Now I'm worried. I guess we won't be talking about detectors and filtering of AI generated crates etc any more.
I suggest to attach a URL to the official announce: Rust Foundation Welcomes OpenAI As Platinum Member, Announces Donation to Rust Project - The Rust Foundation
As far as I understood (from the Reddit discussion too), it's more or less of just a donation. The seat does not give a vote, and does not affect decision making in the language development process.
The fact of sustainable donation by itself is a good news, in my opinion. I was worried that the regular RustLang contributors are underpaid for their hard work. Hopefully, that would improve the situation. And I hope it would stimulate other bigtechy to contribute into Rust more regularly.
On a general note, the fact that the new generation of IT companies have interest in Rust is also a good news. And I would say it's very natural. New languages no matter how good are they, rarely supersede already filled niches. The main chance for Rust as a relatively new language (comparing e.g. to C++) is to become recognized by the new IT companies, and to fulfill new niches. The previous generation could eventually adopt it too, but the locomotive is usually the new generation of ITs.
To note, one such locomotive was block-chain businesses in recent years.
Ah good. What you say there makes me feel better about it. I'm all for industry, AI or otherwise, contributing to the development of the tools they use and depend on. As long as they can't use their money to steer the project in bad directions.
Actually I think AI and Rust are something of a good fit. The LMM tries to palm you off with slop and the Rust compiler being so fussy about types, lifetimes, etc says no, try better. That must be whole classes of problems avoided compared to using lesser languages.
Yes, self-verifying deterministic system certainly helps. I didn't have a chance to use LLMs for programming, but my friends who actively use them together with Rust, confirm it. Rust compiler at some extent plays a role of tests for the LLM output.
Speaking of the fitness function. Perhaps ML languages (especially those with dependent type systems) might also be of interest. But they are lesser recognized, unfortunately.
I'm still of the mind that I should at least take a look at the LLM generated code I try and determine that it looks like it does what I want and does not do anything I don't want. I want to see that any LLM generated tests do actually test what they claim to. Basically code review like any other. So of course Rust's fussiness removes the need to worry about whole classes of details in that review.
The chance to use LLM for code generation is only a Google search away. I'm amazed how much code I can get the "AI mode" to generate for free.
IMO, LLM technology and Rust are a good fit insofar as programmers can more easily realize the former isn't really appropriate for programming yet. I'm much more optimistic about what people like Yann LeCun are developing, which has the parts current LLMs are missing. Time will tell. I doubt they're likely to become partners, though.
And to come back to partners, I'm as wary of Meta, Google, Huawei, ... well, actually, of the Gold and Silver partners, ARM is the only one not making me very uncomfortable. As long as there's not too much influence, I suppose it's a necessity.
$600k - a small fraction of the pile they are burning at the moment.
Interesting to compare to the early years of C++ - fewer people and smaller budget than Rust.
I just learned about OpenAI's donation from this thread, so I might be missing context. Please help me understand: why doesn't OpenAI get a vote?
The Board of Directors listing seems to indicate that OpenAI gets equal voting power with everyone else:
The Rust Foundation’s Board of Directors is composed of representatives from our member organizations (“Member Directors”) and the Rust Project (“Project Directors”) who share equal voting power and act collectively to govern the Foundation in accordance with our Bylaws and their Terms of Reference.
That page lists Predrag Gruevski as "Member Director, OpenAI". Combined with the quote above, it seems like OpenAI gets a vote.
To my knowledge, the Rust Foundation does not actually direct the development of the Rust Language. They control the funding and ancillary things, but donors shouldn't be able to directly influence the course of the language. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I think you're right. When the Rust foundation was announced, there were people on the Rust Project who emphasized this: The Rust Project and the Rust Foundation are two separate things.
The "Rust Project" are the ones who actually develop the the Rust language, library and tools. While the Foundation does things that's considered to be distractions for the Rust Project (like seeking sponsorships). While the Rust Foundation can fund projects, they aren't there to pay salaries for engineers working on Rust. (Notably, hang around on rust-lang's zulip for a while and one gets the impression that many people working on rust have other jobs keeping them from working on rust as much as they would like to).
There's also something called the "[Rust] Council". As far as I can tell, they are the actual Crab Elders -- the ones who could be said to be directing the development of Rust. And they are part of the Rust Project, not the Foundation.
I too wish to be corrected if I'm wrong.
I think you may be underestimating how much they spend on salaries - looking at the annual report, seems about $2M is spent on
Contributor Remuneration
Cost of employing people to work full-time on the
Rust programming language — maintaining critical
infrastructure, improving security, and running
crates.io.
I stand corrected!
Ironically, I originally linked that report in my post, but I removed it before posting -- I interpreted that section you quoted not as "we pay Rust Project developers", but rather as "we pay people to run infrastructure so the developers in the Rust Project don't need to worry about that". Now that I read it again, I don't know why I got that impression.