Torvalds Still Calls the "Hey Hi" (AI) Bluff, Some People Are Upset
[Some photos via Saritrat Jirakulphondchai]
So Torvalds got asked about "hey hi" again (of course, hard to escape mindless hype and cargo cults that game the stock market). Today it's Linux's birthday, so what better time to examine what he said?
Here is what he said, based on rants from those watching/attending: "I realize that you can use AI today to write JavaScript or Python and things like that, but we're not at the point where AI is yet helping us find bad patterns in the kernel source code. But there are people working on that, and I'm actually optimistic about it. I'm not so much interested in AI writing code. I'm much more interested in it finding bugs proactively and doing code review, helping maintainers and developers run better code. And I think we will get there, but we're not there yet. [...] What I've been hoping for – and I've been talking to a couple of people from big companies that I won't name – is not the traditional LLM that just predicts what you're doing, but something that hopefully takes the kernel source code history and other projects into account and learns what good code patterns are, and red flags things that it says look suspicious. However, right now, most of the tools are at the ‘fairly obvious’ stage, and I think AI can do better. But it's probably not commercially the number one priority for AI companies. So, we'll just have to see what happens. [With AI it’s] what's the big vision? And things like that. But I've never had a big vision. And I don't want to have them! I associate visions with drugs and mental issues. I see myself as a plugging engineer, and I'm proud of that. I don't like that much vision for the future of open source!"
There are some photos too, but no "official" video yet. The Linux Foundation can take over a month to publish one.
