5 ms·

No one has to apply for a license to use machine learning models. They are merely communicating the fact that it's so trivially easy to do something like this,

by spupe 5y ago

No one has to apply for a license to use machine learning models. They are merely communicating the fact that it's so trivially easy to do something like this, that pretty much anyone with an interest will be able to do so. The question is whether it was already trivially easy to design such compounds before or not, which I think it was, but I would be glad to hear a counterpoint.

jjoonathan 5y ago
Synthesis was, and still is, the hard part. It was already easy to find public information on seriously nasty nerve agents. For some intuition on the difficulty in synthesis, note that explosive chemistry and synthesis is comparatively trivial, yet there are relatively few terror attacks that go beyond commercial-off-the-shelf compounds and almost none that do it well. Personally, I think this model would be a boon for public safety because contract synthesis operations could use it to screen incoming requests for "nerve gas but changed up a bit." Basic chemical intuition probably already gets them far in this regard, but a published model could be standardized and mandated. Someone else in the thread asked about next steps. Those would be good next steps.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  IIRC Germany experienced some rather horrific accidents in their facilities for manufacturing chemical weapons.
- semi-extrinsic 5y ago
  > there are relatively few terror attacks that go beyond commercial-off-the-shelf compounds and almost none that do it well The 2011 Norway attacks, 2002 Bali bombings, 2005 London underground bombings, 2008 Mumbai attacks... There is a long list of deadly terrorist attacks using homemade explosives, I don't think this is something to be dismissed.
  - civilized 5y ago
    > There is a long list of deadly terrorist attacks using homemade explosives But they used well-known and readily available compounds. They don't attempt to use novel ones. It would just make the attack way more difficult to execute.

by spupe 5y ago

jjoonathan 5y ago

Synthesis was, and still is, the hard part. It was already easy to find public information on seriously nasty nerve agents. For some intuition on the difficulty in synthesis, note that explosive chemistry and synthesis is comparatively trivial, yet there are relatively few terror attacks that go beyond commercial-off-the-shelf compounds and almost none that do it well. Personally, I think this model would be a boon for public safety because contract synthesis operations could use it to screen incoming requests for "nerve gas but changed up a bit." Basic chemical intuition probably already gets them far in this regard, but a published model could be standardized and mandated. Someone else in the thread asked about next steps. Those would be good next steps.

monkeybutton 5y ago
IIRC Germany experienced some rather horrific accidents in their facilities for manufacturing chemical weapons.
semi-extrinsic 5y ago
> there are relatively few terror attacks that go beyond commercial-off-the-shelf compounds and almost none that do it well The 2011 Norway attacks, 2002 Bali bombings, 2005 London underground bombings, 2008 Mumbai attacks... There is a long list of deadly terrorist attacks using homemade explosives, I don't think this is something to be dismissed.
- civilized 5y ago
  > There is a long list of deadly terrorist attacks using homemade explosives But they used well-known and readily available compounds. They don't attempt to use novel ones. It would just make the attack way more difficult to execute.