- Linus Torvalds talks about his views on AI
- Linux creator says AI can help, but ‘pain points’ are also present
- New security reporting processes revealed to tackle 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 said: “I actually really like it from a technical point of view. I love tools. I find them very useful and interesting, but it definitely has some problems.
He also spoke out against those who claim that AI tools wrote 100% of their code and the dangers of relying too much on these new tools, particularly when it comes to security.
Unsurprisingly, Torvalds had strong opinions about those who now claim their entire code base is written by AI.
“My view has always been that AI is a great tool, but it is 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 numbers,” Torvalds added, “it took me a while to understand that writing numbers and calculating offsets for branches is kind of stupid, and people had come up with this tool called assembler, and later I figured out that compilers were good too. These days I realize that the tools AI are good too.
“I personally am 100% convinced that AI changes programming, but it doesn’t change the fundamentals,” he said.
“AI will increase your productivity by a factor of 10,” he added, while warning: “AI is great, but AI doesn’t 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 discover a bug with AI, sometimes the first reaction seems to be to send it to the safe list, because that can have security implications,” he said.
“The result, on a deliberately small and 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 just passing these reports on to… the other developers who knew this area better.’
In order to prevent such a problem from happening again, Torvalds revealed new information about AI security, as he noted: “If you find a security bug with AI, you should basically consider it public, simply because if you found it with AI, 100 other people have also found it with AI.” »
Overall, Torvalds was naturally keen to increase human influence in coding, even working alongside AI platforms to gain better insights.
“At the end of the day, you want to understand how it all works,” 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 still look at assembly language… because that’s what I grew up with.”
“You not only need to understand your prompts, but also the end result, because that’s the only way to sustain it for the long term.”
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