I’m more pessimistic about being able to restrict BDTs than general LLMs, but I also think this would be very good.
Why do you think so? LLMs seem far more useful to a far wider group of people than BDTs, so I would it to be easier to ban an application specific technology rather than a general one. The White House Executive Order requires mandatory reporting of AI trained on biological data of a lower FLOP count than for any other kind of data, meaning they’re concerned that AI + Bio models are particularly dangerous.
Restricting something that biologists are already doing would create a natural constituency of biologists opposed to your policy. But the same could be said of restricting open source LLMs—there are probably many more people using open source LLMs than using biological AI models.
Maybe bio policies will be harder to change because they’re more established, whereas open source LLMs are new and therefore a more viable target for policy progress?
Why do you think so? LLMs seem far more useful to a far wider group of people than BDTs, so I would it to be easier to ban an application specific technology rather than a general one. The White House Executive Order requires mandatory reporting of AI trained on biological data of a lower FLOP count than for any other kind of data, meaning they’re concerned that AI + Bio models are particularly dangerous.
Restricting something that biologists are already doing would create a natural constituency of biologists opposed to your policy. But the same could be said of restricting open source LLMs—there are probably many more people using open source LLMs than using biological AI models.
Maybe bio policies will be harder to change because they’re more established, whereas open source LLMs are new and therefore a more viable target for policy progress?