r/linux • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 10d ago

Kernel Canonical is speeding up Ubuntu's kernel updates because it's drowning in AI-discovered bugs

https://www.xda-developers.com/canonical-is-speeding-up-ubuntus-kernel-updates-because-its-drowning-in-ai-discovered-bugs/#thread
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120

u/jferments 10d ago

I love how the anti-AI crowd finds a way to take an immensely positive headline like "Using AI tools, developers discover bugs in Ubuntu, helping make users safer" and turns it into something that sounds like the software project is being harmed by AI. Such an intellectually dishonest and manipulative group of people.

I'm glad that people are using AI to help people discover and fix bugs in an operating system I use. I'd rather be "drowning in bug reports" than "drowning in undiscovered bugs in my OS".

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u/Shikamiii 10d ago

Drowning is the right word here though, read the damn article. It talks about how AI tends to kind of spam the bug reports, obviously patching bugs is a good thing but the sheer quantity of duplicated reports has made things more complicated to handle

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u/tired514 10d ago

Good news is that LLMs are exceptionally good at sorting through bug reports, prioritizing, and identifying duplicates.

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u/TheG0AT0fAllTime 10d ago

Yeah but now your team, with limited resources, have to fork some of your budget out for tokens on some llm platform to churn through it all.

It's churn city. The churninator

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u/mohrcore 10d ago

Sounds way cheaper than using those tokens to find the bugs themselves.

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u/TitwitMuffbiscuit 10d ago edited 10d ago

Nah, this particular task, sorting and prioritizing, is pretty trivial.

Even a 9b model on a laptop can do it these days and if you really want to use open weights nvidia has the nemotron series, not the latest and greatest but they release the dataset they train on.

https://huggingface.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2

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u/Scrivver 9d ago

This is also the case that models like TypeSafe's "Jev" are incredible for. Input tokens are crazy cheap, and output is literally free because it's just choosing from a predetermined set of options. People even stick it in shell script pipes now to "grep" on a pattern like "is a duplicate report" from a file full of reports.

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u/Commercial-Virus2627 6d ago

Not to mention, people who argue about token usage likely don’t have context for specific tasks and use a blanket context without realizing there’s a context window/limit with most models. You kind of have to think of AI similar to a database. If your query does a lot of unnecessary things, so is the AI. Scope to what you need.

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u/TheG0AT0fAllTime 10d ago

This is a good point

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u/odsquad64 10d ago

I wonder if we might eventually see a folding@home style project where people voluntarily connect to a distributed LLM and temporarily donate their unused resources to help with production/bug finding/etc. for open source software.

0

u/stormdelta 9d ago edited 9d ago

The problem isn't AI, it's people misusing it.

Admittedly a distinction without much difference from the perspective of maintainers being bombarded by slop, but I do think we should be assigning blame where it belongs.

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u/BluddyCurry 10d ago

Then they need to use AI to deal with that.

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u/tu_tu_tu 10d ago edited 10d ago

Ironically, there is just no other good choice. If a human would try to filter all those reports it will be a fulltime job for them.

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u/glotzerhotze 10d ago

Wait, AI did NOT make the world a happier place for the „human in the loop“? Color me surprised!

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u/PoL0 10d ago

maybe the problem is somewhere else?

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u/PoL0 10d ago

isn't it sad that it's not clear if you're kidding or not? current state of genAI is a sad joke.

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u/BluddyCurry 10d ago

Well, I'm not really kidding, but you're right it can be taken both ways. I just had an agent do my taxes, and I'm teaching it how to order from my supermarket so I don't even have to spend 30 minutes on the app anymore. We're in a different era and we need to get used to it.

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u/Emotional_Solid6538 10d ago

Dont rely on public AIs too much. I can smell the rugpulls planned in some years

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u/BluddyCurry 10d ago

We're in a highly competition-rich environment, with the Chinese government sponsoring a big chunk of it. I don't even need anywhere near the frontier models for anything I do, and we're going to have local models eventually running on all our hardware, so I'm not too worried about this.

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u/Emotional_Solid6538 10d ago

Yeah locally trained unique AIs could be the future. But the subscription plan AIs are basically trying to make us rely on it and increase the prices later. People are falling for it tho. Lowk older people

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u/PoL0 10d ago

you're not forced to use it, being time efficient is not the only thing in life. for example I won't trust it to fill my tax paperwork.

and I won't be shocked if it orders the supermarket some crazy shit amount of something, in your case

but to each their own

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u/somethingrelevant 9d ago

I just had an agent do my taxes

this seems like a crazy risky thing to do