(But I’ll keep watch to see of they don’t revert course because “the models are now too powerful”, since it is a policy from 2024)
The policy
Gentoo Council has voted on 2024-04-14 on the following policy:
It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case be made for such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns.
This policy affects Gentoo contributions and the official Gentoo projects. It does not prohibit adding packages for AI-related software or software that is being developed with the help of such tools upstream.
Chimera has a strong no-AI policy for contributions in all of its repositories. Contributors found using LLMs will be barred from further contributing to the project.
We take objection against the use of LLMs primarily on ethical grounds. This is based on many factors, including societal impact of LLM use, ecological impact, and others. We reject arguments about “useful tools” and similar, because technical aspects can never be considered in isolation.
LLM-using contributions additionally have a disproportionate burden on reviewers, their mental health, as well as project resources, which we have limited amounts of.
Chimera is a small project and has limited control over what upstreams do, particularly due to dependencies and widespread use of LLM usage in projects nowadays. We try to do the right thing when possible, preferring appropriate alternatives and so on.
I think this bit makes it clear that shipping LLM code from the kernel that wasn’t contributed by Gentoo is fine:
This policy affects Gentoo contributions and the official Gentoo projects. It does not prohibit adding packages for AI-related software or software that is being developed with the help of such tools upstream.
Alright, what are the alternatives folks?
Gentoo? Gentoo!
(But I’ll keep watch to see of they don’t revert course because “the models are now too powerful”, since it is a policy from 2024)
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy
chimera-linux https://chimera-linux.org/community/#project-ai-policy
I genuinely wonder how they’re going to square this policy with LLM code in the kernel.
Personally, I’m guessing that all distros will eventually bend and allow LLM code.
I think this bit makes it clear that shipping LLM code from the kernel that wasn’t contributed by Gentoo is fine:
When an LLM agent reports a huge security bug and provides the solution and the only solution is explicitly exactly what it wrote.
Checkmate!