Re: GR: Ban LLM contributions from Debian

On 23/07/26 at 11:15 +0900, Simon Richter wrote:
> And, speaking of sustainability, the most important point: our AI policy is
> also a statement on whether we believe the efficiency[2] gains are worth the
> resource usage. We cannot remain neutral on this topic.
> 
> [...]
>
> Such a position would also include a statement that we believe the resource
> usage in land, water, energy and material to be adequate for the value it
> provides to free software and its users, including those in the areas where
> new datacenters are being built.
> 
> We cannot avoid making such a statement, because the resource usage is well
> known at this point

Are you sure that the resource usage is that well known at this point?

What I see is announcements mainly target at investors, with:
* Confusion between general datacenter usage (not necessarily
  AI-related) and AI-related usage
* Confusion between training and inference
* Announcements about future datacenters that may or may not realize

At the same time, there are still open questions about:
* How much models can be optimized (example: Google claims that Gemini
  3.6 Flash, released two days ago, reduces output token usage by 17%
  compared to Gemini 3.5 Flash, released two months ago)
* Whether it's possible to select an optimal model for each task to
  minimize costs
* What are the efficiency gains in the specific context of Debian development
* If those efficiency gains allow us to write better software faster,
  what is the impact of this better software on the world at large? (if
  AI helps us make dpkg 20% more resources efficient, is it a net gain
  or a net loss for the world? what if if AI helps up provide a newer
  upstream version that is 20% more resources efficient?)

Currently we are mostly gathering data points. This is very useful, but
this is different from drawing a general conclusion. I fear that if
Debian made a statement on resources usage vs efficiency of AI today,
there's a high risk that we will feel a bit ridiculous about what we
stated in 6 months.

Lucas