Yes, no AI is now a feature
118 points by johnolinda
118 points by johnolinda
This was a very measured and reasonable post from the LibreOffice team explaining why they chose not to integrate any generative features into LibreOffice. I really appreciate that it neither hypes nor whips up the masses into a foaming frenzy, but instead just shows how the tech can’t yet meet their existing criteria for inclusion.
Please do not reflexively tag this as vibecoding. It isn’t about using LLMs, it’s about choosing whether to integrate generative models and features into software.
Please do not reflexively tag this as vibecoding. It isn’t about using LLMs, it’s about choosing whether to integrate generative models and features into software.
That is, quite literally, a discussion about the use of LLMs, in software, so the vibecoding tag seems appropriate. In fact, I'd say the tag is more appropriate on this article than on some other ones submitted recently.
But it's completely unrelated to the use of coding agents or developing software with LLMs. What does "vibecoding" mean to you that you consider it appropriate on this post?
The vibecoding tag has (culturally) come to encompass anything that uses/touches/mentions the zeitgeisty applications of generative AI. In this way, it is not about vibecoding at all.
A blog post that uses a ‘generated’ image but otherwise contains no other connection to generative AI would be sufficient, for example. By blocking the vibecoding tag, you could experience lobste.rs as though generative AI does not exist.
I’m not saying I agree with this, but it seems to be the case.
The description on Lobsters is "vibecoding: Using AI/LLM, coding tools. Don't also tag with ai. "
Its just the tag label chosen on this site, another site might have "Tag every story about sports as football".
The “vibecoding” tag has a tongue in cheek name, similar to the “merkle-trees” tag. Don’t take the name literally, pay attention to the description instead
This was a very measured and reasonable post from the LibreOffice team explaining why they chose not to integrate any generative features into LibreOffice.
Yes, and their criteria are quite good. Basically, office suites should not send parts of your documents off to who-knows-where. So until there's a viable, 100% local solution, with no vendor dependencies, there's nothing to even discuss. Until then, users are invited to look at third party plugins.
This is an extremely sensible policy.
The reality is that local AI exists, but:
So I completely agree that "Keep all this AI stuff in a plug-in until things settle down" is a completely reasonable engineering approach. If you start losing enterprise customers who simply must have AI as a checklist feature, then maybe officially bless a plugin with a support agreement or something.
office suites should not send parts of your documents off to who-knows-where
This seems like a good property for many programs in general!
Nobody wants the support costs
Instead, we're just going to yank half of the package manager as dependencies, from random internet people. :P
If you start losing enterprise customers
Enterprise is going to want to use their own subscriptions for security purposes. I could see not having AI by default as a selling point.
a 2-bit quant of an 8B model
Right, 1-bit quant of a 27B model is the way to go!
Only half-joking; I have given Bonsai-Q1 a simple but boring task where the result was not close to directly usable but not useless as a draft; usefulness of doing that stuff at 1 t/s depends on whether I can just send it to the background while doing something else. And I guess for translation the quality could be quite useful and the speed on a 8GiB VRAM dGPU could be fine (I was on a laptop and not near my miniPC, though, so I took whatever could plausibly LaTeX the stuff for me back from a PDF, without being completely speed-prohibitive).
Now, this is still not-nothing in terms of requirements, but a more important question is: can LibreOffice afford managing quality and reliability expectations about anything they could theoretically integrate. And I am not sure even for frontier models it would be something they'd want to do.
I only have two examples in recent memory (this and Waterfox), but maybe there are some others - why even do these FOSS projects feel the need to make hedging statements such as "well we don't hate AI, we have nothing against it! don't worry, it's useful!"
why even do these FOSS projects feel the need to make hedging statements such as "well we don't hate AI, we have nothing against it! don't worry, it's useful!"
Perhaps it's because this is the genuine opinion of the people behind those projects?
You see, humans are allowed to have different opinions. Not every opinion that differs from the one you personally hold is a sign of malice, dishonesty, or subterfuge.
I have also noticed this, and wish that it would stop. Just reject this humanity-devaluing anti-social technology.
I fully agree and still feel uneasy about the amount of backlash the jqwik author received, as an example. It seems unacceptable to be firmly opposed to GenAI. I don't even care if the 'ethical issues' (data centres, water, power, training data) are all resolved, an ethical LLM/image model would still produce slop
I feel like we just gotta keep pushing, we can push the opinion window to be more and more hostile towards GenAI, especially if we involve other professions into the movement. GenAI for coding is the same as GenAI for visual art, writing, music, video or anything else; it's all unethical and must be opposed.
Also, their development GenAI policy allows GenAI... they should be consistent and ban it there as well. At least they do heavily discourage it, so it's not the worst policy.
But if eventually it does become ethical, what then? I feel like it would be stronger to also oppose it on the grounds that its output is garbage and tasteless
I include the fact that it's dehumanizing and anti-social in the reasons that it's unethical; so from my perspective, it's just impossible to make it ethical. Slop is slop.
Two different ways to get to the same views. x3
Because AI (and even genAI) is not well defined, and it encompasses much more than LLM-based products that constitute the current ridiculous and devastating hype. I think these projects want to make a stance against these products, not against anything that is labelled AI.
I work in medical image processing. Convolutional deep neural networks are excellent tools for segmenting (=semantic voxel-wise classification) such images, and they are generally branded as "AI" in final products or even scientific articles. It has applications for healthcare. I don't think libreoffice wants to position itself as anti-that.
I would love for us to not call any of these things AI, but I have no seat in the world-wide word deciding committee. :shrug:
You're right but I think the way these disclaimers are worded are specifically referring to the current mainstream/hype usage of "AI" (ie specifically GenAI), not something like "by the way, we aren't against the general concept of neural networks or machine learning". More something like "don't worry, we don't hate all instances of generating slop!"