Comment by mekael
12 hours ago
There are already scores of people capable of building biological weapons or doing GOF work which ends up being essentially the same thing. There’s no need for an LLM, just a phd in virology, a decent lab, and a handful of grad students. [0]
All of which, rogue actors have easy access to and could have accomplished for a few millions dollars anytime in the last decade.
And yet, we aren’t drowning in our own blood while our organs liquify, mainly because building and releasing such a pathogen isn’t something people want to do as it’s pure and utter insanity. For those who are inclined to do so, they would do it regardless of whether they had an llm or not because they are, at the end of the day, zealots.
[0] https://universityresearchpark.org/uw-madison-scientist-allo...
We have somewhere between 0% < X < 100% probability that covid-19 (remember that?) was an accidental lab leak by credentialed virologists not making use of AI in the post-2022 sense.
If I don't trust the credentialed virologists without AI based on perceived precedent, I'm certainly not going to trust them with AI to accelerate their their unabated workstreams.
Note: per my HN profile, I am an advisor for BiosafetyNow.
> There’s no need for an LLM, just a phd in virology, a decent lab, and a handful of grad students.
You are missing the forest for the trees. The existing virologist PhDs and the GoF labs are a scarce resource. The model makes the same scarce knowledge accessible to many more malicious actors.
There's > 6 thousand of these labs. I wouldn't really consider that scarce considering the implication.