I just got back from vacation and saw the Debian community’s decision on including LLM in Debian development. Yes, I know Hyperbola is already far away from that community, but I still think some shockwaves will reach us. I had to recall other Debian milestones, such as its decision to accept binary blobs, non-free repositories, or systemd. Even the Debian leader didn’t agree, but I suspect there’s some kind of fear of being left behind (FOMO) in that community, and that Debian should stay relevant and not miss that train.

If I understand correctly, one of the big concerns about LLM is the loss of control. In practice, this is already happening on a small and medium scale. I’ve seen teams that repeatedly generate the code for an entire package just to change details, simply because they lost control over the code. Fortunately, some are already aware of that risk.

The other thing is that this technology is very resource-intensive, especially memory and storage. This will make it even harder for many people to acquire new hardware. It’s interesting to see how the NetBSD community is already taking steps to avoid unnecessary hardware upgrades:
https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano/117184030718497114