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this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2026
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Fuck AI
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A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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In a nutshell he says that Linux is a technology project, where technology comes first. If LLMs help to improve the technology then it's fair game. If not, then of course not.
He also says something about Linux not being a place for 'social warriors', which is kind of ironic, given that Linux is basically a big 'fuck you' against corporations and closed source, i.e., a scoial statement. Given how much beef he famously had with Nvidia, this is somewhat unexpected.
But I interpret it as coming from a place of seeing LLMs really just as a new tool and nothing more. In an interview a couple of years back, Linus also said pretty much that. He grew up with basic tools, had to create new software tools to make him more productive and improve the quality of his work. He saw LLMs just as another tool that can aid in development. I suppose this hasn't changed.
Given, that most people usually don't program in assembler anymore, but use high level programming languages like C++, which simplifies the process of coding enormously, or even scripting languages like Python, which present another level of abstraction and simplification, LLMs do appear somewhat like a next step in this evolution.
Issue is, you have deterministic and formal guarantees in programming languages, whereas LLMs do not. This is by far not the only issue of course, as others in this thread have also noted.
I wonder whether he uses LLMs in his daily work. Might change his perspective a bit.
The only difference between using C and an LLM is C doesn't consume thousands of gallons of water and gigawatts of electricity per second.
You forgot the part where the llm doesn't necessarily do what you tell it to do either
The thing is that they rigorously review their code internally with In the project. It needs to be reviewed and cleaned up before it gets submitted. Someone who keeps posting junk is gonna get chewed out and ignored. So, the biggest issue with LLM code is kind of irrelevant. If someone useses it responsibly and finds a way to make it an effective tool, they’re not worried about it. Banning its use is kind of pointless since the worst outcomes are already banned.
As I understand, they don't use it to generate code, but for scanning code for bugs. This is relevant as there are now many CVEs found by AI scanning tools.
Fun fact: Based on estimates of the value of the Linux kernel (around 2200 Million Euros in 2011), the size of the kernel (in 2011, version 2.6 was current, with a bit less than 20 million lines of code), abd average salary of kernel developers (for Germany, one could estimate 60,000 - 80,000 EUR/year), one can estimate the lines of new code that a full-time kernel developer produces - less than 1000 lines per year:
I get to 545 lines per person-year that way.
Even if AI could reduce time to type in that code to zero, it would not speed up kernel development, since developers are 99% of the time doing something different than typing in code - determining what new code should do, organizing and structuring concepts, or fixing bugs (which is determining what existing code should do, determining what it actually does, and determining how to fix differences between the former and the latter).
I mean, not according to the project leader, or the contributors, who are mostly companies.
If the 3 main groups contributing to a project are Intel, Meta and IBM, it's not really a community project, is it?