Comment by jraph

> We now even have people like Linus Torvalds making the fairly reasonable argument that an LLM is just a tool, and “clearly a useful one”

I don't think this argument is reasonable at all. Many are concerned about the environmental and societal impacts of LLMs, there are many ethical concerns around them as well, there are concerns that they could cause a bubble burst / a major economical crisis. Regardless your opinion on all these things, that's quite the undertaking for "just a tool"! This is unheard of for something like a hammer, for instance.

> If the maintainer of the largest and most consequential open-source project on the planet can treat LLMs as a tool to be judged on its results rather than a category to be banned on sight, a backyard code forge can manage the same

Linus Torvalds can be wrong at times, like anyone else.

It's a shame an authority like Linus Torvalds shared this opinion, now people are taking it even more seriously.

He considers technical merit above all else, even above what allows "technique" to exist in the first place. He always have. It might have helped a lot in the success of Linux, but I still think this is deeply flawed.

Whether you love, or hate, or don't care about LLMs, they are not "just a tool".