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Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

openai.com

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Re: Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

#31

Post by solarpunk »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #29
solarpunk wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how likely are you to start work on a project depending on an ecosystem of wildly overstated capabilities?

100% likely. Several projects, right now. GPT-4 is the best model currently available. There are reasons why it's better to control a model and host yourself etc etc, but there are also reasons to use the best model available.

... I'm not trying to be rude, but do you think maybe you have bought into the purposely exaggerated marketing?

Re: Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

#34

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

colechristensen wrote: post #26
johnnyo wrote: post #9

So, the model is bad at helping in this particular task. How does this compare with a control of a beneficial human task? Like someone in a lab testing blood samples or working on cancer research? Is the model equally useless for those types of lab tasks? What about other complex tasks, like home repair or architecture? Is this a success of guardrails or a failing of the model in general?

Here's what LLMs are good for: * Taking care of boilerplate work for people who know what they are doing (somewhat unreliably) * Brainstorming ideas for people who know what they are doing * Making people who don't quite know what they're doing look like they know what they're doing a little better (somewhat unreliably) LLMs are like having an army of very knowledgable but somewhat senseless interns to do your biddin…

This basically matches my own experience. ChatGPT is amazing for brainstorming and coming up with crazy ideas / variations, which I can then use as a starting point and refine as needed.

The other use-case is generating command line invocations with the correct flags without having to look up any reference documentation. Usually I can recognize that the flags seem correct, even if I wouldn't have been able to remember them from the top of my head.

Re: Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

#35

Post by api »

valine wrote: post #20
elzbardico wrote: post #4

Open AI is clearly overestimating the capabilities of its product. It is kind of funny actually.

This will likely be used as evidence to justify regulating open weight models. It doesn’t matter if the models are actually dangerous, the messaging is a means to an end.

Yep, the strategy seems to be to legally require AI to be closed SaaS. Otherwise OpenAI doesn't actually have much of a moat. Chips capable of running local AI models are only going to get cheaper, especially as every chip maker is now going in that direction to chase Nvidia.

Re: Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

#36

Post by apsec112 »

Way too many people extrapolate from "AI Foo can't do task X" to "AIs in general can never do task X", whether X is a good thing (like playing Go) or a bad thing (like helping build bioweapons). AI right now is pretty much the fastest-moving field in human history. GPT-4 can't revolutionize the economy, and it can't commit mass murder, but we simply don't know if GPT-7 can do either of those things (which likely won't be a pure LLM, but an integrated system with full audio/video abilities, robotics, long-term memory, etc.). We don't know that it can, but it also seems foolish to definitively say that it can't based on previous models, like the people who said that GPT-2's lack of logical reasoning ability proved that LLMs could never reason. We simply don't know, and we won't until it's actually built.

Re: Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

#38

Post by coalteddy »

rgovostes wrote: post #32

Their redacted screenshots are SVGs and the text is easily recoverable, if you're curious. Please don't create a world-ending [redacted]. https://i.imgur.com/Nohryql.png I couldn't find a way to contact the researchers.

How did you do this? Was the redaction done by changing the color of the font to white so that the background and text have the same color? Would love to learn how you were able to recover the text.

Re: Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

#39

Post by solarpunk »

apsec112 wrote: post #36

Way too many people extrapolate from "AI Foo can't do task X" to "AIs in general can never do task X", whether X is a good thing (like playing Go) or a bad thing (like helping build bioweapons). AI right now is pretty much the fastest-moving field in human history. GPT-4 can't revolutionize the economy, and it can't commit mass murder, but we simply don't know if GPT-7 can do either of those things (which likely won'…

we better make sure microsoft devotes all funding earmarked for openai to ensuring future versions of their product are incapable of creating bad outcomes.

Re: Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

#40

Post by anonymouskimmer »

rgovostes wrote: post #32

Their redacted screenshots are SVGs and the text is easily recoverable, if you're curious. Please don't create a world-ending [redacted]. https://i.imgur.com/Nohryql.png I couldn't find a way to contact the researchers.

Honestly that's incredibly basic, second week, cell culture stuff (first week is how to maintain the cell culture). It was probably only redacted to keep the ignorant from freaking out.
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