'AI is a great tool, but it's a tool': Linus Torvalds lays out his complex 'love-hate relationship with AI' | Tech Radar
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'AI is a great tool, but it's a tool': Linus Torvalds lays out his complex 'love-hate relationship with AI'
Linux founder admits he doesn't always get on with AI
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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 is definitely causing pain points."
He also spoke out on those claiming AI tools wrote 100% of their code, and the dangers of relying too heavily on these new tools, especially when it comes to security.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, Torvalds had some strong opinions on those people who now claim their entire code base is written by AI.
"My opinion has always been that AI is a great tool, but it's a tool, and when I see people saying, '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," Torvalds added, "it took me a while to understand that writing down the numbers and calculating offsets for branches is kind of stupid, and people had come up with this tool called an assembler, and then later on I figured out compilers are good too. These days, I'm figuring out AI tools are good 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 warned, "AI is great, but AI is not changing programming."
Torvalds' talk came shortly after he had complained about the Linux kernel security mailing list, which he said was being "overrun by duplicate reports" generated by AI.
"People think that when they find a bug with AI, the first reaction sometimes seems to be, let's send it to the security list, because this may have security implications," he said.
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"The result, on a deliberately small, confidential list, was that "we were flooded by people sending bugs, and then you have this list with very few people on it… and we spent all our time just forwarding these reports to… the other developers who knew that area better."
In order to stop such an issue happening again, Torvalds revealed new AI security disclosures, as he noted, "If you find a security bug with AI, you should basically consider it to be public, just because if you found it with AI, 100 other people also found it with AI."
Overall, Torvalds was understandably keen to push the human influence in coding, even working alongside AI platforms to gain better knowledge.
"You do want to understand how it all works in the end," he said. "Even when I use AI for my pet toy projects, I will use AI to generate code, I will look at that code, I will actually still look at the assembly language… because it's what I grew up with."
"You need to understand not just your prompts, but you need to understand the end result too, because that's the only way you can maintain it long term."
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Mike Moore is Deputy Editor at Tech Radar Pro. He has worked as a B2B and B2C tech journalist for nearly a decade, including at one of the UK's leading national newspapers and fellow Future title ITPro Portal, and when he's not keeping track of all the latest enterprise and workplace trends, can most likely be found watching, following or taking part in some kind of sport.
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