On Sun, Jan 12, 2025 at 04:56:15PM +0000, Colin Watson wrote: > On Sat, Jan 11, 2025 at 07:13:58PM -0800, Otto Kekäläinen wrote: > > I don't think Debian should as an organization pay for LLMs. On the > > contrary I would expect LLM providers to offer API keys for free to > > Debian Developers just like we have other perks listed at > > https://wiki.debian.org/MemberBenefits. >
You can label me as extremely reactionary on this: I think LLM providers shouldn't be providing LLMs to Debian unless they are of proven benefit to the whole Project. I don't think they are and I don't trust the motives of those who suggest them as a cure-all. At the very best, LLMs are at the level of a Google Translate: at worst, they're wholly inaccurate and untrustworthy. I chose Google Translate as a deliberate example here: it's provided by one of the most influential agents on the Internet with the largest corpus of text to train on.I wouldn't trust it against the opinion of a good native speaker to translate to/from English, say, though I might rely on it to give some vague sense of an unknown text in a language I don't understand or read well.. > I'd go further and say that the ecological and social costs of most of > the contraptions provided by those providers means that using them in > any way is unethical, and I personally refuse to do so. I recommend > that other people do the same. > I think the ecological costs have a bearing here: currently, it seems improper to use systems that appear to imperil energy grids for entire - countries. Watching other people find and fix bugs, even in code they have written or know well, I can't trust systems built on modern Markov chains to do better, no matter how much input you give them, and that's without crediting LLMs as able to create good novel code.. > (I have less fixed views on locally-trained models, but I see no very > compelling need to find more things to spend energy on even if the costs > are lower.) > Absolutely: even if the costs to the Debian project for LLMs were to be nil at present, there are better things for the project to spend time on. With every good wish, as ever, > -- > Colin Watson (he/him) [cjwat...@debian.org] >
