this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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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.
I understand and appreciate where you desire to go with it, I just don't see a current system to support it. Afaik people do make their own AIs/LLMs (recalling an artist's court case regarding the legitimacy of their work), but large scale LLMs do their thing by running roughshod and stealing tons of data and driving up hardware and electricity prices. It is difficult to see an environment where small models prosper compared their lawless corpo counterparts. It would probably be more beneficial to humankind, though.
Yeah, you put your finger on maybe the biggest problem that I don't have a good answer to yet. The ability to interact with LLMs in natural language comes from an analysis of huge tracts of contemporary human writing, and there's not an ethical corpus that can compare in scope to the corpus of just snatching the whole internet. Maybe they don't need to be strictly "natural" language interactions? Maybe a sufficient ethical corpus could be compiled and maintained somehow? I don't know, this is kinda where I get out of my depth.