161–170 of 262 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO you should disclose that you are an OpenAI employee if you're going to try and shape the contours of public discussion in a lecturing tone.
Damn, it's not even 1am and I got my first FFS of the day. Is end of days cultism a prerequisite to working at an LLM company? I miss the optimism of 20 years ago.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO you should disclose that you are an OpenAI employee if you're going to try and shape the contours of public discussion in a lecturing tone.
Damn, it's not even 1am and I got my first FFS of the day. Is end of days cultism a prerequisite to working at an LLM company? I miss the optimism of 20 years ago.
Meta: The potential proliferation of biological weapons is serious. Millions could die. It's easy to joke about before it happens, but try to imagine how this thread might look after the successful deployment of a biological weapon by a rogue state or non-state actor. I encourage you to take this topic seriously and contribute posts that add new information or perspectives to the discussion. (I myself think the odds…
All of which, rogue actors have easy access to and could have accomplished for a few millions dollars anytime in the last decade.
And yet, we aren’t drowning in our own blood while our organs liquify, mainly because building and releasing such a pathogen isn’t something people want to do as it’s pure and utter insanity. For those who are inclined to do so, they would do it regardless of whether they had an llm or not because they are, at the end of the day, zealots.
[0] https://universityresearchpark.org/uw-madison-scientist-allo...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Yemeni report is interesting. - How is your missile so accurate? - We're using a vibe coded app on an iPhone that does terrain matching and target finding. The thing is that OK, Anthropic may block it, but nothing says they can't use an open model hosted in a friendly country that has access to GPUs. And yes, this will most likely happen pretty soon to be able to create whatever you want without the AI provider b…
> - We're using a vibe coded app on an iPhone that does terrain matching and target finding. And that part seems entirely reasonable. It looks like the Tomahawk cruise missile did it with an 84 lb package with a 16-bit computer with 64K of memory [1] [2] and sensors. That's similar computing performance to an original IBM PC, which weighed 30 lb. The only bit of hardware an iPhone doesn't seem to have for TERCOM is a…
Ardupilot boards are $20 and support lots of different altimeters technologies: https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-rangefinder-landing...
Meta: The potential proliferation of biological weapons is serious. Millions could die. It's easy to joke about before it happens, but try to imagine how this thread might look after the successful deployment of a biological weapon by a rogue state or non-state actor. I encourage you to take this topic seriously and contribute posts that add new information or perspectives to the discussion. (I myself think the odds…
Nuke requires a long supply chain and massive resources, so the worry there is maintaining control of all of the existing nuke weapons. Except for Russia racing towards Turin no itself into a failed state by staying engaged in the war with Ukraine, I don't see the nuke equation has changed much in recent years. Perhaps N Korea is a worry, but they seem to just want attention and power. Iran pretends to have nukes and says they want to extinguish Israel and the US, but I interpret that as posturing to maintain domestic control and Israel seems excellent at countering Iran's threats.
Chemical weapons have traditionally been the easiest to create (like creating chlorine gas from mixing common household cleaners). The trick there has always been volume and how to disperse it. I suspect within countries, police will have to deal more with LLMs being abused that way.
Bioweapons will be easier than in the past. LLMs will lower the barrier to entry, but bioweapons are hard to create and much of what the superpowers learned thankfully isn't in the training set for LLMs. I doubt there is much that can be inferred by having agents learn biology from first principles.
Ultimately, governments are responsible for policing these threats. Sadly we are currently both cutting government systems which work different aspects of these problems and withdrawing from the multinational orgs (UN, WHO, etc) who do lots of the investigating and watchdog work that underpin lots of the US's intelligence related to these fields.
The US has a schizophrenic regulation policy of AI where we both want to sell Nvidia chips to China (David Sachs) and we don't want to sell the top chips to China (bipartisan policy prior to Trump). We also have a terrible AI regulation policy where David Sachs disables models on a call-to-CEO-on-a-Friday-evening basis after Andy Jasse calls him with a scary story which turns out to be missing lots of relevant info (eg. The exploits was discovered in Mythos, not Fable, and other open weights models were able to find the same exploits).
There's not much we can do at a government policy level while Trump is snoozing through the rest of his term. So we are dependent on the AI companies to police themselves, but it's clear from this report that it's insufficient to prevent all serious abuse of the models.
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I don't think knowing how to build a bio weapon means one could actually build a bio weapon. It's like saying knowing how to build a nuclear weapon can easily lead to building a nuclear weapon. Advanced machinery and safety precaution is needed to engineer a virus or a bacteria to be a bio weapon. It's not something you can do in your tool shed at the moment. Also one would need lethal viruses to even start with and…
> Advanced machinery and safety precaution is needed to engineer a virus or a bacteria to be a bio weapon. It's not something you can do in your tool shed at the moment. I think the claim in this report is that it was a state or semi-state actor. They were from "blocked regions" at a "military research institute." So dismissing the threat by solely modeling it as a disgruntled layman rando is not reasonable. But you…
Meta: The potential proliferation of biological weapons is serious. Millions could die. It's easy to joke about before it happens, but try to imagine how this thread might look after the successful deployment of a biological weapon by a rogue state or non-state actor. I encourage you to take this topic seriously and contribute posts that add new information or perspectives to the discussion. (I myself think the odds…
I don't think knowing how to build a bio weapon means one could actually build a bio weapon. It's like saying knowing how to build a nuclear weapon can easily lead to building a nuclear weapon. Advanced machinery and safety precaution is needed to engineer a virus or a bacteria to be a bio weapon. It's not something you can do in your tool shed at the moment. Also one would need lethal viruses to even start with and…
It's worth verifying whether the US, OECD countries, UN, etc will have sufficient regulation over suspicious purchases, for example, after DOGE and funding cuts. This will be an ongoing issue as sovereign debts and bond yields squeeze out spending for other government regulation.
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Why does it have to be a layman? The 2001 anthrax attacks are believe to have been carried out by an insider to the field (senior biodefense researcher). Such tools could potentially be accelerants for similar individuals?
If the five eyes intelligence services aren't monitoring all biodefense researchers and bio chemists around the world all of the time they've probably failed in their jobs.
It will only get worse as sovereign debt service takes a larger piece of the budget pie.
Meta: The potential proliferation of biological weapons is serious. Millions could die. It's easy to joke about before it happens, but try to imagine how this thread might look after the successful deployment of a biological weapon by a rogue state or non-state actor. I encourage you to take this topic seriously and contribute posts that add new information or perspectives to the discussion. (I myself think the odds…
There are already scores of people capable of building biological weapons or doing GOF work which ends up being essentially the same thing. There’s no need for an LLM, just a phd in virology, a decent lab, and a handful of grad students. [0] All of which, rogue actors have easy access to and could have accomplished for a few millions dollars anytime in the last decade. And yet, we aren’t drowning in our own blood whi…
You are missing the forest for the trees. The existing virologist PhDs and the GoF labs are a scarce resource. The model makes the same scarce knowledge accessible to many more malicious actors.