The Linux Foundation has twelve platinum members, which donate $500000 per year, followed by twelve gold members, who donate $100000 per year. Below these two primary tiers lie the silver peasants, who each donate $5000-$25000 per year, based on number of employees. Looking at the list of twelve platinum members, I noticed something interesting.
Of the twelve platinum companies, six are “AI” companies or companies with massive investments in “AI”: Google, Huawei, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM/Red Hat. Then there’s Samsung Electronics, which is raking in stupendous amounts of money thanks to the “AI” bubble. Additionally, one of the gold members is Anthropic, another major “AI” company and makers of “Claude”, the sloppiest of slopcoding tools.[…]
Anyway, a large chunk of the funding the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvald’s employer, receives is coming from increasingly desperate companies frantically trying to convince a populace deeply skeptical and often downright hostile towards “AI” to spend money on “AI” before the bubble bursts.
I don’t think the Linux foundation is the reason for Linus Torvalds saying AI is not excluded. This is not what you are claiming, but seems to be the onference of your post. The Linux foundation only spends a tiny fraction of their budget on the Linux kernel.
The whole point if open source is that anyone can contribute. Companies that see the value in Linux can donate. All these AI companies companies do so as it is in their interest to do so due the stability of Linux and its use in servers, now llms. It is the same reason nvidia are rapidly improving their Linux driver support. Web servers didn’t need great support and Linux home users were a tiny fraction of their users. So they didn’t give a toss. Then llms used graphics cards and they saw profit and opportunity. No different to these other companies, they invested where it suited them to, not where tje community wanted.
Limis is smart enough to not rock the boat with sponsorship, but not compromised enough by the reality of required sponsorship, in my view, to change ethos or dorection to chase said sponsorship. These donors, although largest, are worth much less than the thousands of free volunteers and many thousands of smaller donors that won’t contribute to a compromised project.
I think AI is a bubble and is overhyped and I expect a financial crash due to it. I also foresee it is here for good, even though it won’t be the revokution the investors hoped it to be. It is still revolutionary, but with severe flaws. I would like to be in a situation where ai continues to be best run on Linux and small home models are useful for most people rather than a dependence on cloud computing. We are seeing a transition to cloud based infrastructure for comoute, beyond what we’ve seen for storage of discrete consumer data, like photos. That is scary as once the power is gone from consumers to have alternative options from the big 7, the more the risk for society, in the same way that social media has had a terrible effect on data bubbles and personal conflict.
Phones have moved to iterative rather than revolutionary and their costs is going up rather than down. Likely people will choose to upgrade them less. Simolar for computers 10+ years ago unless you’re a bleeding edge gamer. Even then there was the introduction of cloud gaming.
What we need is to continually have consumer options that respect privacy and user rights, which Linux is best placed to do. In doing so, it should offer all available options for computation, which includes ai. As linis says, ai is a tool. It would not make sense to categorically refuse it. Code should be approved based on merit. Already, we are seeing consumer pushback on ai. Spotify, for instance, now marks content as ai. Meta too. Xitter et al. And they all tried to initially pass off slop as content. They are recognising both the poorer quality and the customer resentment about that and adjusting accordingly.
Ai money is a bubble. I’m glad that some of that rich investor money is going to a good cause before the bubble bursts. Many of those companies were already donors before the launch of chatgpt which started the rollout of ai everywhere. Hopefully it continues afterwards. I hope their donations are partly what leads to their downfall, or at least the removal of their monopoly powers.
Just to be clear, the article was written by Thom Holwerda, not me. I posted it here as a novel jumping off point of discussion. (While I don’t like gen AI overall, I am out of the loop as far as kernel development goes, and I don’t really know what to think about Torvalds’ LLM boosterism in that respect. I’m following the discourse, but I take no position as of yet.)