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Just ignore that they were a backdoor for hackers for a few years.
And they were open and honest about what happened and how they resolved it. Unlike many, many, many other companies who hide compromise until it hits critical mass in the news.
Nothing to do with AI. Their hosting provider was compromised
winrar. free as fuck for like 30 years and no ai.
I don’t know how mainstream they really are, but the BSDs, maybe? NetBSD in particular publicly bans AI code from their codebase in their Commit Guidelines as tainted code, and I imagine the rest of the BSDs other than maybe MidnightBSD have a similarly hostile stance against AI code to NetBSD. I especially could easily imagine OpenBSD being hostile against AI code given their longstanding security reputation.
Linux seems to be getting pretty friendly to AI code with Linus himself even shaming people who are anti-AI, so I don’t know how much longer it’s gonna hold up for as even if individual distros may be anti-AI, they still have to deal with upstream decisions from the kernel devs.
I have to agree with Linus tho. LLM’s are a tool, and it’s societies responsibility to use it well. Damning the tool because some people don’t wield it correctly or misuse it wont help - the genie is out of the bottle, and even tho I am very sure OpenAI and Anthropic have no future because they are hemorrhaging cash from every possible spot, LLMs and specialized models for specific use cases wont disappear.
It’s like angle grinders. They can be incredibly dangerous, as in life threatening, especially with the wrong disk or used for the wrong purpose, but in the hands of a knowledgeable person, with protection, and with the appropriate disk, they are a pretty awesome and effective tool.
I agree that LLMs won’t disappear even after the bubble bursts. But I fail to see why that should be an excuse for using them.
Because they are great tools everywhere you can easily and by automated systems verify the correctness of their output, that’s why they are so good at e.g. finding security issues - it’s trivial to check if the LLM’s output lead to remote code execution or privilege escalation.
Testcases for software in general are something that are rather boring work - i see no issue in offloading that. And even tho the amount of Devs that document their code has increased since the 80s, i’d prefer an LLM-annotated source over one without comments at all.
The LLM doesn’t have to understand what it is doing to be effective - similar to the 10000 monkeys on typewriters writing everything that can be written given infinite time, but with a very much more educated guess than random gibberish.
They also enable natural language interfaces that are far more powerful than Alexa or Google Assistant ever were, they might be used in games for generating the lore and dialogue for all NPC in entire worlds (or even the entire world itself) by training small scale models with whatever information game writers want to provide as basis.
/// Edit here: This would also enable self-created worlds! Just create a tool to train a small model (probably available for a larger model as a tool) based on whatever lore dump you wanna provide, and then go explore that world with your own eyes!
There are many use cases for LLMs, and none of them have to be as wasteful and hostile as the crap the hyperscalers are currently pushing. Damn, if they would stop building datacenters and hoovering up every piece of silicon they can, prices for a GPU with enough VRAM to run 27b models would be trivial for the average costumer, and those can be very sophisticated if specialized. Also wouldn’t need gas turbines for power, huge complexes that have no other possible usage, no evaporative cooling.
Second Edit: https://www.propublica.org/article/anthropic-mythos-microsoft-software-vulnerabilities displays how awesome these things are at finding vulnerabilities. Using LLMs to find security issues should be implemented regardless of personal stance towards LLM, to make sure we all have technology we can rely upon.
What’s the problem with coding LLMs? They are insanely useful.
Maybe go after the machines that are hacking basic utilities, building biochemical weapons, doing mass surveillance, etc…
DDG seems to be marketing themselves as “google without the ai bullshit” these days.
it is present on their main search but can be ignored or put out-of-sight easily enough.
you have to use noai.duckduckgo.com to have it just ‘off’ period.
Yet they still run their own AI/LLM, for the last year or so, I have kept getting an AI answer box in DDG…
I would argue this is a “follow the market, or become obscure” type situation unfortunately. I have a number of colleagues who don’t look beyond the AI summary on Google and get annoyed when it doesn’t show up for a search.
At least now you know that everything they say is worthless.
I wish I could recommend DDG but their (Microsoft’s? Are they still a frontend around Bing?) search results are just terrible.
The bing index is one of their sources for search results (although a major one yes).
From Wikipedia:
… including Bing, Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Yandex, and its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot)
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