Linus Torvalds has a complicated relationship with AI, seeing both its good and bad points. But his latest remarks on the usefulness of AI may have raised a few eyebrows in open-source circles.
Just a few weeks after the Linux founder complained that a “continued flood” of AI-generated vulnerability reports had made the Linux kernel security mailing list “almost entirely unmanageable”, he has come to see the advantages of the technology.
“Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects,” Torvalds wrote in an email response to Linux Kernel senior engineer Roman Gushchin, archived at Kernel.org.
“It can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a ‘it keeps finding embarrassing bugs’ standpoint,” he said of the use of AI in security scanning. “The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain.”
Developers should be free to choose whether they use AI, he said. “We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.”
Torvalds’ measured support for AI does not come completely out of the blue: Around the same time that he was complaining about AI distorting security maintenance, he also spoke about its usefulness, claiming that it could improve programmer productivity by a factor of 10.
This article first appeared on InfoWorld.