Comment by cubefox
21 hours ago
> Data and content related to "biological weapons" already exist on the internet, in books, etc. The real issue is access to facilities and tools.
No, I think tools are easy to come by (unlike in nuclear research), the real issue is the know-how to create biological weapons, which you can't easily get out of books, but much more easily out of an amoral LLM.
This is just wrong. Standard textbooks like "Bioprocess Engineering Principles" [1] already contain step by step industrial engineering protocols and formulas. LLMs only summarize what print literature has documented for decades. The real bottleneck has always been hands on physical execution, not access to text. (This is not the case with actual models trained on biological data, which are not LLMs)
> amoral LLM
Are you a Lesswrong member? What makes Anthropic moral when their priority is automating people out of jobs instead of developing better medicine or advancing healthcare?
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/monograph/9780122208515/b...
This is just wrong. There is a huge difference between a book that doesn't explicitly tell you how to create a deadly virus, and an infinitely patient future LLM that leads you through every step and every unexpected problem and every question you might have.