← Back to context

Comment by sys32768

5 hours ago

Fable and now Opus 5.5 won't answer my college student's prompt about Alzheimer's and immune response.

ChatGPT 6 Pro answered it without issue.

5 comments

sys32768

Reply
debesyla  4 hours ago

I am honestly still confused about this limitation. I can understand cybersecurity, because mass "hacking" can be automated and Claude itself can help you do it, but biology...? Is it that easy to manufacture and distribute viruses and whatnot?

  • b112  3 hours ago

    You can order genes online, and some say you can assemble using stuff cobbled together in a home lab rather easily. For the last 20 years, I've personally felt that bio-terrorism is the highest possible risk, well above nuclear, or chemical warfare. But it does take training, expertise, or, it did.

  • toss1  4 hours ago

    Considering there are many high-school competitions in genetic editing, some listed at [0] as well as a whole biohacker culture, and labs providing gene sequencing as a service e.g., [1,2], we can reasonably assume it is not beyond the reach of some garage lab to accidentally or deliberately spread a deadly pathogen if it can find the right sequence.

    So, yes, having an unconstrained frontier AI doing the searching and analysis to find the right (i.e., wrong and deadly) sequence would massively increase the odds some garage biohacker or small aggrieved nation-state starting the next pandemic.

    [0] https://www.sciencebuddies.org/projects-lessons-activities/g...

    [1] https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/sanger-sequencing

    [2] https://plasmidsaurus.com/