“My approach to AI right now is I will basically ignore it.”
Bash AI
Is AI everything that it’s made out to be? Not according to Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and its enduring chief spokesperson: in his view, the tech is “90 percent marketing and ten percent reality.” Ouch.
Torvalds had some harsh things to say about the AI industry during an interview with TFiR at the Open Source Summit in Vienna last month — which shouldn’t be surprising, since the Finnish programmer is infamous for his searing invectives, and for chewing out poor developers that don’t live up to his high standards.
That being said, he’s a reformed man now and was a tad more measured than his old self might’ve been.
“I think AI is really interesting and I think it is going to change the world,” Torvalds said in a portion of the interview which recently went viral. “And at the same time, I hate the hype cycle so much that I really don’t want to go there.”
“So my approach to AI right now is I will basically ignore it,” he continued, “because I think the whole tech industry around AI is in a very bad position and it’s 90 percent marketing and ten percent reality.”
Give a Tux
The benevolent dictator for life hath spoken. We’re sure his comments won’t go unnoticed by some in the tech industry, since most of their data centers run on Linux.
But according to Torvalds, the best may be yet to come for AI, with the next few years being a crucial litmus test.
“In five years, things will change, and at that point we’ll see what of the AI is getting used every day for real workloads instead of just ChatGPT,” he said in the interview, before launching into a tangent about the chatbot.
Torvalds doesn’t seem convinced by the current crop of large language models like OpenAI’s, which he says — with something between a smirk and grimace on his face before rubbing his forehead — “makes great, like, demonstrations.”
“It’s obviously being used… in many, many areas,” he added. “But I really hate the hype cycle.”
Kernel of Truth
AI advocates might call Torvalds’ outlook of ignoring the industry for the time being a little rash. But they should consider themselves lucky that Torvalds went easy on them. His sentiment is more than reasonable, after all.
For all the billions of dollars being invested in the technology — which is hollowing out other industries under the premise that it’s already reliable and transformative — a clear path to making AI profitable hasn’t opened up yet.
It doesn’t help that some of the most prominent AI models often act as their own worst enemy. Everything from chatbots to integrated forms like Google Search’s AI Overviews still suffer from frequent hallucinations.
In short, it’s hard to deny that, however good AI may be, it’s falling short of its extremely pervasive — and annoying — hype.
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