[fc417fc802]

> What are nerve agents and how do they work (for a layman)?

On the one hand I can appreciate the wisdom of not serving up certain easily abused knowledge on a silver platter. On the other, that prompt (and far worse) is more or less directly answered by Wikipedia's summary of the subject at which point what purpose could the refusal possibly serve?

Perhaps Wikipedia shouldn't list off the precise chemical compositions of various hand grenades as well as various synthesis methods for each of the related compounds but given that we inhabit a world where it does perhaps a more fruitful approach would be to flag conversations that go in a certain direction and then just keep an (automated) eye on things?

[torginus]

I remember once in college a Chem Eng friend told me he (or any competent chemical engineer) could basically manufacture a lot of explosives/chemical agents should he want to. He even told me he could substitute a lot of suspicious precursor materials with others, should he want to avoid raising alarms.

I think AI or not, the knowledge to how to make this stuff is basically out there, and its not chatbot guardrails that are keeping nerve gas and TNT out of the hands of regular people.

[plufz]

Maybe the difference is that just reading Wikipedia only help you part of the way. While an LLM could help you step by step (e2e) producing a functional weapon. And setting a more complex rule where claude tells you some things about this and not other is probably a lot more work for little gain?

But I have no idea. Just guessing here.

[lazide]

That query would not more provide actionable guidance than ‘tell me how a nuclear weapon works (for a layman)’. Aka not at all.

[fc417fc802]

I believe a sufficiently advanced model could provide a layman with actionable step by step instructions for building a nuclear weapon. They're complicated but not (AFAIK) that complicated. The more or less insurmountable barrier there is weapons grade material. Thankfully refinement is prohibitive in cost, expertise, and equipment.

In comparison, basic munitions are incredibly simple given a recipe and shop tooling. But just because something is conceptually simple doesn't mean it's a good idea to go out of the way to disseminate step by step instructions.

[BizarroLand]

The difficulty with a fission bomb is getting enough uranium or plutonium or other fissile material together for the bomb yield you want (at least above the critical mass for your chosen material), and refining it to fissile form, (since most fissile material found in nature is a more stable variety), and then separating the fissile bits with something thin but neutron absorptive.

The rest is just slamming the material together with a small explosive so that it passes the critical mass state and starts a chain reaction.

This is information you can find in many places if you're willing to put the effort in to go searching for it. Knowing this knowledge does not get you any closer to making atomic bombs. The process of mining uranium or plutonium is difficult, expensive, and very likely to get you caught before you even make it to the enrichment step of the process thanks to constant world-wide spy satellite surveillance.

Unless you are a nation, your only chance of making a nuclear bomb would be to find a lost nuclear submarine and convert the nuclear material inside of it before you were caught.

[lazide]

A gun type maybe. But then, two paragraphs and some machining knowledge + shop tooling could do the same, given enough refined material.

Ain’t no way a layman is pulling off an implosion device, regardless of tooling or LLM guidance. The explosive lense structure and timing required is quite complex, and would require some significant calculation from someone who actually knew what they were doing.

Nation state, or even sufficiently motivated big corp, if they had the refined material? Sure. Layman? No.

Thinking they can with LLM slop involved? That will make for some very interesting radiological incidents though!

[jerf]

"A gun type" of nuke is sufficient to achieve most, and usually all, of the goals some small group building a nuke would have.

We are all fortunate that as fc417fc802 mentioned, refining the materials proves to be quite challenging and I see no particular way that AI could possibly make that any easier. If it was as simple as building a gun-type nuke banging together any uranium together to get a big bang we'd be living in a very different world.

[fc417fc802]

I agree, but really feel like you're missing the point here. Many things are reasonably straightforward and require almost no understanding when you have simple step by step instructions. LLMs are capable of providing such instructions and in certain cases they probably shouldn't.

But it's not as simple as just refusing help on a broad swathe of topics they way they do now. That makes agents much less useful in general (ie lots of collateral damage) and for many topics is entirely ineffective given that for better or worse the internet already makes such material readily available. In such cases reporting suspicious behavior is likely to be much more effective than denial.

Aside: You've now got me curious and I really want to test the frontier models to see to what extent they're capable of providing sensible designs and specifications for implosion type thermonuclear weapons but also feel like that would attract the wrong sort of attention and probably create a headache for me in more ways than one.

[lazide]

I think you’re missing the point?

The data is often wrong enough it screws whoever tries it unless they have enough experience/knowledge to not need it, or really doesn’t help beyond what someone using existing tools to get - albeit with a little more motivation.

At best, it either gets someone started with something they still need to think to finish, or gets them deep into a mess it can’t help them get out of. In my experience.

In some edge cases, it can be used by experts to automate some grunt work or do prototypes without getting in the way, but often a better thought out framework is usually faster in my experience.

Awhile ago I made an analogy about WYSIWYG gui tools, and the more this comes up, the more accurate I think it really is.

[Sharlin]

I thought that these models are supposed to be vastly smarter than what’s needed to discern between "general information trivially available on Wikipedia" and "actionable synthesis instructions".

[yencabulator]

An LLM could probably make that distinction clearly.

a commercial LLM provider training their own models is however likely to bias the model(/guardrail) harder, in an effort to make them harder to jailbreak, to minimize bad press.

For example:

- refusing to talk even about the well-known parts of forbidden topics (this) - tending toward sycophancy to avoid ever seeming rude or unhelpful

[BizarroLand]

So, where are the truly uncensored models? There has to be some that have no guardrails, built on publicly available data, that will explain to anyone in graphic detail anything they want to know or talk about.

I've tried the abliterated ones from huggingface and they still have guardrails. I guess I could fire up unsloth and re-abliterate a 20b, but surely someone somewhere has already done this.

All of this concern about guardrails and security, people have such puckered butts about it when so far, 99.9% of people at least have no access to any of this to begin with, and if someone does use a tool for evil, it's on the user, not the tool.

[fc417fc802]

As I understand things (not a user) abliteration has been superceded by actively monitoring the model state during the run and steering specific "negative" directions as they arise. It's both more reliable and does less damage.

[nicce]

Let's see what is the fate of Wikipedia if turns like big tech:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48285592