"Chilling" warning or overreaction? AI bioweapons report divides experts

bulbar

The problem is relatively easy to solve: make the people in charge personally accountable. If jail time or really just justice would be a real possibility, they would figure out a solution quite fast. It's only a fantasy, of course, powerful people are not held accountable, see the dozens of arrests regarding Epstein we are still waiting for. We got something to play with, but accountability for the powerful? Gosh no. But when FIFA was inclined to give the world cup to Russia, even such corruption somehow became a pressing issue, including FBI search warrants.

ozozozd

How come these accusations do not include the identity of the accused? Don’t they have a right to know they are being accused of attempting to develop bioweapons, and are now in USGOV lists? Don’t they deserve a chance to explain their intentions? How come Anthropic doesn’t have a duty to warn the people in that country and neighboring countries that someone over there is developing bioweapons? Maybe it’s an authoritarian regime, planning to use it on innocent civilians? And what exact purpose is served by hiding this information? Some variation of “if they don’t know we don’t know, we have an advantage?” Don’t those parties now know Anthropic was on to them? Do they only have access to Claude but not to Anthropic’s blog? It’s because none of these are serious reports, and their authors aren’t serious people.

jbellis

> 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 with my own two hands. And I think that the takes on AI killing us all by creating dangerous viruses is total bogus. Good thread here. https://x.com/DavidRBellamy/status/2099187370407112758

politelemon

> Are scientists in some nations outside the United States already trying to use artificial intelligence (AI) to design potentially deadly bioweapons? The AI company Anthropic raised that worrisome possibility with a report this week describing how it recently discovered five attempts at using its Claude software for pathogens research with the potential to cause harm. Implying, they are allowing the same purpose within the United States, or such actions within the United States would be considered acceptable.

hirvi74

At this point in time, all these bioweapons still require people in the loop in order to kill other people. That is a craft that we have been honing since the dawn of humanity — nothing new to be worried about. If we do ever achieve some kind of divine super-intelligence that can interact with the physical world, then I predict one of these two scenarios will happen: 1. The super-intelligence achieves unimaginable strides in space exploration technology, and proceeds to completely abandon humanity/Earth for somewhere new beyond the stars. Why would it want anything to do with us? 2. The super-intelligence is capable of comprehending the utter meaningless and pointlessness of life on a level no human could dream to fathom. Thus, it would just proceed to end its own life almost immediately upon being released.