4 ms·

> I must be among an extremely small group of people (n=1?) that have both 1) trained a frontier LLM and 2) designed and synthesized custom viruses in a lab wit

• protocolture 20d ago
  This is how I feel about the coming LLM Cyber Apocalypse. Like if you are a software developer who has joined the basilisk cult you might be forgiven for accepting the scifi apocalypse narrative but I just dont see it.
  • Geof25 20d ago
    Isaac Arthur was talking about technological singularity 10-15 years ago. The fundamental problem which he pointed out is that you will just run out of energy long before even touching the singularity. AI apocalypse is basically the same thing but you can also run out of tokens too.
    • protocolture 20d ago
      Yeah who in their right mind is going to pay for enough tokens for LLMs to rule the world?
• strken 20d ago
  I'm confused by this. I remember genetically modifying E. coli to glow in the dark in high school. You can apparently buy a kit to do it online for $39.99 USD. I'm not suggesting that making bacteria glow in the dark is the same as making arbitrary changes to a virus. At the same time, do you really need $100M of automated freezers and cell culture rooms? Do you need to synthesise a whole virus? Presumably you could just find a building in the desert, shoot anyone who goes near it, feed the past decade of gain-of-function research into Qwen, splice stuff into viruses based on the most promising leads Qwen gave your biologists, then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest. I would have thought the main thing stopping people is that this is a clearly stupid thing to do and offers little strategic advantage. But at some point it'll be cheap enough for you or I to do it with a little AI assistance, right? Or at least within the capabilities of an Aum Shinrikyo style doomsday cult.
  • xeonmc 20d ago
    Is it, err, possible to then transplant the e coli strain to one's gut biome?
    • strken 20d ago
      I don't know, but I bet it would look neat.
    • ampdepolymerase 20d ago
      Why would you modify E coli for this? Use existing gut friendly bacteria and start from those. There's a wealth of material on the genetics of probiotics.
      • brazzy 20d ago
        Um... E.coli is an existing gut friendly bacteria, one of the most common ones present in at least 90% of all humans' gut biome. There are only some specific strains which are pathogenous.
  • com2kid 20d ago
    > I remember genetically modifying E. coli to glow in the dark in high school. That was a fun class! I haven't encountered anyone else outside a students who went to my one HS in Seattle during the late 90s / early 2000s who also remember doing that, interesting to hear other schools had a similar class.
    • jb1991 20d ago
      The two of you were actually in the same class.
    • strken 20d ago
      In Australia I had to get into a genetics program, which happened automatically because I was the only applicant from my school, and take a four hour train ride to one of the local universities. Definitely worth it though! We did gel electrophoresis too, and some other bits and pieces.
• throwaway13337 20d ago
  When you think about it, it is hard. Evolution was a billion year old game of who could kill who with biological weapons. Very rarely did a species totally succeed. We can’t even get wipe out mosquitoes. Apparently, though, AI research leaders have it figured out and want to save us from them. We must defer to their 'independent' effective altruism friends at METR to tell us which LLMs are 'safe' enough for us plebs to use.
• paganel 20d ago
  The author of that tweet is obviously very biased, seeing how he's employed by a petro-state to build a LLM system for them. Come to think of it, I wouldn't take the opinions of people employed by petro-states at face value, to the contrary.
• kuerbel 20d ago
  [flagged]