alt Hacker NewsIf 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.
I think I'm less bothered by the risk because I've actually used these systems to do biological research, to work in bioinformatics and to work in the lab. And while I think that the leverage you get in bioinformatics is very significant, the laboratory work has never felt the same.
At best, you get much, much better ability to understand existing literature. the model itself has a very poor understanding of the physical world and that's masked by its knowledge of things people write about the physical world but it intrinsically doesn't have the same kinds of intuition and perspective that are really required to drive integration and completion in this space.
Is AI an important new tool in biology? Well, yes. Does it cause so much uplift in capacity that some rogue actor without biological research background could somehow destroy the world with a super-bio-nuke? I don't think so. I think that's just as logical a conclusion as the idea that next year one of the new frontier models will be told to make as many paperclips as possible and accidentally boil lake Michigan in pursuit of its goal.