Richard Stallman Talks Red Hat, AI and Ethical Software Licenses at GNU Birthday

Why would anyone want to paint that kind of target on their own back?

He's quite clearly on the autism spectrum. When I saw him at FOSSETCON in Orlando (RIP that conference), he was.. interesting.

I will say that I was pleasantly surprised, given what I had read about him, at how he handled a question from someone who had a very severe intellectual disability; he treated his question at the Q&A as he treated everyone else's. Although he belittled my question, but that's neither here nor there.

I work in HPC infra, so I know some stuff about how these network are trained, but more from a technical perspective, i.e. stuff like "how to set up MPI for a cluster of X nodes" or how to configure GPU drivers. I know basic stuff about how models are trained from another perspective too -- since I work with researchers, and my wife being an RSE who usually works with healthcare related research I'm also exposed to a lot of side effects of using neural network styled AI in practice.

I don't claim to have a good knowledge of the ins and outs of the particular trend of the day though. I wouldn't be able to tell what the difference is between "deep learning" and "reinforcement learning", not with any authority or confidence. I did take two courses on AI though, long before the neural-network approach was a thing. I.e. my AI learning experience was focused on search algorithms, building knowledge bases etc.

So, here, based on my experience of practical applications of LLMs, I can comment on things you wrote:

> Plus there is a ton of work to now combine LLMs with their excellent language abilities to more formal systems based on rules

Tons of publications doesn't mean this is a solved problem. As it stands now, there's a serious doubt this is a problem that can be solved. I have not seen any real system working in the world of medicine which would use LLMs for anything that can be encoded as rules. If anything, I've heard a lot about failures to implement anything remotely similar to this (which happened outside of academic medicine, or somehow slept through the cracks). I.e. chatbots suggesting suicide to people in distress, or suggesting to cut on carbs to young women struggling with anorexia and so on.

> the ability to handle language, that previous approaches were all extremely bad at

Well, now it's my turn to point fingers. You probably don't know much about previous approaches, and don't understand the problem well. It's true that since the term AI was coined substantial efforts went into understanding natural languages. But what came out of this work is a disillusionment, the understanding that natural languages suck at encoding knowledge and as such are a bad tool for building ontologies, or call them knowledge bases. So, it wasn't because older methods failed to parse language well. It was because we realized that there's no point in being good at it. It's a cute gimmick, if you can do it, and can be useful in harmless situations, like enabling rich interactions between NPCs and PCs in video games. But, if your goal is to understand how to make good decisions, it's more of an obstacle really.

Like I said previously, but you seem to have ignored: yes, neural networks are useful, but not in the way a lot of people understand intelligence, or, at least, they fail to address the central and the critical questions about intelligence. Compounded by dishonest advertisement of their abilities and armies of low-quality practitioners this approach has a tendency to alienate people who are interested in more fundamental questions about the nature of intelligence.

Why are we giving this accused sex pest attention still?

Meanwhile everybody knows what GNU is, who Stallman is, what free software is, and what that "lunatic", to paraphrase you, is all about.

His methods might've been of a lunatic indeed, but it's on you to argue that Free Software would have grown further than what it is today with a more mild mannered person at the helm.

I disagree completely with this proposition. You need crazy zealots to change the world: no one will accept their extreme view of the world, but choose a more moderate version of their message. And so the zealot has succeeded in his mission. Examples in history abound, whereas mild-mannered people don't go very far in radically changing the status quo.