- Linus Torvalds talks about his opinion on AI
- Linux creator says AI can be useful, but there are also “weak points”
- New security reporting processes revealed to address AI deluge
Linux creator Linus Torvalds admitted he doesn’t always have the best experience with AI tools and said he has a “love-hate relationship” with the technology.
Speaking at the Linux Foundation’s North American Open Source Summit, Torvalds noted: “I actually really like it from a technical angle. I love the tools. I find them very useful and interesting, but they are definitely causing problems.”
He also talked about those who claim that AI tools wrote 100% of their code and the dangers of relying too much on these new tools, especially when it comes to security.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Torvalds had strong opinions about those people who now claim that 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 say, ‘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 down numbers and calculating offsets for branches is a little stupid, and people had come up with this tool called an assembler, and then I found out that compilers are good too. These days, I’m finding out that AI tools are good too.”
“Personally, I am 100% convinced that AI is changing programming, but it is not changing the fundamentals,” he declared.
“AI will increase your productivity by a factor of 10,” he added, but cautioned: “AI is great, but it won’t change programming.”
Torvalds’ talk came shortly after he 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 in AI, the first reaction sometimes seems to be: let’s send it to the security list, because this 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… and we spent all of our time just sending these reports to… the other developers who knew that area best.’
To prevent this issue from happening again, Torvalds revealed new AI security revelations, as he noted: “If you find a security bug with AI, you should basically consider it public, just because if you found it with AI, 100 other people also found it with AI.”
Overall, it’s understandable that Torvalds was interested in boosting human influence in coding, including working alongside AI platforms to gain better insights.
“In the end, you want to understand how everything works,” he said. “Even when I use AI for my pet toy projects, I’ll use it to generate code, I’ll look at that code, I’ll actually still look at assembly language… because that’s what I grew up with.”
“You need to understand not only the indications, but also the end result, because it is the only way to maintain it long term.”
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