this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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IMO it's a pretty clear eyed take. LLMs are tools and, like all tools, are more fit for some purposes than others. And, like many tools, they're hard to understand, easy to misuse, and dangerous when they are misused (intentionally or otherwise). And, like any tool, they can be used for evil if the user has a mind to do so. Just because they are currently being used to do great harm doesn't mean they can't also be put to good use.
I think the FOSS community, in particular the Fediverse community, does itself a disservice by refusing to engage with them at all. They aren't evil in and of themselves, they're just new and selfish people will try to find an angle with them, same as it's always been. I think it's up to us to understand them and try to find a way to use them ethically. Show the world that it's not that we invented scary Artificial Intelligence, it's just that we created a cool, if wonky, search interface for text. Wonky in what way? Well, I think it'd be nice if there were robust FOSS tools and documentation I could use and/or contribute to, and learn about them with a community of my peers working for the common good, instead of having to either take the megacorps at their word or just renounce anything "AI branded" altogether, which doesn't feel like a good long term strategy.
Well all I will say is that I do understand the usefulness of LLMs as tools, though I only really use them passively through search results, and always verify the results separately. And I have a fundamental understanding of how they work. While I understand what Linus is getting at in a practical sense, I worry he is putting his head in the sand regarding the heavy handed agendas at work in the implementation of AI as we know it now. And I think that is a definite bad thing to be ignorant of. I personally won't embrace "AI" until it is liberated from the agenda of power and inequality. Though, I cannot but accept its level of influence in daily life, and will attempt to understand and recognize if it fundamentally evolves or changes.
Edit: "they’re just new and selfish people will try to find an angle with them, same as it’s always been." Just wanted to add that yeah, its pretty highly focused in that way. And until society can fundamentally change, that is and always will be a huge problem applying such technologies. I mean shit, look at the fuckin internet.
I think if we, as a community, really put our heads together, we could figure out how to define and make useful user-respecting tools that incorporate LLMs. There are a lot of hard problems, like the massive power consumption, and the ethical use of data, that I don't really know how to solve.
I think a start would be to focus on making smaller, lower-complexity models that are built for purpose, rather than trying to make a jillion-parameter jack-of-all-trades trades model. I think it would also make sense to focus initially on areas where there are already large corpuses of freely available text, like all the writings in the public domain. But I don't really have a good idea of what these tools would be used for, exactly, which is where I'm stuck.
The energy consumption can be measured, very approximately, by the cost of the tokens. If you design agentic tools to make use of fewer, cheaper tokens then you're likely also minimizing the energy usage.
How vague of a guess is that when people rely on those closed systems? We all know Corporate AI is hiding the actual costs with creative accounting while they enjoy abusing the environment...
Comparisons can be made using open AI models. I run some locally on my own hardware, I know exactly how much energy they use.
I wasn't talking about the closed source models you use. I was talking about the cloud ones you were just discussing.
And I said comparisons can be made.
If those cloud models are getting comparable results but using way more electricity, why would companies be running them? They like making profit, don't they? They're not some kind of Captain Planet villains chortling at being maximally wasteful.
We know the AI megacorporations are not profiting off it. Why would you pretend otherwise? Other you are very ignorant, or you're being dishonest right now.