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OpenAI acknowledges new models increase risk of misuse to create bioweapons
- tahoeskibum 2y agoIn other news, Gutenberg's ghost acknowledges that the printing press increases the risk of misuse to create weapons, misinformation...
- tgv 2y agoThere's a bit of a difference between producing the laptop that can connect to the internet and creating a web site with information on how to kill someone.
- rockemsockem 2y agoStep 1. Buy a gun and bullets Step 2. Shoot someone Oh no, now this website has information on how to kill someone. I'm not a bioweapons expert, but I think there's a lot of equipment and materials required to build a bioweapon of sufficient lethality and efficacy. Look at anthrax for an example of a bioweapon with only one of those.
- tgv 2y ago> Oh no, now this website has information on how to kill someone. That's just a bad faith response. > I'm not a bioweapons expert That's the whole point, innit? You don't know how to do, so you can't. Publishing functioning recipes using easily accessed materials would provide you and countless others with a bio-weapon. Thus the publication is the problem, not the tech stack (internet, pcs, servers, etc.). Therefore, OpenAI publishing risky information is equally at fault.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoGo to a beauty spa and take their supply of Botox. Boom incredibly toxic bioweapon. Or grow some Castor plants, the beans contain ricin.
- keyboardcaper 2y agoYou can get PTFE spray in any hardware store.
- rockemsockem 2y agoI think when most people talk about a bioweapon to be concerned about they mean something that can be deployed against a large number of people. IDK much about Botox as a weapon, but can you use it to deploy broadly? With ricin, that's just another poison, so how's that better than rat poison?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoIt is more just that there are a wide variety of existing ways available to harm or kill the population. No need to invoke the specter that AI magic is going to engineer some super bug. Plenty of virulent pathogens already around. You could trivially cause enormous harm by sabotaging electrical distribution, water treatment, hospitals, airports, etc. Go to any food manufacturer/distributor and contaminate the products with listeria or such.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y agoIs the risk higher than with any chemistry or microbiology grad student?
- sandspar 2y agoPossibly. Imagine if the "school shooters" of tomorrow are depressed kids who release a bioweapon at their high school.
- sgillen 2y agoThis feels like a marketing move to me, claim your model is so powerful that it’s dangerous, and people will be more interested in using it.
- jdminhbg 2y agoCoincidentally, governments should prevent anyone from building an open source competitor, which would be too dangerous to be out in the wild.
- hollerith 2y agoThe same sneaky ploy used to restrict nuclear weapons to a mere handful of "great powers". Even today, most people believe that nuclear weapons are dangerous.
- elashri 2y agoUnfortunately we have tried the destruction power of nuclear weapons on muck up cities and actual cities. This bold claim is not in agreement with experiment.
- Iulioh 2y agoThe danger of nuclear is not the explosion, that's nothing special, really. Maybe you can't have such a big explosion with conventional weapons but you can just use more. The problem is contamination. Invisible and deadly
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago> danger of nuclear is not the explosion, that's nothing special, really It's absolutely the explosion. (And fires.) You can make a similar boom as historical (not modern) nukes with conventional weapons, but not in a form factor that fits on the tip of an ICBM.
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- bormaj 2y agoCan't read the article because of the paywall, so this may/not be related... Is it fair to say that the real liability here is a dataset mapping protein/molecule structures to outcomes/effects? Hypothetically the govt could always require OpenAI to blur responses with malicious intent. But if the underlying corpus is available, what's stopping a bad actor from training another model to do the same thing? I guess the question I'm asking here is what risk is unique to their model if not the data it was trained on?
- bradyriddle 2y agoIs it just way easier/accessible to make a bioweapon then I think it is? Serious question. I've seen this pop up a few times.
- mr90210 2y agoOne doesn’t need advance chemistry, perhaps what makes it harder to do it is the access to the materials and enough motivation. Source: my limited understanding.
- printerphobia2 2y agoin theory you can print out any virus given the sequence which you can find just from googling (e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/1798174254 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/1798174254 attaaaggtt...)
- inciampati 2y agoThen you have to boot it up. Bio equivalent of putting the lightning in the rock (semiconductors). The DNA is like the lightning (like the code) the rock is the biological system you drop it into to run it. Booting viruses is not super easy.
- neom 2y agoDepends what you're trying to do, light weight bio weapons are pretty easy to make, not an expert but there is ammonia and chlorine that can be used easily. I presume cytotoxins are among the easier of the "bad ones", but the precursors are monitored. that said, I think the risk here isn't about teaching people how to make the stuff we know about, it's about inventing new stuff we've not thought about?
- rimunroe 2y agoThose are examples of chemical agents. Bioweapons (biological weapons) are weaponized pathogens like viruses or bacteria.
- kylehotchkiss 2y agoCan't we make the crawler just a little smarter then to avoid chemistry websites?
- rafaelmn 2y agoGiven how shit GPT is at programming and the amount of training data available in this domain - I highly doubt it would be more useful in this area over a Google search.
- DilutedMetrics 2y agoYour Google search will probably send you to Amazon or Pinterest.
- goles 2y agohttps://archive.is/xmuVF https://archive.is/xmuVF