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Making Claude a Chemist

anthropic.com

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Re: Making Claude a Chemist

#21

Post by andai »

If they succeed here, won't they have to gate access to this feature, too? For the same reasons as, "if I so much as mention mitochondria, it downgrades me to Opus."

Step 1. Make it so Claude can do anything — the whole point of AGI

Step 2. Wait, if the user can do Anything, that would be Very Bad!

Step 3. Err on the safe side with blanket bans of entire fields

The latter actually seems to me a sensible reaction to e.g. the compartmentalization used in the large scale cyber attack using Claude last year. Where they were able to do Bad Thing by dividing it into many, many Small, Seemingly Harmless Things.

Gated access sounds bad (and I agree it sounds bad!) but it might actually be the only sensible response to such a set of conditions. I'm not sure though.

--

I saw some studies recently which showed LLMs provide much more detailed information to expert users. So we can distinguish between competence and incompetence based on use of language, and that is a reasonable metric for harm reduction.

But I don't think we can reliably detect "user has harmful intentions", at least not at a sufficient level of sophistication of the attacker.

Re: Making Claude a Chemist

#22

Post by xvilka »

Combine it with automated lab like this[1][2][3][4][5] (and many others) and it will iterate much quicker. Some already do but at a smaller scale, AFAIK.

[1] https://www.ginkgo.bio/autonomous-lab

[2] https://www.emeraldcloudlab.com/

[3] https://www.kebotix.com/

[4] https://www.chemify.io/

[5] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01485

Re: Making Claude a Chemist

#23

Post by MiracleRabbit »

andai wrote: post #21

If they succeed here, won't they have to gate access to this feature, too? For the same reasons as, "if I so much as mention mitochondria, it downgrades me to Opus." Step 1. Make it so Claude can do anything — the whole point of AGI Step 2. Wait, if the user can do Anything, that would be Very Bad! Step 3. Err on the safe side with blanket bans of entire fields The latter actually seems to me a sensible reaction to e…

I just wait until a Opensource model inhaled all the chemistry books and papers. Lol.

They are following closely and the best offer 80-90% of the performance and come with a very small fraction of the costs.

Re: Making Claude a Chemist

#24

Post by NewsaHackO »

andai wrote: post #21

If they succeed here, won't they have to gate access to this feature, too? For the same reasons as, "if I so much as mention mitochondria, it downgrades me to Opus." Step 1. Make it so Claude can do anything — the whole point of AGI Step 2. Wait, if the user can do Anything, that would be Very Bad! Step 3. Err on the safe side with blanket bans of entire fields The latter actually seems to me a sensible reaction to e…

I think one time I asked opus about copyfail when it just came out and it did treat me like some sort of criminal, but are there really people that run into this on a regular basis other than cybersecurity experts (which cannot be a big enough group to generate all of this criticism)?

Re: Making Claude a Chemist

#29

Post by b112 »

moffkalast wrote: post #19
jgilias wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even if you get the right molecule, it might be the wrong way around or just clump up into a useless mess. Sounds a lot like vibe coding lol

At least vibe coding can only explode in your face metaphorically.

Until vibe code is used for weapons system, or explosive manufacturers, or.. or...

The world today is coding.

Re: Making Claude a Chemist

#30

Post by echelon_musk »

MiracleRabbit wrote: post #23
andai wrote: post #21

If they succeed here, won't they have to gate access to this feature, too? For the same reasons as, "if I so much as mention mitochondria, it downgrades me to Opus." Step 1. Make it so Claude can do anything — the whole point of AGI Step 2. Wait, if the user can do Anything, that would be Very Bad! Step 3. Err on the safe side with blanket bans of entire fields The latter actually seems to me a sensible reaction to e…

I just wait until a Opensource model inhaled all the chemistry books and papers. Lol. They are following closely and the best offer 80-90% of the performance and come with a very small fraction of the costs.

Why wouldn't the US gov. outlaw the open source models?
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