In a conversation with Dirk Hohndel, Head of Verizon's Open Source Program Office, Linus Torvalds had this to say about the AI hype: Torvalds quipped, “It's very interesting to watch. Maybe I'll be replaced by an AI model!” As for Horndel, he believes that most AI today is “autocorrection on steroids.” Torvalds summed up his position by saying, “Let's wait 10 years and see what actually happens before we make these crazy announcements.”
That's not to say they don't think AI will be useful in the future. In fact, Torvalds noted that he already has one positive side effect. “NVIDIA needs Linux to run his AI's large-scale language models (LLMs) efficiently, so we've gotten better at talking to Linux kernel developers and working on Linux memory management.”
Torvalds also said, “I'd love to see tools to actually find bugs. We have a lot of tools and use them avidly, but making tools smarter doesn't make them worse.” Using smarter tools is just the next inevitable step. Tools that do kernel rewriting and pattern recognition using very complex scripts are specified at a sufficiently low level. Some are very difficult to use because of the need.'' Just be careful, Torvalds warns about “AI BS.'' Horndel said right away, “He mentioned beautiful science. You know, “Beautiful science goes in, beautiful science goes out.''