Linus Torvalds, the notoriously grumpy man who rails against Windows, swears at Nvidia, and is known as the creator of Linux, is surprisingly upbeat about the growing hype surrounding the state of artificial intelligence. It's "hilarious to watch," he said in his keynote address at this week's Open Source Summit (via ZDNet). 'I may be supplanted by the AI model,' he said."

Torvalds was speaking in a keynote "conversation" with his friend and other prominent open source luminary, Dirk Horndell, and their discussion covered many different topics. Of course, we must mention the current technological concern: AI. [People seem to be wavering over whether AI is humanity's savior or its irrevocable doom. [However, Horndell is less complimentary of the current state of AI, noting that he believes most AI is merely "autocorrect on steroids."

Torvalds sees at least some positives. He notes that "Nvidia is getting better at talking to Linux kernel developers and working with Linux memory management," and that they are increasingly relying on Linux systems to efficiently run large language models. And there must be something to get positive comments from Torvalds, who is generally rather anti-Nvidia.

During a speech he gave in Finland, he looked down the lens of his camera and raised his middle finger, "Nvidia, f*ck you!" was uttered publicly more than a decade ago. And that was after he had already called Nvidia "the worst company I've ever dealt with.

So perhaps he has gone quiet?

In particular, Torvalds also sees value in AI tools for development, which was the main focus of his professional life. He states, "I look forward to tools to actually find bugs. We have a lot of tools and use them religiously, but there is nothing wrong with making tools smarter."

"Using smarter tools is just the inevitable next step. There are tools that rewrite the kernel with very complex scripts and pattern recognition. Some of these tools are very difficult to use because you have to specify things at a sufficiently low level.

Honestly, this is probably the fairest thing I've ever heard Torvalds say about a traditionally incredibly divisive subject. I am almost shaking. He also warns us to beware of "AI BS," which I think is a fair warning that most of us can easily heed.