Re: PKGBASE Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature

> >    But now I'm going to say something controversial: I was disappointed
> > by the reaction about AI, and how it could help the project, in the
> > developers list. While I fully appreciate the concerns about "stealing"
> > other people's work (indirectly through the training of the vast corpus of
> > the Internet) - i.e., the potential to violate copyright, what was said in
> > that thread - to dismiss what AI could do for the project, for the
> > development cycle - was exceptionally, tragically, myopic. Most people in
> > the world (and here I mean 5 Sigma +) have no idea what's about to hit
> > them. I've been deep in AI research recently and I can tell you, first
> > hand, well...we're in for interesting times ahead. We can either embrace
> > it or be tossed into the scrap heap of history.
> 
> My opinion about AI-generated codes is that "need to be clarified in
> international law about copyrights and licenses first".
> But it is, AFAIK, still in discussion at each countries. Not at UN.
> This is the fatal problem.
> 
> My assumption is "if the operator specifies the license to be
> (including possibly to be) applied to the resulting codes,
> AI referres only to non-violating knowledges/data/codes and
> generate codes" is needed to be implemented by AI guys.

   I would caution against the assumption that the most advanced AI today
somehow outputs some chunk of copyrighted code "verbatim". That may have
occurred in what I would consider _ancient_ models, the training processes
have changed dramatically in recent times. While I can't make any definitive
statements about what other AIs do or how they were trained, I can say
that the modern approach is to have each batch of training be re-written
by another model to be semantically and logically the same (and I'm not
just talking about code here), but different in how it is expressed so
that it captures the _idea_, but not the verbatim text. While it is true
that there really aren't too many ways to say "for (i = 0; i < N; i++)",
that, usually, is about where the similarity ends with the original code.
What used to happen in AI is a phenomenon called, I think inappropriately,
"overfitting", which basically means that the model memorized an exact
text because it was trained on that exact text repeatedly with no variation.
In this case, it doesn't generalize the concept - it's more like a parrot.

   But, let's take a step back and look more generally at AI. Everyone,
for some reason, seems to be assuming that AI can only be used for coding.
I didn't say that - and I didn't even mean to suggest it. I am talking
more about using AI in development workflows to make it easier to examine
the proper functioning of the code that _you_ have written or that
_others_ have contributed. The AI doesn't need to write one line of code.
It can just analyze what you have written and make helpful suggestions
on how you can improve it. And AI can do much more than that. It can help
you when you're struggling with architectural directions - big picture
stuff. It could help the project by being a first line of analysis of
submitted bug reports. It could be an oracle of knowledge for users
about how to set up FreeBSD, administer it, and solve user problems.

   If anyone in the project wants to use AI - for whatever of these
use-cases, the very first thing you will need is: An Open Mind.

-DG

 *  Dr. David G. Lawrence
* * DG Labs
    Pave the road of life with opportunities.