Linus Torvalds Dismisses AI Industry as '90% Marketing' (tomshardware.com)
- Reference: 0175352435
- News link: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/24/10/29/1512253/linus-torvalds-dismisses-ai-industry-as-90-marketing
- Source link: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/linus-torvalds-reckons-ai-is-90-percent-marketing-and-10-percent-reality
The Finnish software pioneer singled out ChatGPT and graphic design as current practical use cases. His criticism follows Baidu CEO's recent warning of an impending AI bubble burst, [3]claiming only 1% of companies would survive the fallout . "I think AI is really interesting, and I think it is going to change the world. And, at the same time, I hate the hype cycle so much that I really don't want to go there," Torvalds said.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/linus-torvalds-reckons-ai-is-90-percent-marketing-and-10-percent-reality
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4wlrxFf2lM
[3] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/10/21/1616200/ai-bubble-will-burst-99-of-players-says-baidu-ceo
10% reality? (Score:5, Funny)
Linus is overly generous here.
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That 10% is snake oil
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I don't... entirely think so?
The 10% that's not bullshit has made its way into the world. Image recognition is tech that comes from the AI field, and like my grocery store no longer requires a PLU for fresh vegetables because a camera can ID what I put on the scanner visually. That's a real improvement in a small way.
Facial recognition, as evil as most of the usage seems to be in practice, also seems to mostly work.
It's easy to get hung up on all the garbage produced by generative algorithms as all that h
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You got modded Funny, but this is worth pointing out. I've yet to see anything real coming from AI. I can't even get it to write a simple BaSH script that removes spaces from filenames, recursively.
Remember the .COM bubble? (Score:2, Interesting)
The internet was a fundamentally sound product buy the gold rush during the .COM Bubble from out of touch, clueless boomers running wall street investments did definitely lead to a crash. Since everyone hates Copilot and the AI autorespond on Youtube for comment management would make the users think you're deranged and drunk, it's safe to say 90% AI products will be scrapped at a gigantic loss to the industry. Now bulk work like text and image processing and customer service, that's not going anywhere. But
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> LLMs will be useful for many things, even if they aren't 'AI' in any form.
llms and their application are definitely ai, a contraption of llm with other heuristics and utilitarian tools can even loosely fit the definition of agi if sophisticated enough. you might just have a too romantic concept of what intelligence is. it has many forms and a very wide spectrum. any behavior that we humans might consider intelligent is accepted as such, and llms do that very aptly, as they pass the turing test with brilliance once and again.
ofc nobody is talking about conscience, let alone sentie
AI? Or OpenAI, Meta, and LLM bullshit? (Score:2)
It seems to me that virtually all people commenting on "AI" right now are focused exclusively on the useless general LLMs and image generation toys out there. AI - training networks and models has been used very successfully to great success and lived up to actual expectations for over a decade. "AI" itself is an incredibly useful and versatile tool.
On the other hand what OpenAI, CoPilot, and I assume Apple Intelligence are shitting out is utterly worthless, so if they are in fact talking about this as I su
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It always amazes me that when ever we talk about AI, we almost never talk about Deepmind and AlphaFold, considering that it is the only company that can use AI to win a Nobel. To me it has been obvious for almost a decade who is the leader in the AI field, but every time I talk with anyone, even from the IT-field, they don't even know the company.
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Because people are talking about generative AI. Just a subset which is way more visible.
He's not wrong (Score:2)
AI is the new 3D - you should want it so bad that you won't mind that eventualy you won't be able to buy anything without it (at least until the hype fades and reality kicks back in for a while)
AI is the ultimate hype generation tool (Score:4, Insightful)
Torvalds is exactly right that most of what currently calls itself AI is hype that will vaporize soon. But there is an interesting twist here. Large language models are amazingly good at generating marketing materials. One the reasons for the insanity of hype bubbles at the moment is the way digital tools speed up the generation of hype. It is possible that the deluge of marketing from AI run amok will finally guide more careful thinkers to examine the differences between clear thinking and marketing. AI itself will likely soon become effective at distinguishing between rhetoric aimed at marketing and clear thinking aimed at understanding. Eventually the post-modern silliness in academia will have to recognize that a distinction exists between clear thinking about simple problems that we call science and marketing rhetoric.
He's wrong (Score:2)
Yep, wrong. It's 95% marketing.
Still waiting for business use cases.
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Except, it's not reliable. Even in a game, how can you constrain the thing enough that it doesn't start recommending maxi pads, in response to user input?
Re: He's wrong (Score:1)
Use cases? How about military targeting? It's been used for that, for years now.
Web search as well (Score:2)
Web search is 90-100% marketing. Seems to have served Google pretty well. And indirectly Linux once people started making clusters of inexpensive PCs to serve all this stuff.
I suspect AI is going to alter how marketing is done in some very dramatic ways. And very soon, if it isn't happening already.
Depression (Score:2)
For me, the most depressing part of becoming an adult was learning the fact that it doesn't matter how smart you are, or how hard you work. Someone can always come in and just say they are smarter, and that they work harder. And they can be convincing enough to get as much or more than you get.
funny (Score:2)
I find it particularly funny they use all that money on marketing yet do such a poor job of communicating what their tools are actually good at
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They probably don't know themselves.
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Indeed. I mean even obvious use cases like image generation deeply suck, because by now it is blatantly obvious something was AI generated and immediately can be seen as "low quality crap".
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> Indeed. I mean even obvious use cases like image generation deeply suck, because by now it is blatantly obvious something was AI generated and immediately can be seen as "low quality crap".
The fact that someone on a "Tech" site can say this as if the current state of computer capability is static and not a frenetic state of change makes it clear how IBM could think the world needed no more than five computers. You, on the other hand, have access to decades of computer history and quite possibly a couple decades of using computers in you daily life, and yet you think that? (You're not the only one who thinks this btw.) Any 'low quality crap' you purchase these days is on the shelf at all only
Re: funny (Score:2)
He didn't say it would never improve. He accurately described the current state of the art and you got triggered.
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I think it's the age-old "99% crap, 1% great work" that tainted Generative AI. Much like the early days of computing, it's an emergent area which requires good knowledge and a certain mental discipline, so-to-speak, to generate good results.
Since most people (Average Joes) have neither, their "outputs" using AI are mostly crap.
I mean, this took me a copy/paste and a click on "Create" - took two minutes.
[1]https://suno.com/song/b8e9f12c... [suno.com]
At the same time, if I wanted to make a proper, nice song out of that art
[1] https://suno.com/song/b8e9f12c-cfa2-4b01-afe2-c5dcbc5d72df
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The tools aren't very good at doing anything other than regurgitating random stuff found on the Internet.
The basic problem is that you can't trust the output and there is no mechanism to fix bad output so it just keeps repeating stuff without improvement.
Re: funny (Score:2)
Garbage in, garbage out. Programmers of old were very anxious about this fact. Modern programmers - not so much.
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> On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
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> I find it particularly funny they use all that money on marketing yet do such a poor job of communicating what their tools are actually good at
They are telling us everything they know about what their tools are good at.
The thing is AI has been used for over a decade in special applications, and those applications have clearly communicated what the tool was good at, and it was a good tool. But modern LLMs are just worthless timewasters.