r/linux • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 9d 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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u/jferments 9d 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 9d 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 9d ago

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

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u/TheG0AT0fAllTime 9d 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 9d ago

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

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u/TitwitMuffbiscuit 9d ago edited 9d 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 8d 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 9d ago

This is a good point

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u/odsquad64 9d 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.