alt Hacker NewsI was a genetic engineer for ~20 years and have worked on frontier LLMs for the last 8. I used to engineer viral vectors and studied how to evade human immune systems for gene therapies...
The biorisk scenarios that the AI safety folks flog are fever-dreamed fantasies that have only the most tenuous connection to biological reality. As someone who cares about the real bio-risks of natural pathogens, I get pretty tired of fear-based marketing pretending that AI is a bigger threat than, say, animal agriculture.
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> The biorisk scenarios that the AI safety folks flog are fever-dreamed fantasies that have only the most tenuous connection to biological reality
Do you not think that at the rate ai intelligence and ability is increasing, this could realistically change one day soon?
> The biorisk scenarios that the AI safety folks flog are fever-dreamed fantasies that have only the most tenuous connection to biological reality.
As an expert, could you also provide your arguments please?
If you are optimistic about this given your expertise, I am very glad to hear it. As someone scientific but with little background in biology, I've been concerned about the bioweapons angle for a long time (and not because AI companies tell me to worry about it). Can you please explain a bit more about why you are not concerned? Between standard bioweapons like sarin and gain-of-function research on viruses, it's not obviously implausible to me that LLMs a few generations from now won't be able to guide a determined layperson through the steps needed to make something very destructive.
> fever-dreamed fantasies
Reminder that what local LLMs are achieving today is the "fever-dreamed fantasies" of 5 years ago.
People really need to internalize that we will eventually have the technology for giving everybody the equivalent of a world class scientist locked in their basement that is willing to do anything.
No one knows the timeline, but it's inevitable (barring societal collapse or some kind of legislation)
It has always been ridiculous to suppose that some organization spent $500m on a microbiology / genetics lab, but ran out of money for scientists, so they have to ask Claude what to do. Or OTOH to suppose a guy in his garage set up a weapons-grade CRISPR lab without anybody noticing.