Here’s the thing. What is it that an LLM does? I would argue, it sumarizes. It’s a probabilistic model of human language. Give it a corpus of text, and it can “understand” that data and extract “meaning” from it. Is that useful? Totally. For a number of uses. Many coding tasks, research, translation, etc are really an effort in summarization. Is it going to solve every problem humans ever had? I doubt it. Language is the human model of reality, and we have a tendency to equivocate our model with the real thing. We’re just THAT hard wired for words. I think the hype and the marketing has overshadowed what I think is a very useful application for machine learning. I think Torvalds is overall correct. I feel his position is inconvenient for political reasons. I think that open source stands in stark contrast to the world the big tech “AI” class want to build. But I don’t really think he’s wrong perse.
I was a scout. All the way from age 6 until around mid highschool, where I really fell off it. I think overall it had a positive impact on my life. I got to learn about nature and bushcraft and first aid and things like that. I think the worst part was that a number of adults really pushed the “military” shit. Like they wanted to larp as drill seargents to a bunch of 12 year olds. Having too much fun was generally looked down upon. As if we were camping with our friends for some other reason. When I heard the scouts were going co-ed, I thought that would be a push in the right direction. When I was going, most of the leaders were very old. Pretty much all white men. Many were great, but the entire place could use some diversity of thought.