“Good moment” for apple to announce their AI shit

I’d argue that if you exactly call the model you refer to by their actual name, you’ll get much different reactions. For instance, expert systems have been around for a long while.

You can’t do machine learning without tons of data and processing power.

Commercial “AI” has been built on fucking over everything that moves, on both counts. They suck power at alarming rates, especially given the state of the climate, and they blatantly ignore copyright and privacy.

FOSS tends to be based on a philosophy that’s strongly opposed to at least some of these methods. To start with, FOSS is build around respecting copyright and Microsoft is currently stealing GitHub code, anonymizing it, and offering it under their Copilot product, while explicitly promising companies who buy Copilot that they will insulate them from any legal downfall.

So yeah, some people in the “Linux space” are a bit annoyed about these things, to put it mildly.

Edit: but, to address your concerns, there’s nothing to be gained by rushing head-first into new technology. FOSS stands to gain nothing from early adoption. FOSS is a cultural movement not a commercial entity. When and if the technology will be practical and widely available it will be incorporated into FOSS. If it won’t be practical or will be proprietary, it won’t. There’s nothing personal about that.

There are already a lot of open models and tools out there. I totally disagree that Linux distros or DEs should be looking to bake in AI features. People can run an LLM on their computer just like they run any other application.

Sounds like something an AI would post. Quick, what color are your eyes?

Good.

The Luddites were right.

…this looks like it was written by a supervisor who has no idea what AI actually is, but desperately wants it shoehorned into the next project because it’s the latest buzzword.

Is there no electron wrapper around ChatGPT yet? Jeez we better hurry, imagine having to use your browser like… For pretty much everything else.

Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS

In addition to everything everyone else has already said, why does this have anything to do with desktop environments at all? Remember, most open-source software comes from one or two individual programmers scratching a personal itch—not all of it is part of your DE, nor should it be. If someone writes an open-source LLM-driven program that does something useful to a significant segment of the Linux community, it will get packaged by at least some distros, accrete various front-ends in different toolkits, and so on.

However, I don’t think that day is coming soon. Most of the things “Apple Intelligence” seems to be intended to fuel are either useless or downright offputting to me, and I doubt I’m the only one—for instance, I don’t talk to my computer unless I’m cussing it out, and I’d rather it not understand that. My guess is that the first desktop-directed offering we see in Linux is going to be an image generator frontend, which I don’t need but can see use cases for even if usage of the generated images is restricted (see below).

Anyway, if this is your particular itch, you can scratch it—by paying someone to write the code for you (or starting a crowdfunding campaign for same), if you don’t know how to do it yourself. If this isn’t worth money or time to you, why should it be to anyone else? Linux isn’t in competition with the proprietary OSs in the way you seem to think.

As for why LLMs are so heavily disliked in the open-source community? There are three reasons:

1. The fact that they give inaccurate responses, which can be hilarious, dangerous, or tedious depending on the question asked, but a lot of nontechnical people, including management at companies trying to incorporate “AI” into their products, don’t realize the answers can be dangerously innacurate.
2. Disputes over the legality and morality of using scraped data in training sets.
3. Disputes over who owns the copyright of LLM-generated code (and other materials, but especiallly code).

Item 1 can theoretically be solved by bigger and better AI models, but 2 and 3 can’t be. They have to be decided by the courts, and at an international level, too. We might even be talking treaty negotiations. I’d be surprised if that takes less than ten years. In the meanwhile, for instance, it’s very, very dangerous for any open-source project to accept a code patch written with the aid of an LLM—depending on the conclusion the courts come to, it might have to be torn out down the line, along with everything built on top of it. The inability to use LLM output for open source or commercial purposes without taking a big legal risk kneecaps the value of the applications. Unlike Apple or Microsoft, the Linux community can’t bribe enough judges to make the problems disappear.

Reminder that we don’t even have AI yet, just learning machine models, which are not the same thing despite wide misuse of the term AI.

Using an Al-less desktop may be akin to hand copying books after the printing press revolution.

Or perhaps not.

I get that AI has many problems but at the same time the potential it has is immense, especially as an assistant on personal computers

[Citation needed]

Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS AI models so that we don’t become obsolete.

And this mentality is exactly what AI sceptics criticise. The whole reason why the AI arms race is going on is because every company/organisation seems convinced that sci-fi like AI is right behind the corner, and the first one to get it will capture 100% of the market in their walled garden while everyone else fades into obscurity. They’re all so obsessed with this that they don’t see a problem with putting in charge a virtual dumbass that is constantly wrong.

I don’t like AI because it’s literally not AI. I know damn well that it is just a data scraping tool that throws a bunch of ‘probably right’ sentences or images into a proverbial blender and spits out an answer that has no actual comprehension or consistency behind it. It takes only an incredibly basic knowledge of computers and brains to know that we cannot make an actual intelligent program using the Von Neumann style of computer.

I have absolutely no interest in technology being sold to me based on a lie. And if we’re not calling this out for the lie it is, then it’s going to just keep getting pushed by people trying to make money off the concept at the stock market.

One of the main things that turns people off when the topic of “AI” comes up is the absolutely ridiculous level of hype it gets. For instance, people claiming that current LLMs are a revolution comparable to the invention of the printing press, and that they have such immense potential that if you don’t cram them into every product you can all your software will soon be obsolete.

I won’t rehash the arguments around “AI” that others are best placed to make.

My main issue is AI as a term is basically a marketing one to convince people that these tools do something they don’t and its causing real harm. Its redirecting resources and attention onto a very narrow subset of tools replacing other less intensive tools. There are significant impacts to these tools (during an existential crisis around our use and consumption of energy). There are some really good targeted uses of machine learning techniques but they are being drowned out by a hype train that is determined to make the general public think that we have or are near Data from Star Trek.

Addtionally, as others have said the current state of “AI” has a very anti FOSS ethos. With big firms using and misusing their monopolies to steal, borrow and coopt data that isn’t theirs to build something that contains that’s data but is their copyright. Some of this data is intensely personal and sensitive and the original intent behind the sharing is not for training a model which may in certain circumstances spit out that data verbatim.

Lastly, since you use the term Luddite. Its worth actually engaging with what that movement was about. Whilst its pitched now as generic anti-technology backlash in fact it was a movement of people who saw what the priorities and choices in the new technology meant for them: the people that didn’t own the technology and would get worse living and work conditions as a result. As it turned out they were almost exactly correct in thier predictions. They are indeed worth thinking about as allegory for the moment we find ourselves in. How do ordinary people want this technology to change our lives? Who do we want to control it? Given its implications for our climate needs can we afford to use it now, if so for what purposes?

Personally, I can’t wait for the hype train to pop (or maybe depart?) so we can get back to rational discussions about the best uses of machine learning (and computing in general) for the betterment of all rather than the enrichment of a few.