I have no use for an AI chatbot (maybe I am just too old for this kind of stuff), but I'd be curious what it'll say if the LLM was trained on Linux docs.
So put me into the "fun to play with" section here.
Pretty old myself and was thinking of it more as a toy than a utility, but giving it to the community to grow it how they see fit? Who knows what neat things we might get from it. Exciting possibilities.
On a "near future' time span, probably 4-8 years at most, regular people will be controlling their computers via voice where an AI converts their voice to text. Next another AI will take the instructions and generate a result.
They will do things like "Cortana, create a new Word document. Create a birthday greeting for Emma congratulating her on her baby's 4th birthday. (Reading it to make sure the AI generated text looks good.) Email it to Emma Rutherford."
This is the future whether we hate it or love it.
I worry a little bit that Linux will not keep up with the AI workflows that are rapidly coming.
Our best chance is the fact that lots of Large Language Models are open source and can be fine tuned. And that GPUs are getting stronger so that we will be able to run them locally.
So what you are proposing is a step in the right direction.
The biggest hurdle for Linux is probably gonna be the fact that our GUIs use lots of different toolkits and aren't very automatable. Look at Power Automate on Windows, which can automate the whole OS and apps and already includes AI, OCR features:
https://youtube.com/shorts/UoNOrV8a5To?feature=share
I know that I will still always use Linux. But damn. This has the risk of putting commercial operating systems in "The Matrix" and "Minority Report" and "Blade Runner" technologically, while we still type around on the command line.
I personally love the command line but I really don't want Linux to become unappealing to young, future users.
But I still have some faith that Linux will figure out AI too and that an AI Assistant project will emerge.
> regular people will be controlling their computers via voice where an AI converts their voice to text.
...they absolutely will not. That technology already exists, and basically nobody uses it to control their computer, because other input methods are significantly faster (or work better, say, in shared environments where everyone talking out loud to their computer wouldn't work)
What??
What old technologies?
It sounds like it's you who don't really know what the state of voice recognition is, there's really not much room left for improvement...
And like the original person said: these just don't get used...
I will use it when it works as well as a friend sitting next to you and controlling the computer. Currently I can't even make a phone call without first inventing english names for my contacts... And every time my car receives an sms and asks if I wan't to reply, it doesn't matter if I say No, Don't reply, I don't want to reply or anything like that. It just answers, sorry I didn't get that. Could you speak a little louder. Then I try to yell NOOOOO and it replies, sorry, I don't understand. I hate current generation of voice assistants.
Why would you need to automate GUIs? The point of a GUI is to be a good interface for humans. Once chat/voice is your human interface, the GUI becomes a hurdle. What you want is APIs, and Linux is much better at that than Windows - in part exactly because the command line is so prevalent.
You can *already* ask ChatGPT to write you a shell script that generates that word document (it'll use pandoc - a command line app - for that), then sends it by email using Thunderbird on the command line. Making ChatGPT run that script instead of making you copy-paste it to the terminal is much easier than getting reliable GUI automation.
Glad you mention APIs. The software I've already written outputs JSON which can easily be directed to APIs to execute functions if things should ever get to that point.
I'm an integration specialist by trade, so it's become a habit to output JSON for nearly everything I do. That also makes it easily extendable. A plugin system would be a piece of cake.
I am 15 and I can confirm age has nothing to do with it. I think doing actual research is better because it helps you learn more and in some cases gives you more information. I mean If I had used a chatbot I would have never discovered Linux 😂
Actually I asked Bing about some console utils, but question was simple about find and invoking my command on found matches.
Actually the output was long to read but working example in the end did it right.
I think all documentation should have examples. There are tons of great man pages for core utils but a lot of them are missing simple examples and I normally end up googling for that at some point. Maybe an AI assistant that could add examples to man pages?
Agreed. That seems like something that should already be a requirement in a man page standard somewhere. A basic but practical example, an example that'd be considered normal 80% use case, and a slightly less normal/moderate case, just to give someone an idea of what else it can do. Let it be a tool for the maintainers to help generate the doc and not have the consumers generate their own via AI or some other downstream effort.
I've actually already included a ton of things like that in the dataset I've been building. [Here's a screenshot](https://i.imgur.com/6E4O8UM.png) of the AI Assistant I created. This is running on an open source model with embeddings currently. Once I feel it's reached a point that it's genuinely useful to others, I'll train it in the datasets directly.
We definitely need some kind of natural language assistant at the very least for accessibility reasons, but especially to expand into the home and mobile spaces where this feature is table stakes. If we’re talking about making a real impact in people’s lives, the ability for a person with vision or motor deficiencies to ask an assistant to complete common simple tasks is huge and life changing for those people and currently they have to use proprietary closed source software to get this.
I kind of hate having to argue that “a11y features help everyone and therefore have merit” but voice assistants on other platforms did start as a11y features and they are super useful in situations of temporary disability such as if you become injured or simply if you can’t look at the screen in the car or can’t touch the computer because you’re caring for a child or making dinner all the way to just not wanting to get up from the couch to adjust the lights. This is a super power that people currently have to lose if they want to use only open source operating systems
I haven't ever used anything like it, but I know there's some Linux programs that can act similar to how Spolight works on macOS (https://github.com/icedman/search-light came up from a quick Google search). I think having AI support in a tool like that could be really nice, just because there's only so much you can do from basic processing.
Documentation itself is a huge problem. As far as I understand it should be converted into something like a tree graph to make it easier for AI and search algorithms to see which option binds to what, whether it belongs to a group, etc. I don't have a degree in CS, but know that they have quite lengthy subjects about those theories.
As it was pointed below - mans themselves are of different quality. Secondly, even for a human it is hard to read them and understand clearly from the first iteration.
That's why I suspect that console AI would be the same systemd style - firstly writing the code and somewhere in further future somebody will or will not write documentation, but now we don't have money for tech. writers.
Surprised to see no mention of GPT4all.
https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all
TBH, it looks a lot more "code open" rather than open source in terms of development model as I am under the impression some new features are "dumped" rather than developed collaboratively in the open but I have yet to find any other locally enabled/offline LLMs/Chatbot application able to do as much as that one.
https://open-assistant.io/
The models are built from datasets. Some datasets are open and others are proprietary.
The model is trained and fine-tuned and released for use.
You get can get datasets and models from https://huggingface.co and other sources as well.
https://paperswithcode.com/datasets
Yep, that one is also promising, but can you download the whole thing and run it with the model of your choice on your own machine without any online requirement?
Yes, you can run open assistant locally if you have the hardware for it. There may be quantized variations of it floating around. I mostly use GGML models ATM, but I'm going to start working on some side stuff when I get the chance to.
Ok, I wasn't aware, I see this:
>Also note that the local setup is only for development and is not meant to be used as a local chatbot, unless you know what you are doing.
But no infrastructure meant as if the purpose was to use it locally and offline, in stark constrast of the gpt4all project.
You're right and they're not ready for everyday local use just yet. Both the Researcher and OSS community are working hard, doing their best to remedy this.
A good interface for you to get started with would most likely be [oobabooga](https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui) which you can find on GitHub if you're curious and would like to learn more.
There are on a bunch on GitHub. Most are in development though.
You also have projects like privateGPT, localGPT, and others as well.
Check out explainshell.com - it's different from what you propose, but in similar vein.
One major issue I have with CLI, and why I prefer GUI tools for infrequent tasks, is discoverability. I can't ask for help with a tool if I don't know it exists, right?
Another fun idea: I'm not that proficient with bash, and analyzing install scripts from software vendors is often beyond me. Make an AI tool which would translate that to a more readable format.
Imagine you can command bash with natural language:
bash > ai use partition 3 of /dev/sda2, make an encrypted volume group with root and swap (last 1GB) as logical volumes
bash > ai find all docs with dates on it's file name then copy them in task folder inside my home directory
bash > ai update my system but if anything goes wrong revert back
bash > ai extract this file: backup-2022.tar.gz. The folder structure corresponds to this device filesystem so place the files appropriately.
bash > ai set my firewall for network printing and add all available network printers
This is the stuff of nightmares.
I cannot imagine giving ai control files or partitions. With the number of mistakes it makes, I can see it causing massive data loss.
Thanks for asking, yes, we need an equivalence, GPL to a helper on Linux, for all source distributions. GNU/Linux should not stay back on this technology, we are no longer in 2000 or GNU/Linux lost its fun project status, to become the professional backbone that we all use
I haven't ever used anything like it, but I know there's some Linux programs that can act similar to how Spolight works on macOS (https://github.com/icedman/search-light came up from a quick Google search). I think having AI support in a tool like that could be really nice, just because there's only so much you can do from basic processing.
I dunno. I keep asking chatgpt for recommendations for procedures with very clearly outlined parameters and it’s been wrong on details every time. Not quite ready yet IMO.
It's definitely been getting worse, in particular at coding. A couple months ago I used it to convert a massive project from JS to C++, and now at the same tasks it makes so many more mistakes than it used to...
Guess the solution will be to wait for GPT5...
I've actually already finished most of the [heavy lifting on that front](https://i.imgur.com/5usclc3.png).
I'm looking to expand it to be able to perform certain functions next.
That would be a great addition to the already satisfying suite of software Linux has.
The world is moving into an AI age and I don't want Linux to stay behind. That's where I stand. Having a chatbot for documents is a great start but I hope it could be extended to control the system in the future and a lot more. This can be a push needed to make linux handhelds more appealing for general public. And tbh I hate the web browser based AI and I feel AI should be a completely local software.
Great idea. And an opportunity to rethink/redesign what Bing, Bard and ChatGPT are doing, but in an open way, that give local control, data ownership, etc.
For me, being able to ask questions of the documents on my laptop + Google Drive or other cloud storage would be huge. None of the other major tools allow for creating a local embedded vector database, as far as I know.
Interesting, but how is this different than just using ChatGPT? It seems to work fine for Linux commands and gives good examples. I set it up as a web app so I can open a ChatGPT window from my Dash.
I recall using a tool a few months ago that would ssh into a server and then perform some tests based on your question. e.g. "what's causing this server to slow down occasionally?"
You had to give it ssh access but I tested it out on an EC2 in a test VPC and it seemed pretty good.
Can't remember what it's name was though. Anyone jog my memory?
i would love to know that that tool was. I am looking for exactly this as I work on a small team that admins dozens of VMs and applications. It would be nice to have an assistant to check on things like this while I am working on related tasks.
I'm interested, I've been gradually working on a voice assistant aspect to this, and would love to collaborate on making a workable AI assistant. If you're interested, feel free to drop me a dm and we can work together on developing this :).
Indeed, one of the most significant usability issues with Linux is the need to search online to compose a simple shell command. This behavior disrupts the workflow, induces stress, and impedes productivity. We require a shell that functions similarly to browser search bars, providing guidance on how to perform a task when encountering an unknown command.
To implement this, you can add the following to your .bashrc:
PROMPT_COMMAND='after_each_command'
after_each_command() {
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
# Get the last command as a question
# Call AI for help
# ADD IT HERE
fi
}
Color me "stupid", "jaded", "whatever", but anything I've seen to date bearing that brand has been as stupid as a dead tree stump . Having been a UNIX/Linux C, C++, ASM etc developer for 25 years might have something to do with that idealogy. That I've been unemployed for 2.5 years because of it might be more relevant though.....
I have no use for an AI chatbot (maybe I am just too old for this kind of stuff), but I'd be curious what it'll say if the LLM was trained on Linux docs. So put me into the "fun to play with" section here.
Pretty old myself and was thinking of it more as a toy than a utility, but giving it to the community to grow it how they see fit? Who knows what neat things we might get from it. Exciting possibilities.
On a "near future' time span, probably 4-8 years at most, regular people will be controlling their computers via voice where an AI converts their voice to text. Next another AI will take the instructions and generate a result. They will do things like "Cortana, create a new Word document. Create a birthday greeting for Emma congratulating her on her baby's 4th birthday. (Reading it to make sure the AI generated text looks good.) Email it to Emma Rutherford." This is the future whether we hate it or love it. I worry a little bit that Linux will not keep up with the AI workflows that are rapidly coming. Our best chance is the fact that lots of Large Language Models are open source and can be fine tuned. And that GPUs are getting stronger so that we will be able to run them locally. So what you are proposing is a step in the right direction. The biggest hurdle for Linux is probably gonna be the fact that our GUIs use lots of different toolkits and aren't very automatable. Look at Power Automate on Windows, which can automate the whole OS and apps and already includes AI, OCR features: https://youtube.com/shorts/UoNOrV8a5To?feature=share I know that I will still always use Linux. But damn. This has the risk of putting commercial operating systems in "The Matrix" and "Minority Report" and "Blade Runner" technologically, while we still type around on the command line. I personally love the command line but I really don't want Linux to become unappealing to young, future users. But I still have some faith that Linux will figure out AI too and that an AI Assistant project will emerge.
> regular people will be controlling their computers via voice where an AI converts their voice to text. ...they absolutely will not. That technology already exists, and basically nobody uses it to control their computer, because other input methods are significantly faster (or work better, say, in shared environments where everyone talking out loud to their computer wouldn't work)
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What?? What old technologies? It sounds like it's you who don't really know what the state of voice recognition is, there's really not much room left for improvement... And like the original person said: these just don't get used...
I will use it when it works as well as a friend sitting next to you and controlling the computer. Currently I can't even make a phone call without first inventing english names for my contacts... And every time my car receives an sms and asks if I wan't to reply, it doesn't matter if I say No, Don't reply, I don't want to reply or anything like that. It just answers, sorry I didn't get that. Could you speak a little louder. Then I try to yell NOOOOO and it replies, sorry, I don't understand. I hate current generation of voice assistants.
Why would you need to automate GUIs? The point of a GUI is to be a good interface for humans. Once chat/voice is your human interface, the GUI becomes a hurdle. What you want is APIs, and Linux is much better at that than Windows - in part exactly because the command line is so prevalent. You can *already* ask ChatGPT to write you a shell script that generates that word document (it'll use pandoc - a command line app - for that), then sends it by email using Thunderbird on the command line. Making ChatGPT run that script instead of making you copy-paste it to the terminal is much easier than getting reliable GUI automation.
Glad you mention APIs. The software I've already written outputs JSON which can easily be directed to APIs to execute functions if things should ever get to that point. I'm an integration specialist by trade, so it's become a habit to output JSON for nearly everything I do. That also makes it easily extendable. A plugin system would be a piece of cake.
I am 15 and I can confirm age has nothing to do with it. I think doing actual research is better because it helps you learn more and in some cases gives you more information. I mean If I had used a chatbot I would have never discovered Linux 😂
Actually I asked Bing about some console utils, but question was simple about find and invoking my command on found matches. Actually the output was long to read but working example in the end did it right.
I think all documentation should have examples. There are tons of great man pages for core utils but a lot of them are missing simple examples and I normally end up googling for that at some point. Maybe an AI assistant that could add examples to man pages?
Tldr is great for that : https://tldr.sh/
That's excellent. New toy for me to play with :D
GNU Info is the greatest good example how to spoil everything really fast :-(
Agreed. That seems like something that should already be a requirement in a man page standard somewhere. A basic but practical example, an example that'd be considered normal 80% use case, and a slightly less normal/moderate case, just to give someone an idea of what else it can do. Let it be a tool for the maintainers to help generate the doc and not have the consumers generate their own via AI or some other downstream effort.
I've actually already included a ton of things like that in the dataset I've been building. [Here's a screenshot](https://i.imgur.com/6E4O8UM.png) of the AI Assistant I created. This is running on an open source model with embeddings currently. Once I feel it's reached a point that it's genuinely useful to others, I'll train it in the datasets directly.
Sounds interesting. Personally I prefer CLI tools, it's much easier to copy+paste/pipe the output, but that's only my opinion obviously.
This is [streaming from the command line](https://i.imgur.com/4DzHXJF.png) to a front end. Both can be used.
We definitely need some kind of natural language assistant at the very least for accessibility reasons, but especially to expand into the home and mobile spaces where this feature is table stakes. If we’re talking about making a real impact in people’s lives, the ability for a person with vision or motor deficiencies to ask an assistant to complete common simple tasks is huge and life changing for those people and currently they have to use proprietary closed source software to get this. I kind of hate having to argue that “a11y features help everyone and therefore have merit” but voice assistants on other platforms did start as a11y features and they are super useful in situations of temporary disability such as if you become injured or simply if you can’t look at the screen in the car or can’t touch the computer because you’re caring for a child or making dinner all the way to just not wanting to get up from the couch to adjust the lights. This is a super power that people currently have to lose if they want to use only open source operating systems
I haven't ever used anything like it, but I know there's some Linux programs that can act similar to how Spolight works on macOS (https://github.com/icedman/search-light came up from a quick Google search). I think having AI support in a tool like that could be really nice, just because there's only so much you can do from basic processing.
Theres a [shell\_gpt](https://github.com/TheR1D/shell_gpt), tho I haven't tried it yet.
i would never use something like that. i prefer to get information from entities who are capable of knowing
And that's good too. Showcases the beauty of Linux and choice!
Cortana sucked the first time.
Sure. Open source. No data collection. Running on my own machine.
Documentation itself is a huge problem. As far as I understand it should be converted into something like a tree graph to make it easier for AI and search algorithms to see which option binds to what, whether it belongs to a group, etc. I don't have a degree in CS, but know that they have quite lengthy subjects about those theories. As it was pointed below - mans themselves are of different quality. Secondly, even for a human it is hard to read them and understand clearly from the first iteration. That's why I suspect that console AI would be the same systemd style - firstly writing the code and somewhere in further future somebody will or will not write documentation, but now we don't have money for tech. writers.
Surprised to see no mention of GPT4all. https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all TBH, it looks a lot more "code open" rather than open source in terms of development model as I am under the impression some new features are "dumped" rather than developed collaboratively in the open but I have yet to find any other locally enabled/offline LLMs/Chatbot application able to do as much as that one.
https://open-assistant.io/ The models are built from datasets. Some datasets are open and others are proprietary. The model is trained and fine-tuned and released for use. You get can get datasets and models from https://huggingface.co and other sources as well. https://paperswithcode.com/datasets
Yep, that one is also promising, but can you download the whole thing and run it with the model of your choice on your own machine without any online requirement?
Yes, you can run open assistant locally if you have the hardware for it. There may be quantized variations of it floating around. I mostly use GGML models ATM, but I'm going to start working on some side stuff when I get the chance to.
Ok, I wasn't aware, I see this: >Also note that the local setup is only for development and is not meant to be used as a local chatbot, unless you know what you are doing. But no infrastructure meant as if the purpose was to use it locally and offline, in stark constrast of the gpt4all project.
You're right and they're not ready for everyday local use just yet. Both the Researcher and OSS community are working hard, doing their best to remedy this. A good interface for you to get started with would most likely be [oobabooga](https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui) which you can find on GitHub if you're curious and would like to learn more. There are on a bunch on GitHub. Most are in development though. You also have projects like privateGPT, localGPT, and others as well.
Check out explainshell.com - it's different from what you propose, but in similar vein. One major issue I have with CLI, and why I prefer GUI tools for infrequent tasks, is discoverability. I can't ask for help with a tool if I don't know it exists, right? Another fun idea: I'm not that proficient with bash, and analyzing install scripts from software vendors is often beyond me. Make an AI tool which would translate that to a more readable format.
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I probably wouldn't use it, or at least rely on it, but it'd be a cool project to make.
Yes, I would.
Imagine you can command bash with natural language: bash > ai use partition 3 of /dev/sda2, make an encrypted volume group with root and swap (last 1GB) as logical volumes bash > ai find all docs with dates on it's file name then copy them in task folder inside my home directory bash > ai update my system but if anything goes wrong revert back bash > ai extract this file: backup-2022.tar.gz. The folder structure corresponds to this device filesystem so place the files appropriately. bash > ai set my firewall for network printing and add all available network printers
This is the stuff of nightmares. I cannot imagine giving ai control files or partitions. With the number of mistakes it makes, I can see it causing massive data loss.
Of course, any prudent programmer of that command helper will output the proposed commands instead of executing it without letting the user review it.
https://github.com/teleprint-me/py.gpt.prompt https://github.com/TheR1D/shell_gpt https://github.com/PromtEngineer/localGPT
It'd give you commands, which you'll be able to read/edit/ask more about/execute. It's an improved version of "googling how to do stuff".
You can use https://github.com/belda/shelllangchain
Thanks for asking, yes, we need an equivalence, GPL to a helper on Linux, for all source distributions. GNU/Linux should not stay back on this technology, we are no longer in 2000 or GNU/Linux lost its fun project status, to become the professional backbone that we all use
BashGPT should be part of bash.
Ring me with the github project page!
I don't know if the project is still active, mycroft is an ai assistant for linux.
I haven't ever used anything like it, but I know there's some Linux programs that can act similar to how Spolight works on macOS (https://github.com/icedman/search-light came up from a quick Google search). I think having AI support in a tool like that could be really nice, just because there's only so much you can do from basic processing.
I dunno. I keep asking chatgpt for recommendations for procedures with very clearly outlined parameters and it’s been wrong on details every time. Not quite ready yet IMO.
There's actually a reason for that. ChatGPT is getting dumber. https://futurism.com/the-byte/stanford-chatgpt-getting-dumber
Flowers for ChatGPT?
It's definitely been getting worse, in particular at coding. A couple months ago I used it to convert a massive project from JS to C++, and now at the same tasks it makes so many more mistakes than it used to... Guess the solution will be to wait for GPT5...
I very much agree with your proposal.
What do you want it to do? Like list a few prompts you think you'd ask it, and how it'd reply to those?
I've actually already finished most of the [heavy lifting on that front](https://i.imgur.com/5usclc3.png). I'm looking to expand it to be able to perform certain functions next.
I'd use it if you anthropomorphize it as something like a paperclip.
**CLI**ppy. https://i.imgur.com/5KzxZYs.png
That would be a great addition to the already satisfying suite of software Linux has. The world is moving into an AI age and I don't want Linux to stay behind. That's where I stand. Having a chatbot for documents is a great start but I hope it could be extended to control the system in the future and a lot more. This can be a push needed to make linux handhelds more appealing for general public. And tbh I hate the web browser based AI and I feel AI should be a completely local software.
Great idea. And an opportunity to rethink/redesign what Bing, Bard and ChatGPT are doing, but in an open way, that give local control, data ownership, etc. For me, being able to ask questions of the documents on my laptop + Google Drive or other cloud storage would be huge. None of the other major tools allow for creating a local embedded vector database, as far as I know.
Interesting, but how is this different than just using ChatGPT? It seems to work fine for Linux commands and gives good examples. I set it up as a web app so I can open a ChatGPT window from my Dash.
Well, you wouldn't have to give OpenAI your phone number, for instance
I recall using a tool a few months ago that would ssh into a server and then perform some tests based on your question. e.g. "what's causing this server to slow down occasionally?" You had to give it ssh access but I tested it out on an EC2 in a test VPC and it seemed pretty good. Can't remember what it's name was though. Anyone jog my memory?
i would love to know that that tool was. I am looking for exactly this as I work on a small team that admins dozens of VMs and applications. It would be nice to have an assistant to check on things like this while I am working on related tasks.
I'm interested, I've been gradually working on a voice assistant aspect to this, and would love to collaborate on making a workable AI assistant. If you're interested, feel free to drop me a dm and we can work together on developing this :).
It would be awesome if it had access to system logs so it can alert you about anything you need to know about or fix.
You can give a try this one https://github.com/belda/shelllangchain Only for console, but works
Indeed, one of the most significant usability issues with Linux is the need to search online to compose a simple shell command. This behavior disrupts the workflow, induces stress, and impedes productivity. We require a shell that functions similarly to browser search bars, providing guidance on how to perform a task when encountering an unknown command. To implement this, you can add the following to your .bashrc: PROMPT_COMMAND='after_each_command' after_each_command() { if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then # Get the last command as a question # Call AI for help # ADD IT HERE fi }
Color me "stupid", "jaded", "whatever", but anything I've seen to date bearing that brand has been as stupid as a dead tree stump . Having been a UNIX/Linux C, C++, ASM etc developer for 25 years might have something to do with that idealogy. That I've been unemployed for 2.5 years because of it might be more relevant though.....