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OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

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Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#71

Post by ACCount37 »

realusername wrote: post #59
ACCount37 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would "memory" be relevant to that? I honestly don't see it be much more relevant to "write maintainable code" than it is to "play chess".

Have you even onboarded somebody at work? There's a big difference between the newcomer and the dev who's been there for 5 years, even at the same seniority level on paper. And that difference is in the memory. The LLM can work during 5 years on the codebase and still will be as good as a newcomer. You can somewhat partially compensate for this bad memory by writing tons of guardrails and tons of extra LLM focused do…

That's how it works for humans. And, sure, LLMs are severely human-adjacent. But they aren't human.

An LLM can just re-ingest the entire codebase every time it wants to make a change - open it up, find the relevant parts, derive how a well structured, maintainable change should look like from them, then make that change. The way a compiler can just re-ingest the entire codebase every time it wants to make a binary.

The intermediates are a cache - a resource optimization, not an outcome optimization. Is it wasteful not to have a cache? Maybe. Can you get away with not having it? Yes.

And, the more maintainable a codebase is, the easier it is for an LLM to "re-ingest" it from scratch. Or for a human to get onboarded. There's some overlap there.

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#72

Post by kdavis »

malfist wrote: post #64
kdavis wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A Simple yet Effective Training-free Prompt-free Approach to Chinese Spelling Correction Based on Large Language Models"[1] [1] https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.966/

That's a research paper. Can you point to a single product that claims they use an LLM for their spellchecker? With today's investor market, surly that would be something a company would brag about.

Craig Federighi SVP of Software at Apple “The keyboard now leverages a transformer language model, which is state of the art for word prediction, making autocorrect more accurate than ever.”[1]

"New features available with macOS Sonoma" doc states "Autocorrect fixes mistakes for you more accurately than ever before by leveraging a new transformer language model in English, French, and Spanish keyboards." [2]

"Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models" blog post states "Apple Intelligence is comprised of multiple highly-capable generative models that...have been fine-tuned for user experiences such as writing and refining text.. In the following overview, we will detail how two of these models — a ~3 billion parameter on-device language model, and a larger server-based language model."[3]

"A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model" blog post[4] is the kind of deep dive you'd have to do to find out what's going on under the hood in your spelling/grammar checker. TL;DR AppleSpell uses GPT-2 which proves my point.

[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2023/06/06/wwdc-2023-appl...

[2] https://www.apple.com/mideast/macos/sonoma/pdf/en/macOS_All_...

[3] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...

[4] https://jackcook.com/2023/09/08/predictive-text.html

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#73

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

kdavis wrote: post #67
malfist wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a research paper. Can you point to a single product that claims they use an LLM for their spellchecker? With today's investor market, surly that would be something a company would brag about.

This wasn't your original question, which I answered. This "moving the goalposts", requiring me to know the internals of say a closed source product, just proves my original point. I can't know if an LLM is being used because I don't have the source code.

> This wasn't your original question, which I answered.

No, their original question was,

> Who is using an LLM as a spell checker?

(Emphasis mine)

> This "moving the goalposts", requiring me to know the internals of say a closed source product, just proves my original point. I can't know if an LLM is being used because I don't have the source code.

It's not moving the goalposts, you pointed at research showing that somebody theoretically looked at using LLMs for that purpose, not evidence that anybody is actually doing so which is obviously what we're discussing. This is getting into Russell's Teapot territory; yes, a closed source system could do anything, but it would be nice if we had literally any evidence that they were doing so, especially when you're proposing that they burn orders of magnitude more compute on something that isn't really better than existing systems (i.e. there are obvious downsides).

Edit: I see that you have now posted another comment actually providing that evidence. That's actually compelling; thanks.

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#74

Post by encyclopedism »

kdavis wrote: post #42
abc42 wrote: post #26

My prophecy is that in 3 years we'll see a complete reversal of this. Using GenAI to code will be the default and we'll see policies that put limits on human/artisan development. Possibly even projects that outright ban non-LLM development.

I don't know the timeline, but I generally agree. I think history agrees too, i.e. machine code > assembly language > high-level programming language > prompts.

A more reasonable extension is:

machine code > assembly language > high-level programming language > what ever works for business i.e. prompts/ai/LLM

If it works for business then increasingly that's all that will count. Clean code, static vs dynamic any the other principles or debates will give way as long as AI produces results. The economic ends justify the means.

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#75

Post by stonogo »

Marha01 wrote: post #69
Volundr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you enforce the law against murder? Mostly after the fact when people get caught. It's hard to enforce is rarely a good argument against a rule.

Catching a murderer is much, *much* easier than catching someone using a modern AI model to generate code, especially if they actually read it and fix occasional LLMisms, and not just vibecode from the hip. The societal damage is also infinitely more serious in the case of murder.

If your argument is "this is unenforceable" and "failure to enforce is a low-stakes problem" then I'm not sure what your concerns are, other than a desire to control how others choose to spend their time. Either of those might be a valid objection (although I do not consider them to be) but together they sort of cancel each other out, no?

Regardless, some efforts like this are explicitly performative. In the event some problems arise and it turns out someone used a specific tool in the process of causing those problems, administrators (and insurers) can say "look we forbade the use of that tool, so this is on them and not us." In other words, enforcement is not always even the point, but it always seems to be the first stop on the concern-trolling trolley.

Finally, yes, people can misbehave and break rules, and the more effort they put into doing so, the more successful they will be at the rule breaking. Nothing about that is justification for not having rules, even when they are hard to enforce.

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#76

Post by stonogo »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #38
stonogo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As best as you can. I don't know why people keep asking this question, when the answer is obvious and exactly like all other contribution policies. In this case, this is coming from Oracle, which holds the OpenJDK purse strings, so being found in violation is also likely to have financial consequences for the violator.

> I don't know why people keep asking this question Well, because it's going to lead to witch hunts and drama and so on. I mean, not necessarily on this project, but the same-ish discussion is going on on many community based projects (debian was recently on the front page with 4 proposals, etc).

[dead]

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#78

Post by malfist »

kdavis wrote: post #72
malfist wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a research paper. Can you point to a single product that claims they use an LLM for their spellchecker? With today's investor market, surly that would be something a company would brag about.

Craig Federighi SVP of Software at Apple “The keyboard now leverages a transformer language model, which is state of the art for word prediction, making autocorrect more accurate than ever.”[1] "New features available with macOS Sonoma" doc states "Autocorrect fixes mistakes for you more accurately than ever before by leveraging a new transformer language model in English, French, and Spanish keyboards." [2] "Introdu…

Autocorrect != spellcheck

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#79

Post by bigstrat2003 »

kdavis wrote: post #67
malfist wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a research paper. Can you point to a single product that claims they use an LLM for their spellchecker? With today's investor market, surly that would be something a company would brag about.

This wasn't your original question, which I answered. This "moving the goalposts", requiring me to know the internals of say a closed source product, just proves my original point. I can't know if an LLM is being used because I don't have the source code.

Nobody has moved the goalposts. You claimed that "most spell checkers" would be disallowed by this policy because they use LLMs. You are simply being asked to substantiate that rather bold claim.
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