131–140 of 260 posts
You can’t even ask about what’s in HN right now. It will switch to 4.8.
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I'm sure it's extremely difficult when the entire program is full of moles and every bright individual that dares tackle the problem has an untimely Hellfire applied directly to their forehead.
> full of moles I'm imagining a comedy in the style of "The Office" in which the majority of the workers are agents of sabotage who are unaware that the majority of their coworkers are doing the same. How far fetched is it for the entire program to be a fake, with all the pomp and cost of a real program, but secretly existing only to string the leadership along with occasional dog and pony shows?
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It’s moral panic. People need big unambiguously evil things to be scared of, and most are too lazy to think of one for themselves, so they glom onto whichever one is presented to them / caters to their community
The chem/bio stuff is a lot more likely for some malicious hobbyist to be able to do at home.
Notes:
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Amerithrax-Anthrax-Killer-Robert-Gray... . Amerithrax was the name of the FBI investigation. https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/amerithrax-o...
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_atta...
> In 1984, 751 people suffered food poisoning in The Dalles, Oregon, United States, due to the deliberate contamination of salad bars at ten local restaurants with Salmonella. A group of prominent followers of Rajneesh (also known as Osho) led by Ma Anand Sheela had hoped to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates would win the 1984 Wasco County elections.[2] The incident was the first and largest bioterrorist attack in U.S. history.
Tried to take over a town by making all the voters too sick to vote on election day. This event is why all buffets & salad bars in the US now have sneeze shields.
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo_and_weapons_of_m...
> Aum Shinrikyo operated the most extensive biological weapons program by a non-state actor ever discovered. Aum considered a range of agents, but only seriously attempted to obtain and disperse Bacillus anthracis and botulinum toxin, the causative agents of anthrax and botulism. With the 2001 anthrax attacks, it comprises the only attempts to use anthrax as a weapon not attributed to a state program.
Tried multiple times to weaponize anthrax and failed. This was a group that made an automated factory to build AK-47s. Eventually, they spread sarin nerve agent in the Tokyo subway.
I still don't know why all these concern about nuclear weapons with LLMs. It is not that if an entity (A country) wants to develop a nuclear weapons that the resources they need for such a program and huge infrastructure and scientific enterprise would need an LLM to teach them anything. Knowing how to develop one is not a closed secret but getting in secret is impossible without the whole world knowing. So I wouldn'…
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This is the right answer. There's a ton of easy low hanging fruit ways to do absolutely horrible evil things with high potential body counts. I could sit here and brainstorm dozens.
Occasionally we see people motivated to do some of those things, though. And when they're not also complete idiots, they can cause big problems. What would someone like the Tsarnaev brothers be able to do with the power of an unrestricted LLM? Well-financed cartels? Organized terrorist groups? Yes, there used to be an uproar about stuff like the anarchists cookbook... and people did attempt some of the things it outl…
Censorship is not the answer.
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I think the point is intent. Sure, no chance of success to build a reactor. But he created a radiation hazard situation all the same. If a nuclear engineer enabled and instructed him, would there not be liability for the hazard? If ml is going to be an expert instructor for nuclear, hacking, bio hacking, virus research, do the peddlers of the ai product escape ethical or legal responsibility just because "its an app?…
> If a nuclear engineer enabled and instructed him, would there not be liability for the hazard? Should the library where he read books about physics also be liable?
E.g. look at programming - people who don't know how what a compiler is, are making things that I could only make after a few years into my programming journey.
You obviously get the same results in chemistry or nuclear physics or whatever, the models are heavily trained on code in particular, but if there's a chance that we've reduced the ease of committing certain kinds of crime that were previously gate-kept by knowledge, we should know about it.
I still don't know why all these concern about nuclear weapons with LLMs. It is not that if an entity (A country) wants to develop a nuclear weapons that the resources they need for such a program and huge infrastructure and scientific enterprise would need an LLM to teach them anything. Knowing how to develop one is not a closed secret but getting in secret is impossible without the whole world knowing. So I wouldn'…
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Of course. "tried to" being key words in the comment. If he had the help of Claude at the time, how much more dangerous would his bumbling have been? A real nuclear engineer with the knowledge he needed would also have said "no, don't do that and I won't help you." We are programming the knowledge into the ai agent. Giving ai a little discretion makes sense too.
> A real nuclear engineer with the knowledge he needed would also have said "no, don't do that and I won't help you." That sounds like what Claude would say unless he was really good at jailbreaking it, which would IMO imply he knew he was chasing after a bad idea.
Even in the early 2000s, in the aftermath of 9/11, I can remember people in school passing around copies of The Anarchist’s Cookbook. Perhaps I’ve been naïve, but I’ve always assumed that should one actually want to look up instructions for nearly any sort of horrible thing one could imagine, it could be found fairly quickly using nothing but a little Google-fu.
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> in secret is impossible without the whole world knowing. I'm curious about why this is Outside of an actual test detonation, presumably this could all happen in a secure place?
My guess would be that sales of the high-tech gear you need, like Uranium centrifuges, are strongly sales/export controlled. Probably someone would also notice if you start mining Uranium ore.