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Comment by kdavis | Hacker News Reader

While I understand the caution, the current policy seems too draconian.

It states in part:

> Until that policy is in place, the Governing Board has approved this interim policy:

> Contributions in the OpenJDK Community must not include content generated, in part or in full, by large language models...

Note, this would exclude most spell checkers, as they often are LLM based. That said, they do soften this with the addition:

> Q: Is it okay to continue using the spell-checking, grammar-checking, auto-completion, and refactoring features in my editor or IDE?

> A: Yes, so long as they are not based on large language models or similar deep-learning systems.

This addition will likely not help as most spell checkers are OS/IDE services and their implementation details are opaque to users.

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> this would exclude most spell checkers, as they often are LLM based

Who is using an LLM as a spell checker?

Yeah - spell checking has been on device for literal decades.

My point is you might be when you wrote your comment or I might be in writing this comment.

However, I don't know if I am as I haven't seen, and will likely never see, the implementation behind the text box that is suggesting the next letter, word, or spelling correction as I type.

Can you point at a specific spell checker that is known to use an LLM?

"A Simple yet Effective Training-free Prompt-free Approach to Chinese Spelling Correction Based on Large Language Models"[1]

[1] https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.966/

That's a research paper. Can you point to a single product that claims they use an LLM for their spellchecker? With today's investor market, surly that would be something a company would brag about.

This wasn't your original question, which I answered.

This "moving the goalposts", requiring me to know the internals of say a closed source product, just proves my original point. I can't know if an LLM is being used because I don't have the source code.

> This wasn't your original question, which I answered.

No, their original question was,

> Who is using an LLM as a spell checker?

(Emphasis mine)

> This "moving the goalposts", requiring me to know the internals of say a closed source product, just proves my original point. I can't know if an LLM is being used because I don't have the source code.

It's not moving the goalposts, you pointed at research showing that somebody theoretically looked at using LLMs for that purpose, not evidence that anybody is actually doing so which is obviously what we're discussing. This is getting into Russell's Teapot territory; yes, a closed source system could do anything, but it would be nice if we had literally any evidence that they were doing so, especially when you're proposing that they burn orders of magnitude more compute on something that isn't really better than existing systems (i.e. there are obvious downsides).

Edit: I see that you have now posted another comment actually providing that evidence. That's actually compelling; thanks.

Nobody has moved the goalposts. You claimed that "most spell checkers" would be disallowed by this policy because they use LLMs. You are simply being asked to substantiate that rather bold claim.

I think you moved the goalposts, they asked for a spell checker, you provided a paper

Craig Federighi SVP of Software at Apple “The keyboard now leverages a transformer language model, which is state of the art for word prediction, making autocorrect more accurate than ever.”[1]

"New features available with macOS Sonoma" doc states "Autocorrect fixes mistakes for you more accurately than ever before by leveraging a new transformer language model in English, French, and Spanish keyboards." [2]

"Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models" blog post states "Apple Intelligence is comprised of multiple highly-capable generative models that...have been fine-tuned for user experiences such as writing and refining text.. In the following overview, we will detail how two of these models — a ~3 billion parameter on-device language model, and a larger server-based language model."[3]

"A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model" blog post[4] is the kind of deep dive you'd have to do to find out what's going on under the hood in your spelling/grammar checker. TL;DR AppleSpell uses GPT-2 which proves my point.

[1] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2023/06/06/wwdc-2023-appl...

[2] https://www.apple.com/mideast/macos/sonoma/pdf/en/macOS_All_...

[3] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...

[4] https://jackcook.com/2023/09/08/predictive-text.html

Autocorrect != spellcheck

Mac User Guide documentation states "When autocorrection is on, misspelled words are detected and automatically corrected as you type."

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-az/guide/mac-help/mchlp2299/mac

Is anyone using even a tiny on-device language model for spelling? For grammar, I could almost imagine it.

But this also bans "simple" AI-powered auto-complete, like Zed's Zeta2 model. This is a very conservative model that rarely tries to propose more than a few obvious lines (at least in my use cases). If a developer accepts a three-line autocomplete that introduces a bug, that's kind of on them. Honestly, about the only thing that Zeta2 is good for is reducing the risk of RSI.

To be fair, it's also their project, and I completely support their right to set whatever policies they want.

The is not exactly my point.

I am speaking of spelling/grammar checkers are part of the IDE and/or OS.

You'd have to know your IDE and/or OS's implementation details to know you are not using an LLM based one.

I'm fairly confident mine doesn't. There'd be 0 benefit to using an LLM for something we've had near perfect tooling around for decades.

LSPs vs LLM Autocomplete are a different story, but I can just turn that off.

My VSCode spell checker is open source and written before GPT. I've never seen an IDE use OS provided spell check

I think it's pretty clear how this was meant, not sure why you feel the need to split hairs here. I'm certain the intention is this:

- spell checkers: ok

- '.getC' autocompleting to '.getColor()': ok

- 'getC' autocompleting to 'getColor()' + five more lines based on preceding code and documentation: NO.

If the company making this claim were not famously litigious, I would agree with your "good faith" interpretation. They are, unfortunately, famously litigious[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_...

Why is it draconian? If we take Dec-2025 as the point where the models became good for real work (agreed by many), not even a year has passed since then. The world hasn't changed, and there are still many open legal questions.

> Note, this would exclude most spell checkers, as they often are LLM based

Like, what? What are you even talking about? Most spell checkers used by programmers are certainly not LLM based. Spell-checking has always been instant for like two decades. It's such a solved problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49111599

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