[tacet]

the bioweapon panic is funny. "oh, yes i know nothing about bicrobiology but i will follow instructions of synthetic text generation machine on temperature 1 about how to design a lab to not kill myself while brewing organisms that will kill myself if i make mistake"

There is nothing that special about bioweapons, there are plenty of bacteria that will kill you just fine. Americans even have free samples on their salad.

[consumer451]

> There is nothing that special about bioweapons.

The reason that madmen and terrorists choose kinetic weapons is because the knowledge and materials are more readily available... of and also that even terrorists are likely aware that their own people would suffer. As the knowledge and tools for playing with CRISPR-style biological legos become more widespread, we come closer to the Great Filter, where one person could kill billions.

Even our normal mad leaders have agreed that bioweapons cannot be allowed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention

[johncolanduoni]

A halfway decent synthetic biology lab (no need to invoke CRISPR) can make e.g. smallpox without a sample of the original disease, just from the gene sequences. Basically all state actors could do this if they wanted to without an LLM. What barrier that a terrorist organization faces today to having a functioning synthetic biology lab does an LLM actually solve?

[consumer451]

> Basically all state actors could do this if they wanted to without an LLM.

The issue is non-state actors. That moves it from a ~hunderd to many billions.

BTW, according to my FOSS religious beliefs, I should be making the other side of the argument. This whole thing is tough.

[mnicky]

With current gaps in DNA synthesis screening yes. But this will be improved in the future hopefully.

[tacet]

i meant it in the sense of arcane knowledge model could have that would make it simple for anyone to brew up in cheap lab while managing to not infect themselves over and over.

"at home" bioweapon panic has been around since crispr and rna synthesis got available to amateurs.

[consumer451]

I appreciate the reply. I did not mean to be dismissive at all. In the interest of a good exchange, I have to say:

I really want open weight models. Otherwise, I see no other path outside of the labs eventually not being allowed to/wanting to release model access at all, and instead just eating all the verticals. That would be a horrible near-term business outcome.