The bioweapons threat is real, but shouldn't be constrained at the 'intelligence' level. Rather it should be constrained at the supply chain level.
The cybersecurity threat will likely be a cat and mouse react game for a while. Just like robberies / the mob was in the early 20th century.
Social forces bring things into balance over time, much more so than the proactive actions of individuals.
Unfortunately, the genie at this point is unlikely to go back into the bottle. There's enough 'intelligence' out there that a super intelligent model could emerge at some point in spite of pacing.
This isn't a doomer scenario - we tend to navigate social changes better than we ever could have hoped.
What supply chain controls can you have on biotech? Part of the problem is that you can do a lot of damage with ingredients you can buy over the counter or make at home.
And all of this information has been available on the open web way before LLMs.
I'd wager it's likely easier for an average person to do this with Tor browser than it is to get an LLM to help them with it. Even ones that Dario calls dangerous.
You are right that it’s easier to do this via Tor than an LLM. Those are the safeguards…
So what's the fuss about then? Is the idea that a Chinese company will release a model that will have no safeguards? For what purpose?
Basic safeguards are all that's required, and they've been there in every usable model since GPT-2, including Chinese models that are supposedly "unsafe".
Or are we saying that some lunatics will start training their own models, spin up a GPU cluster, run some abliteration workflow, or learn how to jailbreak?
That would be a very dedicated person. And dedicated person doesn't need an LLM. So where are they?
Yes, that is exactly Dario's concern. Either one of the US labs or one of the Chinese ones will eventually release something with insufficient safety controls for its power level because it gives them slightly better user retention (look how much complaining there is about current frontier models, especially Fable, rejecting requests). Regulation or consortium is how you avoid the prisoner's dilemma.
As long as user provides inputs and LLMs stay LLMs, you can waltz through any guardrail. Fable is the extreme case, but it's not that hard if you know what you're doing and know how LLMs and their guardrails work.
Am I saying that guardrails don't work? No, they probably stop a lot of insane people trying insane things. But you don't need Fable-level guardrails to do that. You probably don't even need to do anything during pretraining, or RL, or classification to make sure model refuses to compy with "hack me a bank" or "make me a chemical weapon".
All models will automatically have guardrails just as a result of training on data that gives them intelligence. You have to actually train it to be malicious to produce something what Dario calls "insufficient guardrails".
No guardrail is going to stop a determined person with sufficient intelligence. It only has to stop ones with insufficient one, and even basic guardrail that are just by-product of training is going to achieve that.
The bioweapons argument is one of the favorites used by these con artists and dreamed up by their PR team.
Except Bioweapons already existed before LLMs, Adversarial governments already have them, they are already easy to make. You could use the same bullshit argument for why we need to ban libraries, books, or require a license to buy an internet connection.
An undergrad bio student with some lab experience can do some effing terrifying things with about $20k in equipment and time and access to some papers and a library. AI is not needed, but it might help accelerate the research.
Not going to go into it but I studied biology. It’s all out there. It’s easier than you think.
It hasn’t happened yet because… nobody has done it. That’s the answer. There is no policeable physics based barrier like there is with nukes and fissile material. Biology is scarier than nukes. One attack could have a much larger body count than even a big H-bomb.
It’s the kind of thing that makes me wonder about quantum immortality, the idea that we are just in the timeline where we exist.
I love watching NileRed/NileBlue on youtube - crazy chemist that does a lot of insane stuff. While it's obvious that he's very smart and probably way above the average, his education is still nothing that probably millions of people don't have:
> Bachelor of Science degree in biochemistry with a minor in pharmacology
Watching him explain things has made me realize that knowing how to manufacture a very dangerous thing probably requires attending some classes and knowing how to read a paper. And the way he just casually orders dangerous materials makes me feel like there are just online stores with 2-day shipping after you upload your ID or something.
It also made me think that lack of specialized education would get me nowhere if I wanted to replicate whatever he's doing, even if an LLM guided me step-by-step, because I'd probably do something stupid (or AI would miss a crucial instruction/hallucinate) and kill myself first.
So my opinion on this is that people who could pose any danger were already posing it before LLMs and LLMs won't materially change that.
That’s not entirely true though, right? There have been plenty of bioweapon attacks
Ex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack
The bioweapons concern is assuming that the current open models aren't already capable of bioweapons development. It's also assuming that halting the bioweapons threat is his true intention rather than the 'feels legit' story.
As for cyberweapons, there is no way to secure a system than to actually design it securely.
It's not. I think they believe this, but it's deeply wrong and it will hurt everyone in the long run.
[note - There has been supply chain surveillance since Project Bacchus, at the very least.]
I've read the front matter and the Misuse report.
You don't have to take my word for it. Read for yourself what inspired the NYT headline "Anthropic says it blocked possible efforts to build biological weapons."
Let's dig into, "Case study 2: A research program engineering highly pathogenic mammal-adapted avian influenza"
Sounds serious. But what were they using Claude for?
Note, "Claude’s [assisted] in study planning and design, data analysis, and the interpretation and prioritization of experiments"and "editorial assistance in writing up the research."
and then,
Anthropic then says for the above, "we estimate that the uplift provided by Claude was primarily clerical assistance in data analysis, study ideation and design"The report mentions "uplift" here. They're talking about a domain expert in a state research institution using Claude to do paperwork.
The front matter then says,
Once again, I want to take pains to remind you that they're talking about, a "researcher [..] in a credible institutional context"Working scientists.
From a different case study. this one was called, "Case study 3: Covert frontier model access for orthopoxvirus research"
What were the researchers using Claude for? What did they block?"blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application"
What was the grant being written?Note, "The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo" [..] and then, "Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics"
It was most likely vaccine development. They stopped the study of a neglected tropical disease and vaccine development.
But we can't be sure, because,
I would like to point out the most notable part, this account was used by "civilian researchers" at an "institutional affiliation associated with the grant was also a cause of concern" and the concern was that they were researchers at "performed at a military research institute."In most parts of the world, there's either strict military control over BSL-4 labs, or a mixed military-civilian hybrid model.
I doubt that researchers working in the military side of these labs looking to weaponize things are writing grants with Claude.
I really want to be charitable here, but in general, it seems that they stopped people writing grants and reports for vaccine and therapeutics research and are claiming it as "possible efforts to build biological weapons."
The one case where Claude was used to do something interesting and were stopped is fairly upsetting to read, at least for me.
Ozempic was isolated from Gila monster vneom. Since its success there has been interest in finding other peptides that are breakthroughs. So researchers around the world are looking for similarly beneficial compounds in different venom species and families.Anthropic says so itself,
"The program had an explicit therapeutic goal: the development of new analgesics (pain killers), antidepressants, and other therapeutic molecules"
and that it was a "[..]state-supported research program"
Who exactly is using venom from snakes as a weapon when... nerve agents like sarin, VX, novichok etc exist and can get the job done for less fuss and muss?
They stopped the development of new painkillers and antidepressants.
Are you feeling safer knowing that researchers can't use Claude to write grants and progress reports? Or make new painkillers?
Again, trying really hard to be charitable here. Because from what I remember, one of the motivations behind the founding of OpenAI and Anthropic was ending disease.
This seems to be anything but.