- Linus Torvalds talks about his view on AI
- Linux creator says AI can be useful, but “pain points” are also present
- New security reporting processes unveiled to cope with AI deluge
Linux creator Linus Torvalds has admitted he doesn’t always have the best experience with AI tools, saying he has a “love-hate relationship” with the technology.
Speaking at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America, Torvalds noted, “I actually really like it from a technical angle. I love the tools. I find it very useful and interesting, but it definitely causes pain points.”
He also talked about those who claimed that AI tools wrote 100% of their code and the dangers of relying too much on these new tools, especially when it comes to security.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Torvalds had some strong opinions about the people who now claim that their entire code base was written by AI.
“My opinion has always been that AI is a great tool, but it’s a tool, and when I see people say, ‘hey, 99% of our code is written by AI,’ I literally get angry,” he said.
“I grew up writing machine code, and when I say machine code, I don’t mean assembly language, I mean the numbers,” added Torvalds, “it took me a while to understand that it’s kind of silly to write down the numbers and calculate offsets for branches, and people had come up with this tool called an assembler, and then I found out later that compilers these days are good tools too.”
“I’m personally 100% convinced that AI is changing programming, but it’s not changing the fundamentals,” he declared.
“AI will increase your productivity by a factor of 10,” he added, but cautioned, “AI is great, but AI is not going to change programming.”
Torvalds’ speech came shortly after he complained about the Linux kernel security mailing list, which he said was “overrun with duplicate reports” generated by AI.
“People think that when they find a bug with AI, sometimes the first reaction seems to be, let’s send it to the security list, because this could have security implications,” he said.
“The result, on a deliberately small, confidential list, was that ‘we were inundated with people submitting bugs, and then you have this list with very few people on it… and we spent all our time relaying these reports to… the other developers who knew the area better.’
To prevent such a problem from happening again, Torvalds revealed new AI security disclosures, which he noted: “If you find a security flaw with AI, you should basically consider it public, just because if you found it with AI, 100 other people also found it with AI.”
Overall, Torvalds was understandably eager to push the human influence in coding, even working with AI platforms to gain better knowledge.
“You want to understand how it all works at the end of the day,” he said. “Even when I’m using AI for my pet toy projects, I’ll use AI to generate code, I’ll look at that code, I’ll actually still look at assembly language… because that’s what I grew up with.”
“You have to understand not only your prompts, but you have to understand the bottom line, because that’s the only way you can keep it long-term.”
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