Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

openjdk.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 90 posts

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#81

Post by rpdillon »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #29

This makes sense. AI contribution is basically just "prompt + AI work". Even if you are okay with AI work per se, you should accept prompts (after reviewing them) and let your own AI generate the code (and then also review the code)... rather then accept an output of someone else's AI with an unknown prompt, that may or may not include an instruction to create a vulnerability. In the age of AI, the prompt is becoming…

This doesn't match my experience with prompting AI at all. In every professional application of AI I've seen, there are a huge number of variables and inputs, over many turns, that produce the output. We see radically different results across different engineers using AI, and that variance is not 100% attributable to the prompt. I don't even think it's 50% attributable. See sibling comment for some delineation of these additional parameters.

The correct policy is what Linux adopted. "We don't care what tools you use, provide high-quality PRs."

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#82

Post by rpdillon »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #33
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.

Why would companies accept AI generated code, it they can generate their own (and review the prompt)? It's like predicting that when compilers become more popular, accepting binary contributions will become the default.

LLMs are non-deterministic, and compilers are (mostly) deterministic.

A good PR with AI is a like a series of dice rolls that you need to get right to get high-quality output. Folks asking for prompts are basically saying "hand me the dice, I'll do all the dice rolls." To which my response is "Why?"

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#83

Post by piinbinary »

> Most generative AI tools, however, are trained on copyrighted and licensed content, and their output can include content that infringes those copyrights and licenses

To some extent, it feels like the genie is out of the bottle on this. There's so much LLM-generated code out there, and I'm sure plenty of it could be argued to infringe a copyright or license (though I think the legal bar for counting as infringement is set too low), that there's no way to go back and undo it.

That said, OpenJDK might be afraid that someone will decide to make an example of them because they are a high-profile target.

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#84

Post by wannabe44 »

htltzp wrote: post #51
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.

Yes, I'm sure that insecure slop projects like Artifactory will ban human contributions.

I would be interested to hear the lore.

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#85

Post by abc42 »

ACCount37 wrote: post #31
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.

At this point, I wouldn't be too surprised if LLMs just get better at "write understandable, maintainable code" than most developers are. For now, LLMs are still bad at it, but they're already at "competitive with humans" tier of bad. I expect them to get better.

They will get better, and they (the best coding models) are already better than 90% of human developers, even when you don't factor in their much faster speed.

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#86

Post by kdavis »

raincole wrote: post #30
kdavis wrote: post #12

While I understand the caution, the current policy seems too draconian. It states in part: > Until that policy is in place, the Governing Board has approved this interim policy: > Contributions in the OpenJDK Community must not include content generated, in part or in full, by large language models... Note, this would exclude most spell checkers, as they often are LLM based. That said, they do soften this with the ad…

> Note, this would exclude most spell checkers, as they often are LLM based ? Like, what? What are you even talking about? Most spell checkers used by programmers are certainly not LLM based. Spell-checking has always been instant for like two decades. It's such a solved problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49111599

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#87

Post by kdavis »

malfist wrote: post #78
kdavis wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Mac User Guide documentation states "When autocorrection is on, misspelled words are detected and automatically corrected as you type."

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-az/guide/mac-help/mchlp2299/mac

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#88

Post by [deleted] »

lelanthran wrote: post #58
this_user wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really though, since the result of the prompt is not deterministic. It greatly depends on the model, the version, the harness, even time of day if the provider's infrastructure is currently overloaded and is silently degrading performance. Some things also require multi-turn interactions.

> Not really though, since the result of the prompt is not deterministic. It greatly depends on the model, the version, the harness, even time of day if the provider's infrastructure is currently overloaded and is silently degrading performance. Some things also require multi-turn interactions. All of that are even more reasons to reject AI-generated code: if it cannot be trusted to produce same (or even similar) out…

[deleted]

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#89

Post by queenkjuul »

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.

I think you moved the goalposts, they asked for a spell checker, you provided a paper

Re: OpenJDK Interim Policy on Generative AI

#90

Post by queenkjuul »

kdavis wrote: post #28
ekidd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone using even a tiny on-device language model for spelling? For grammar, I could almost imagine it. But this also bans "simple" AI-powered auto-complete, like Zed's Zeta2 model. This is a very conservative model that rarely tries to propose more than a few obvious lines (at least in my use cases). If a developer accepts a three-line autocomplete that introduces a bug, that's kind of on them. Honestly, about th…

The is not exactly my point. I am speaking of spelling/grammar checkers are part of the IDE and/or OS. You'd have to know your IDE and/or OS's implementation details to know you are not using an LLM based one.

My VSCode spell checker is open source and written before GPT. I've never seen an IDE use OS provided spell check
Post reply on HN