computer that doesn't get tired or overworked seems like it would probably help with accurate diagnosis.
It is, both in good and bad ways. The problem, as Linus and others here are pointing out, is that marketing pushes the good and downplays/ignores the bad, so there's going to be a rough adjustment period as people eventually see through the BS and find the issues, and the longer that takes, the harder things will crash.
There are plenty of good uses of modern AI approaches, they're just far fewer than the ones being marketed these days.
Which is how new technologies tend to go see what sticks after exploring what is possible. So it shouldn't be surprising that ai is goong through the motions, but it is getting annoying how fast it is ruining functioning systems by being jammed in with no guardrails.
But, it also means we get Sam Altman as the next Elon Musk if he cashes in before the pop. And whatever other tech bros do the same. More filthy-rich men with the emotional maturity of a 12 year old.
ah yes it's reactionary to checks notes not support the righteous biggest bubble since dotcom era
you okay out there bud?
You might want to look up the definition of reactionary. Because that's...exactly what it means. To oppose reform/advancements.
You okay there bud?
Congratulations -- Currently you and 18 others are not smarter than an average high schooler.
Opposing actual fraud isn't what reactionary means.
You've got a pretty high bar of proof for proving "actual fraud"...
You can't provably say that this is a "bubble" as claimed. The tools do what they purport to do. Where's the fraud?
It's not remotely within the realm of plausibility that Sam Altman genuinely believes any of the horseshit he spews. (And that's ignoring that they gained their funding by lying about the core intent of their organization by pretending to be serving the public interest and not profiteering.)
Welcome to earth. That's basically every business ever, and you'll quite literally never be able to prove that in court; which is the litmus test for this claim.
Speaking as someone who worked on AI, and is a fervent (local) AI enthusiast... it's 90% marketing and hype, at least.
These things are tools, they spit out tons of garbage, they basically can't be used for anything where the output could likely be confidently wrong, and the way they're trained is still morally dubious at best. And the corporate API business model of "stifle innovation so we can hold our monopoly then squeeze users" is hellish.
As you pointed out, generative AI is a fantastic tool, but it is a TOOL, that needs some massive changes and improvements, wrapped up in hype that gives it a bad name... I drank some of the kool-aid too when llama 1 came out, but you have to look at the market and see how much fud and nonsense is flying around.
As another (local) AI enthusiast I think the point where AI goes from "great" to "just hype" is when it's expected to generate the correct response, image, etc on the first try.
For example, telling an AI to generate a dozen images from a prompt then picking a good one or re-working the prompt a few times to get what you want. That works fantastically well 90% of the time (assuming you're generating something it has been trained on).
Expecting AI to respond with the correct answer when given a query > 50% of the time or expecting it not to get it dangerously wrong? Hype. 100% hype.
It'll be a number of years before AI is trustworthy enough not to hallucinate bullshit or generate the exact image you want on the first try.
Its great at brainstorming, fiction making, a unreliable intern-like but very fast assistant and so on... but none of that is very profitbable.
Hence you get OpenAI and such trying to sell it as an omiscient chatbot and (most profitably) an employee replacement.
https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html
How dare you bring sources into this opinion!
This is what I've seen many people claim. But it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines. Why is that information unavailable to search engines, but is available to LLMs? If someone has put in the work to find and feed the quality content to LLMs, why couldn't that same effort have been invested in Google Search?
I'd rather a world where 10 companies can compete with google search with AIs, than where they dump money into a monopoly.
If you don't feel like discussing this and won't do anything more than deliberately miss the point, you don't have to reply to me at all.
The content is not unavailable to search engines. AI LLMs simply are better at surfacing it. I don't know what point you were trying to make that I missed, it wasn't on purpose, I assure you.
Ok, but how exactly? Is there some magical emergent property of LLMs that guides them to filter out the garbage from the quality content?
Yeah. Money. Google has an incentive to make search results less accurate to get you to click around and interact with more ads. As it currently stands, AI models aren't inserting advertisements; though I suspect that's only a matter of time.
And that's more or less what I was aiming for, so we're back at square one. What you wrote is in line with my first comment:
The point is that there isn't something that makes AI inherently superior to ordinary search engines. (Personally I haven't found AI to be superior at all, but that's a different topic.) The difference in quality is mainly a consequence of some corporate fuckery to wring out more money from the investors and/or advertisers and/or users at the given moment. AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.
That's kind of how things work you know.
Yeah, would you say the original iPhone is any good today? No. Because everything got better. That's how things work. AI of today, in 20 years is probably going to be considered to suck.
That's how that works. When things are better than other things, we consider them good.
If you are just blatantly copying art, well yeah you're stealing it.
He isnt wrong. This comes from somebody who technically uses ai daily to help develop ( github copilot in visual studio to assist in code prediction based on the code base of the solution ), but AI is marketed even worse than blockchain back in 2017. Its everywhere, in every product, even if it doesnt have ai or has nothing to do with it. Monitor ai shit? Mouse with ai? Hell, ive seen a sketch of a fucking toaster with 'ai'.
There is shit like microsoft recall, apple intelligence, bing co pilot, office co pilot, ...
All of those are just... Nothing special or useful. There are also chatbots which bring nothing new to the table either.
Everyone and everything wants to market there stuff with ai and its disgusting.
Does that mean that current ai tech cant bring anything to the table? No, it totally can, but 90% of ai stuff out there is, just like linus says, marketing bullshit.
Half of the people here linus included must have never use stable diffusion
Let me guess. Dumped by an art girl and anxious about the $600 you invested?
AI can give me a blueprint for my logic. Then I, as a developer, make the code run. Cuts my scripting time in half.
Rofl. As a developer of nearly 20 years, lol.
I used copilot until finally getting fed up last week and turning it off. It was a net negative to my productivity.
Sure, when you're doing repetitive operations that are mostly copy paste and changing names, it's pretty decent. It can save dozens of seconds, maybe even a minute or two. That's great and a welcome assist, even if I have to correct minor things around 50% of the time.
But when an error slips through and I end up spending 20 minutes tracking down the problem later, all that saved time vanishes.
And then the other times where my IDE is frozen because the plugin is stuck in some loop and eating every last resource and I spend the next 20 minutes cursing and killing processes, manually looking for recent updates that hadn't yet triggered update notifications, etc... well, now we're in the red, AND I'm pissed off.
So no, AI is not some huge boon to developer productivity. Maybe it's more useful to junior developers in the short term, but I have definitely dealt with more than a few problems that seem to derive from juniors taking AI answers and not understanding the details enough to catch the problems it introduced. And if juniors frequently rely on AI without gaining deep understanding, we're going to have worse and worse engineers as a result.