Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: banning "AI"-backed (LLM/GPT/whatever) contributions to Gentoo

[Eli Schwartz <eschwartz93@gmail.com>]

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On 3/9/24 4:13 PM, Duncan wrote:
> I'm not saying don't use gentoo -- I'm a gentooer after all -- I'm saying 
> gentoo simply isn't in a good position to condemn AI for its energy 
> inefficiency.  In fact, I'd claim that in the Gentoo case there are 
> demonstrably more energy efficient practical alternatives (can anyone 
> sanely argue otherwise?, there are binary distros after all), while in the 
> AI case, for some usage AI is providing practical solutions where there 
> simply /weren't/ practical solutions /at/ /all/ before.  In others,  
> availability and scale was practically and severely cost-limiting compared 
> to the situation with AI.  At least in those cases despite high energy 
> usage, AI *is* the most efficient -- arguably including energy efficient 
> -- practical alternative, being the _only_ practical alternative, at least 
> at scale.  Can Gentoo _ever_ be called the _only_ practical alternative, 
> at scale or not?
> 
> Over all, I'd suggest that Gentoo is in as bad or worse a situation in 
> terms of most energy efficient practical alternative than AI, so it simply 
> can't credibly make the energy efficiency argument against AI.  Debian/
> RedHat/etc, perhaps, a case could be reasonably made at least, Gentoo, no, 
> not credibly.


FWIW I am not really convinced of this claim... gentoo is not a
monoculture, I could have installed Gentoo in 2012 and was strongly
tempted but did not because it didn't have binpkgs, but being an early
adopter of https://www.gentoo.org/news/2023/12/29/Gentoo-binary.html is
the single reason I have a Gentoo system today.

There you go, Gentoo is a binary distro. (If you want it to be one.) You
are not required to waste energy in order to use Gentoo.

Leaving that aside, I think it's a bit of a red herring to claim that
one must be *as energy efficient as possible* in order to have the right
to criticize technologies that use orders of magnitude more energy and
don't come with an option to avoid spending said energy.

You also note that AI is providing practical solutions "where none
existed before, for some cases". But I really, really, REALLY don't
think this is the case for AI-backed contributions to Gentoo, which
plainly do have an exceedingly practical solution that has been in use
for a couple decades so far.

So we could perhaps agree that LLMs may not be intrinsically an
impractical energy waste, but using them to contribute to Gentoo *is*?

:)


-- 
Eli Schwartz

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