Comment by addaon
9 hours ago
It depends how easy it is (now, or in the near future) to turn information into weapons, and how realistic control of materials is. There's a reason we control access to plutonium, but information about metastable hafnium.
It does seem to me that for this specific problem the materials are a lot more amenable to control than the information is?
There's also this weird revealed threat model thing going on? Like why does it make sense to support heavy LLM restrictions but leave benchtop oligo synthesisers completely unregulated? (Note: I do agree that wanting to regulate BOTH is at least a consistent and defensible position).
I find it philosophically interesting because the problem is not strictly information control. Local models don't have any special extra information with respect to biological research. What has to be restricted is using information that's already publicly known in the wrong ways.