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Gentoo AI Policy

wiki.gentoo.org

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Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#3

Post by ares623 »

Maybe we’ll see a (new) distro with AI assisted maintainers. That would be an interesting experiment.

Unfortunately one caveat would be it will be difficult to separate the maintainers from the financial incentives, so it won’t be a fair comparison. (e.g. the labs funding full time maintainers with salaries and donations that other distros can only dream of)

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#4

Post by logicprog »

There are reasonable ethical concerns one may have with AI (around data center impacts on communities, and the labor used to SFT and RLHF them), but these aren't:

> Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models.

I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright?

> Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water.

This is massively overblown. If they'd specifically said that their concerns were around the concentrated impact of energy and water usage on specific communities, fine, but then you'd have to have ethical concerns about a lot of other tech including video streaming; but the overall energy and water usage of AI contributed to by the actual individual use of AI to, for instance, generate a PR, is completely negligible on the scale of tech products.

> The advertising and use of AI models has caused a significant harm to employees and reduction of service quality.

Is this talking about automation? You know what else automated employees and can often reduce service quality? Software.

> LLMs have been empowering all kinds of spam and scam efforts.

So did email.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#5

Post by tptacek »

perching_aix wrote: post #2

Dated 2024-04-14 and features nothing special.

Interestingly --- while I doubt it would make a difference to the decision Gentoo in particular would make --- the cost/benefit of LLMs for coding changed sharply just a month or two after this, when the first iteration of foundation models tuned for effective agents came out. People forget that effective coding agents are just a couple minutes old; the first research preview release of Claude Code was this past February.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#6

Post by AdieuToLogic »

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is:

  Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at 
  generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They 
  are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful 
  enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, 
  they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo 
  projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from 
  developers and users to review contributions and detect the 
  mistakes resulting from the use of AI.
The first non-title sentence is the most notable to consider, with the rest providing reasoning difficult to refute.

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#7

Post by perching_aix »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #6

Perhaps the most telling portion of their decision is: Quality concerns. Popular LLMs are really great at generating plausibly looking, but meaningless content. They are capable of providing good assistance if you are careful enough, but we can't really rely on that. At this point, they pose both the risk of lowering the quality of Gentoo projects, and of requiring an unfair human effort from developers and users to…

[flagged]

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#8

Post by bleepblap »

logicprog wrote: post #4

There are reasonable ethical concerns one may have with AI (around data center impacts on communities, and the labor used to SFT and RLHF them), but these aren't: > Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? > Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. This is massively overblown. If…

>> Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. > I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright?

Absolutely not! Every major FOSS license has copyright as its enforcement method -- "if you don't do X (share code with customers, etc depending on license) you lose the right to copy the code"

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#9

Post by AdieuToLogic »

logicprog wrote: post #4

There are reasonable ethical concerns one may have with AI (around data center impacts on communities, and the labor used to SFT and RLHF them), but these aren't: > Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models. I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright? > Their operations are causing concerns about the huge use of energy and water. This is massively overblown. If…

>> Commercial AI projects are frequently indulging in blatant copyright violations to train their models.

> I thought we (FOSS) were anti copyright?

No free and open source software (FOSS) distribution model is "anti-copyright." Quite to the contrary, FOSS licenses are well defined[0] and either address copyright directly or rely on copyright being retained by the original author.

0 - https://opensource.org/licenses

Re: Gentoo AI Policy

#10

Post by blibble »

tptacek wrote: post #5
perching_aix wrote: post #2

Dated 2024-04-14 and features nothing special.

Interestingly --- while I doubt it would make a difference to the decision Gentoo in particular would make --- the cost/benefit of LLMs for coding changed sharply just a month or two after this, when the first iteration of foundation models tuned for effective agents came out. People forget that effective coding agents are just a couple minutes old; the first research preview release of Claude Code was this past Febr…

[flagged]
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