From his website stallman.org:
Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphona, so he will probably live many more years nonetheless. But he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.
Recent video of him speaking at GNU 40 Hacker Meeting. Screenshots of video stream.
I don’t think we’re too far away from AI’s that can refactor compiled code into any language of your choice; then all software will be open source.
Edit: lul; at least 50 people are butt hurt over the idea that an AI can decipher assembler in 5-10 years
GPT, for example, fails in calculation with problems like knapsack, adjacency matrix, Huffman tree, etc.
it starts giving garbled output.
https://www.deepmind.com/blog/competitive-programming-with-alphacode
People overestimate how much it matters that ai “doesn’t have the capacity to understand it’s output”
Even if it doesn’t, is that a massive problem to overcome? There’s studies showing that if you have an ai list the potential problems with an output and then apply them to its own output it performs significantly better. Perhaps we’re just a recursive algorithm away from that.
stop getting all your info about AI and it’s current/upcoming capabilities from mainstream news media my dude lol
We’re nowhere close to what you describe, and even we were, that wouldn’t be the same thing as “open source”, since you could only do it to code you have access to. You couldn’t - for example, use it to get a copy of the Reddit/Facebook server-side source code
even if LLM were capable of this, don’t expect it to be any open. like everything we saw these last 25y, it starts free, it captivates you and you have to pay for. paying for is not a problem in general but the conditions how they delivers the service to you might be problematic.
we don’t need AI for code, we need frugality and scope bounds.
Downvoted because phrased as a technical solution. There might be a technical solution one day but until then, if it ever happens, it’s a moral problem. By phrasing it otherwise we diminish the value and efforts of countless people, including RMS, who did invest their time in FLOSS for an ideal. Again it might happen but until then we must bet on what is right, not an idealized future that prompts idleness because it is genuinely dangerous.
I think we still have a long way to go before this is equivalent to “the preferred form for modification”. I’d give it at least 5 more years. It would be really cool if you could just say “Hello AI, please remove all ad code from Windows”. But I think it is going to be a long time until we get there.
Also as this gets closer companies will get more defensive. It will become an arms race of obfuscating the code vs the AI understanding it.
And still, free software that can be modified and the copies can be redistributed is a world away from being able to ask your AI to try and make these modifications yourself.
On top of all of that don’t forget about DMCA where circumventing digital protections is a crime, even if you don’t commit any other crime.
Someone still has to know how to query the AI for it to spit out the code that actually does what we want it to.
The only way current AI models would gain the abilities you described in any practical sense is if they joined forces with the neuroscientists to invent a brain implant that would allow a human brain to exploit the advantages of human intelligence and artificial intelligence models while shoring up the weaknesses of both.
