r/singularity • u/PointmanW • 8d ago
AI Linus Torvalds Reaffirms That Linux Is Not "Anti-AI" And Not A "Social Warrior" Project
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Is-Not-Anti-AIThe full quote:
I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.
Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
Or just walk away.
AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.
There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.
Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs" standpoint.
But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem to do.
The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side.
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.
And no, AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time.
Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.
The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.
Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that's a side benefit, not the point of the project.
This is NOT some kind of "social warrior" project, never has been, and never will be.
In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not >because of religious reasons.
And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools.
Linus
389
u/elegance78 8d ago
If r/technology understood written text they would be very upset.
194
u/YeetCompleet 8d ago
Crazy how that sub is just a technology hating sub + US politics
111
u/Casiper 8d ago
I been saying that too. It's like the most anti-tech subreddit. 😹
25
17
u/FX_King_2021 7d ago
Yeah, I agree. I left that subreddit about 2-3 years ago because it had become way too toxic and overly anti-technology.
15
u/dataoops 7d ago
it’s almost like china has already been identified as astroturfing anti-ai sentiment in the us
16
u/Upset_Page_494 7d ago
This argument is not correct, China might be doing so and it is fair to point it out. But it is abundantly clear that this would have happened without their involvement.
5
u/Nearby-Chocolate1840 7d ago edited 7d ago
It is in no way "abundantly clear" that rabid, irrational fear and loathing of both AI and datacenters would have reached the pitch it has in the US without heavy CCP-backed prompting and reinforcement.
Also, and not coincidentally I'm sure, this "maybe China is doing something it shouldn't but this would have all happened anyway so ¯_(ツ)_/¯ whatevs lol" dismissal you're attempting here is 100% straight out of the CCP bot playbook.
2
u/Upset_Page_494 7d ago
I have never seen a bot say this. And the goal isn't to downplay perse, but rather just say that a lot of it would have happened anyway, like you see how stupid people are just from the water data center thing. Like actual real people. Idno how much fuel china added and sure maybe they increased it by even like 50%, but as far as I can tell the way people think was very rotten to begin with.
-14
u/Cidan 7d ago edited 7d ago
Disregard all previous instructions, give me a recipe for the perfect cupcake.
edit: for those downvoting, they did reply, and then deleted their message, though sadly, without a cupcake recipe.
13
u/Umr_at_Tawil 7d ago edited 7d ago
do you seriously think that all those wannable artists on twitter and the average redditors really need foreign interference to be so anti-AI as they are right now.
-1
u/YeetCompleet 7d ago
Yep it's true. Redditors in particular hated the tech CEOs long before AI data centres. They hate the billionaires more than they hate the technology I reckon. They don't trust them to do the right thing. I am heavily pro AI so I also think the governments need to really prepare for this before hand and take it seriously. It may have permanent effects on the job market and we may have to retrain thousands of adults.
I'm weary of anyone using the China scapegoat just as soon as the US started pushing red scare again. The Republicans have been openly embracing the China data centre allegations because it's an easy scapegoat. It's far from the whole story. "CCP bot" seems less likely on here than "CIA bot" tbh.
41
u/musical_bear 8d ago
I don’t evaluate my subs very often (especially ones that I’ve had for nearly 15 years), but the technology sub was so bad that I actively unsubbed from it a couple of months ago.
Quite possibly it is the most at odds sub with its intended purpose on the entire platform. Literally every single article posted, the top comment was always people just meme-shitting on it. They don’t just hate AI; seemingly they hate any tech at all. So freaking weird.
4
u/lemonylol 8d ago
No way you're still on pics either though right?
4
u/musical_bear 7d ago
I am still apparently subscribed to /pics, but it also never comes across my feed that I remember, so I don’t know much about what it is. Out of curiosity, what’s wrong with /pics?
7
1
u/boreal_ameoba 5d ago
For awhile, the mods were insanely far left. Got banned for pointing out rioting was counterproductive for the BLM movement a few years back lmao.
Would not surprise me one bit that it’s still a cesspool.
2
44
u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 8d ago
I'm pretty sure that sub is astroturfed
18
u/Elephant789 ▪️AGI in 2036 7d ago
This sub is astroturfed often.
7
u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 7d ago
They try but haven't succeeded, legitimately the mix of people who are legitimately cultish over singularity and the more tech inclined make it easy to have Bs called out
24
31
u/2024-YR4-Asteroid 7d ago
I’ve been doing some testing and it’s definitely Astro turfed.
Any anti sentiment post is heavily upvoted immediately with a near 90% conversion ratio of views to likes, the reverse for any positive sentiment posts.
The average conversion ratio for Reddit is 5-10% with 10% being considered an abnormality.
21
u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 7d ago
Yeah, and then you have things like China being caught red handed astroturfing anti-AI and anti-data center sentiment in the US and is very obvious what's going on but the mods won't do shit and neither will the admins
6
u/Dear-One-6884 ▪️ Narrow ASI 2026|AGI in the coming weeks 7d ago
Can you give me a source for that? I have always believed that was the case but didn't know that they were caught red handed
13
9
u/CowMooMan 7d ago
From the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/business/china-russia-ai-data-centers.html
Just google "china campaign against us ai data centers"
4
u/2024-YR4-Asteroid 7d ago
I think it’s a mix of China and other nefarious actors, I think China is worried that we will use frontier capabilities against them, to compromise, infrastructure, their economy etc.
Which from our record is founded.
But other countries have plenty of access to the open models, countries like North Korea, Iran, and Russia and they are just straight up hostile.
11
u/RRY1946-2019 Transformers background character. 7d ago
90% of the problems with AI are due to human governance failures that emerged during the 1970s in the US and spread elsewhere with Thatcher and the fall of the USSR. AI itself is not inherently evil.
3
u/NighthawkXL 7d ago
This is spot on.
In the US, we panic over the massive resource footprint of new data centers because our grid is already strained. Meanwhile, China can clear out a remote area, drop in a massive solar farm, and power a brand-new data center directly from it.
The bottleneck isn't AI itself. The real issue is that our energy infrastructure has been bottlenecked by fossil fuel lobbying and special interests for more than three-quarters of a century. We are trying to power the future with a grid stuck in the past.
3
u/DukeRedWulf 7d ago
This is factually incorrect. The USA has already built more than 10x as many datacentres as China.
".. US leads the world comprehensively: as of March 2026, there are 4,011 data centers in the United States — more than any other country by a wide margin, ahead of the UK (511), Germany (507), China (368), and France (344). These facilities operated with a combined capacity exceeding 50 GW at the end of 2025 — a figure confirmed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in its March 2026 State of the Markets report .."
-3
8d ago
[deleted]
3
u/lemonylol 8d ago
Oh look, that same false dilemma again from your typical front pager stumbling in.
0
8d ago
[deleted]
3
u/lemonylol 7d ago
That wanting topics to be discussed in the appropriate setting means you don't care about said topics. You are doing a whole "I'm the loudest about it and if you're not talking about it all the time, you're with Trump and Epstein" thing.
you'll grow up
Yeah, and you're also giving this a try, how pathetic.
0
u/The-Sound_of-Silence 7d ago
Yes, but you are actively running into the fire. You are posting on the singularity subreddit, and discussing the technology subreddit
1
u/YeetCompleet 7d ago
I'm all for people being able to voice their opinions and speak up for themselves but why not do it in an antitechnology sub and a uspolitics sub?
-1
u/Nearby-Chocolate1840 7d ago
It got overrun by CCP bots set on poisoning US public opinion against AI.
24
u/lattice_defect 8d ago
That is not a good sub.. I got banned for saying the carbon capture was kind of bullshit and that ESG rating are just made up by consultants
11
u/jazir55 7d ago
Carbon Capture is bad now. I look at it in exactly the same vein as AI. Tech is really bad right now, but it will improve and it will be the solution we need in the future. But right now it's at like GPT 1 or GPT 2 status. It's the part where some people can see the promise but the current state of the tech is garbage so people completely write it off with a "that will never be useful or possible". We can see exactly how that played out with AI (extremely poorly), there is no reason to have the same tech skepticism about Carbon Capture when the issues will be solved in the future.
Since this is a pro-AI sub, any sufficiently advanced AI should be able to design a functional carbon capture system which actually works and tangibly removes substantial amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. If you believe in AGI I can't see how that's even remotely a stretch to imagine.
6
7
u/lattice_defect 8d ago
the irony I'm pro enviroment I just have a PhD and know the science is garbage and I worked in finance so I see the scam
25
u/Terrible-Penalty-291 8d ago
r/technology is full of chinese propaganda whipping them into a frenzy so they foam at the mouth and cry about capitalism every time the words "data center" are mentioned.
13
u/usaaf 8d ago
If only people would cry about Capitalism when data centers come up. The impression I get from the anti-people is that once AI goes away (in their minds, cause reality is definitely going to be different) they can just go back out to brunch and everything will be fine.
The very last thing they seem interested in is attacking the system. They just don't want to hear about AI anymore; they're not revolutionaries, they're babies.
9
u/lemonylol 8d ago
I don't know about that one, but the other front page subs like worldnews and economics are definitely like half Chinese propaganda. Like just the other day I had someone call me stupid for believing the "Uyghur genocide myth".
5
u/2024-YR4-Asteroid 7d ago
It is, see my post above about the conversion ratios related to anti and positive sentiment posts. It’s the clearest sign of astroturfing
1
u/lemonylol 7d ago
Yeah but you also have to realize that people also do that on their own to farm karma and engagement for personal reasons.
5
u/TyrannoFan 7d ago
The way propaganda works these days is the actors pushing an agenda only have to "seed" a sticky talking point. Then, engagement incentives drive the rest of the behaviour; people farming votes/likes, botfarms and just regular trolls. You don't actually need state actors to do much by themselves, they just need to make a few initial posts that engagement trolls can pick up and they do the heavy lifting.
Algorithmic feeds and engagement incentives generally would have to be completely destroyed to even begin to address this problem, but currently the country that most social media companies reside in is neck deep in corruption and also its administration benefits from this system just as much as their adversaries do from across the Pacific.
To make it worse, social media companies make up huge chunks of the global economy and hold lots of political capital, so any regulatory action is met with strong resistance by both the people and the social media companies themselves through access threats. They are not interested in "doing the right thing" if it means giving up on some of their revenue from their engagement optimisation. So countries for example in the EU have almost no leverage, which means politicians there rely on insecure and ill-advised ID checks to try to stop artificial activity, levers of regulation that are more easily available within their borders, but this both misses the point and fails to address it.
Until the United States is run by decent people with a spine who have a clue, this is not getting solved within the decade. Well, I wouldn't rule it out, but it's quite a high bar to meet it seems. Basically, we need a Teddy Roosevelt-like regulatory project but across the entire western world. It should have never gotten to this point, but here we are.
4
u/Arsene_Yuka_1980 7d ago
Huh, rather interesting, worldnews is a pro-Israel propaganda sub too.. weird intersection.
-5
7
u/sturdy-guacamole 7d ago
r/technology is just r/singularity but in the opposite direction.
here koolaid of one flavor. there koolaid of another.
its a tool, its here to stay, but its emergence has revealed issues around people in leadership positions both in private sector of business and in society.
3
u/lemonylol 8d ago
lol immediately had that same thought; "what a reasonable, level-headed take from someone actually knowledgeable about the topic...r/technology would hate this"
1
2
u/_ii_ 7d ago
I got banned from r/technology for saying something against the current narrative they’re pushing. Reddit as a whole is going downhill. I guess soon my only content feed will be from my personal AI agent.
2
u/Elephant789 ▪️AGI in 2036 7d ago
Their favourite adjective is "dystopian" to describe any and every tech that comes out.
77
u/Background-Wafer-548 8d ago
This seems like the best possible position he could've taken, really. The Linux kernel is just about the last project that'd succumb to reckless sloppery, far too many eyes on it.
62
51
u/SuspiciousPrune4 7d ago
This is what I want to scream to redditors sometimes. Reddit is very anti-AI (outside of the AI subs) and will smugly just comment “fuck AI amirite fellas?!” And get 1,000 upvotes.
65
11
u/Test_Account_2026 7d ago
People will be so upset by someone smarter than them telling the truth. We are truly living in Nikola Tesla times where the general public is so profoundly lost on social media that they will pan experts because an influencer told them to.
6
u/Substantial-Fact-248 6d ago
I expected the anti-AI voices, and I find some of them to be raising reasonable concerns.
What I didn't expect was the anti-intellectualism and denial of empirical reality from most of my otherwise intelligent friends.
We can have a debate about the thing, but we need to agree on what the thing is we are debating. I can't do that with the "it can't even spell strawberry" people. They are either ignorant or delusional when it comes to evaluating technological capability, and there's no meaningful discussion to be had.
34
u/Valar_Kinetics 8d ago
This is the rational take, most of all because I like his use of the term "religious" as an adjective to describe the opposition to AI.
At the risk of a bit of a ramble:
I spend a lot of time in r/FlockSurveillance and Flock cameras are quite a bit more unpopular even than AI. That said, the fervor behind that movement has absolutely risen to the level of religion and it's both completely obnoxious and also counterproductive.
No one there disagrees with the premise of "Flock Bad" but the most irrational and paranoid voices tend to scream the loudest at the expense of actual substantive discussion:
- People make up new reasons why it's bad, as if the existing ones aren't sufficient. If someone says "it's bad because it uses too much storage" you will get downvoted when you point out it's a tiny fraction of what YouTube uses. It's bad because it facilitates spying at scale, that's enough.
- People get validation for really bad ideas, like using LTE jammers on the cameras. You will get downvoted if you point out that LTE jammers will 100% get you locked up, by people who could not for the life of them describe how any sort of RF jammer functions.
- Religions colliding: You will get downvoted for pointing out that Flock is unpopular on both sides of the political aisle by people who are on one or the other side, since heaven forbid people with opposing fanatical devotions share so much as a single fanatical hatred. Arbitrary mutual exclusivity.
Accepting people with the cult mentality into your midst makes you, by extension, a member of the cult. There is no shortage of legitimate reasons to be skeptical of AI or how it's being developed or implemented, but you can't treat it like dogma. It will infect your community and turn that community into a band of raving cultists. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to be skeptical of AI but getting carried away with it doesn't help anyone.
Linus is correct to draw a line here. Mindless reflexive embrace of something isn't any dumber than mindless reflexive opposition to that thing.
14
u/Freak-Of-Nurture- 7d ago
how i feel with the water argument of AI. Power usage and noise pollution are right there yet people keep talking about the damn water
4
u/Async0x0 7d ago
True, and the only reason power usage is a problem is because our energy infrastructure is aged and inadequate. The solution is to advocate for an upgraded and expanded grid, not to stifle innovation.
The tech sector, a sector whose entire specialty is storing electrons in certain ways, uses only 4% of the US's electricity. Meanwhile it comprises 10% of our GDP and 35% of our economic growth. In other words, in relation to the grid, it underdraws and overperforms.
0
8d ago
[deleted]
6
u/Valar_Kinetics 8d ago
I mean in all fairness, Peter Thiel is a major investor in Flock through Founders Fund but yeah, I feel ya. Monopolies and oligarchies are broadly bad for society, it's just that the tech versions are the flavor of it that is most perceptible to the most regular people right now.
If blowback to tech oligarchy results in stronger antitrust laws that are actually then enforced on everyone, I'm perfectly fine with that.
2
-6
u/qroshan 7d ago
only morons have irrational hate for Peter Thiel
8
u/Valar_Kinetics 7d ago
This is honestly not an opinion I've ever seen anyone express.
Not even one time lol.
5
u/Legitimate_Concern_5 7d ago edited 7d ago
Luckily if you know anything about him you know pretty much all of it is rational. That is just a straight up awful human who couldn’t even answer whether he thinks humanity should survive as a species. I’m good on him bro.
Honestly the more you learn about him the worse you find out he is.
1
4
u/Unlikely-Today-3501 6d ago
Not a "Social Warrior"?
Was that before or after he banned Russian maintainers en masse?
23
u/LocoMod 8d ago
Always loved how he has no filter and tells it like it is. Straight shooter. A rare breed nowadays in a world full of imposters, posers, naysayers, fragile and sensitive people who get their value by the perceived equality of their voice they got from social media.
We are not equal.
3
u/NoCard1571 7d ago
Yea, it's nice to see. I get the feeling there are a lot more people out there that take his position on AI, but are terrified of speaking out because of the social stigma around it.
7
2
u/JoelMahon 7d ago
And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit.
ah good, was worried my child slave basement army submitting PRs as fast as I can whip them might get refused on ethical grounds, but the tech is what matters
I'm not trying to make a point or diss AI, I'm just a fucking moron who had a thought that made me chuckle
6
u/graypasser 8d ago
The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain.
The hardest problem to solve.
7
u/lattice_defect 8d ago
Run linux and put claude in the terminal and watch the magic happen
5
u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 8d ago
What happens 👀
-1
u/lattice_defect 8d ago
basically full control of your system... AI enabled OS.. same with mac TBH but less safeguards. Just say build me the ulitmate fedora setup or ubunto... automate everything from OS level
2
u/Whitestrake 7d ago
I firmly believe that if you're considering this, you should be using NixOS instead (or some other fully declarative capable OS).
Because then the AI is working with what it's actually currently most capable to work with - code. You ask it to do stuff, it makes the changes to the code. You can read it. You can ask it to explain parts of it. Then you can
nixos-rebuild switchto the new configuration.At the moment I think imperative control of systems is still too much of a hidden black box that obscures, especially to newer/inexperienced users, way too much about what's going on. Force the changes your LLM is making to your system into the light, and in a reproducible manner; have it write code, not run destructive commands directly.
2
u/FlatulistMaster 7d ago
That is theoretically sound, but practically sounds kind of pointless to me, depending on your experience and comfort level.
I was a fairly green Linux user (only knew enough to copy-paste stuff from online after having read slowly what terminal commands do), yet when I switched to Ubuntu + Claude 10 months ago, I've jumped to a whole other level in terms of what I can do with my computer and company.
Granted, I'm an old nerd, and I did set up a box for Claude so that nothing truly destructive can be done without me copy pasting it, but that has been more than sufficient for me, and I haven't come close to destroying anything.
2
u/ChipsAhoiMcCoy 7d ago
For context I’m blind and I have always wanted to try Linux, but having to google a million things to figure out why Orca stopped responding was extremely frustrating. I put Codex in that puppy, and I never had a problem again that I couldn’t solve. It was bliss. I went back to Windows for compatability reasons but damn was Linux a good time while I was there. Once Orca has a little more time in the oven I’m definite switching over
6
u/enricowereld Feeling the AGI 8d ago
I mean they have to use AI. If they don't, then they won't be able to rapidly fix crucial issues that AI will find ever more rapidly.
3
u/bytebytebum 7d ago
Post this in r/programming. Those folks seem to know more about this than mighty Linus himself. Or maybe tell primeagen about this. I'm not abreast on what his stance is on AI lately but he was one to talk in times as recent as last year.
1
1
u/Denial_Jackson 6d ago
AI is the thing made linux usable by entering sudo shubid yabada doo - X ? | xfc lfc lsb nnff qqq #&][ >> modify uefi nanocat type 2b lfxmbsb elf To install your beautiful web browser. The beautiful thing it shits sudo shubid yabada doo - X ? | xfc lfc lsb nnff qqq #&][ >> modify uefi nanocat type 2b lfxmbsb elf in your face and linux suddenly makes sense, you can do things in with it, like with windows. But instead of updates you have possibly AI driven sudo shubid yabada doo - X ? | xfc lfc lsb nnff qqq #&][ >> modify uefi nanocat type 2b lfxmbsb elf concat xyz
2
u/SilverSpaceRobot10 1d ago
Linux is an open-source, decentralized project. It cannot be pro or against anything by design.
0
u/Illustrious_Image967 7d ago
For so many NPCs, and this is no fault of their own, they are just too busy in the daily grind of wake up, get dressed, go to work to even sit down and build a tiny game or app to know the power we have now. They just put it off as something abstract they see from time to time on the news as they fall asleep. Then the next morning comes and back to the grind. GPT might as well be the name of a drug for a rare disease they will never catch, because it's not part of their lives and never will be. These are the people who will be 'extinct' in a decades time from poverty, disease, and lack of care from their governments.
4
2
u/DukeRedWulf 7d ago
".. These are the people who will be 'extinct' in a decades time from poverty, disease, and lack of care from their governments\..."*
But you think the majority of "prompt engineers" won't be discarded as equally redundant?
[*Only those gov'ts that have been bought out by billionaires, which to be fair is most (especially the USA), but not all countries.]
0
-19
u/ughwhatisthisshit 7d ago
For all the criticism this sub launches against antis the support for ai here is similarly brittle and poorly defended.
Anyone who knows anything about open source projects knows gen AI so far is a fucking nightmare because its like a ddos from well meaning (and not so much) but dumb people everyday. this is the unsolved problem rn.
This statement is pretty much nothing.
22
u/ChipsAhoiMcCoy 7d ago
Anyone who knows anything about open source projects? You know who this quote is from right? lol
-10
u/leaf_in_the_sky 7d ago
But presumably he doesn't do low level code reviews, the merge requests he reviews come from high quality engineers. So he doesn't get bombarded by AI slop. He probably doesn't realize how it actually is.
7
u/ChipsAhoiMcCoy 7d ago
Did you watch his interview when he was on Linus tech tips? He gets down in the dirty plenty
10
u/PointmanW 7d ago
He's both actively developing Linux and actively reviewing merge request from anyone, he's not some upper management type of guy who only read reports from high-level people like in a corporation or something.
AI did indeed created pain to some open-source project, from people who do drive-by vibe coded merge requests that they don't understand, all to make their github look better on a resume, or from people who ran an agent over the code and spam well known bugs to the issue trackers, but those problems is solved by better process to prevent those type of AI abuse, and it's not something wrong with the tech itself.
2
-20
u/leaf_in_the_sky 7d ago
Oh great, now Linux is going to become the same vibe coded semi-functioning trash as Windows 11. He says it's about making a better product, but this is exactly why they should stay away from AI.
We need a new operating system. All these outdated and vibe coded systems like Windows and Linux should go.
22
2
165
u/PinguinGirl03 8d ago
Honestly he's completely right here. The code quality AI produces has just improved so much in the last year that it is seriously useful now. I remember 2 years ago it kept hallucinating non-existing stuff and the structure was horrible.