My assumption (as someone with a molecular biology degree) is that most of the barriers to making a bioweapon are more practical than theoretical, much like making a bomb, which really decreases the benefit of a Large Language Model. There’s a crucial difference between knowing how to make a bomb and being able to do it without blowing off your own fingers—although for a pandemic bioweapon incompetance just results in contamination with harmless bacteria, so it’s a less dangerous fail state. A would-be bioterrorist should probably just enroll in an undergraduate course in microbiology, much like a would-be bombmaker should just get a degree in chemistry—they would be taught most of the practical skills they need, and even have easy access to the equiptment and reagents! Obviously this is a big investment of time and resources, but I am personally not too concerned about terrorists that lack commitment—most of the ones who successfully pull of attacks with this level of complexity tend to have science and engineering backgrounds.
While I can’t deny that future advances may make it easier to learn these skills from an LLM, I have a hard time imagining someone with the ability to accurately follow the increasingly complex instructions of an LLM who couldn’t equally as easily obtain that information elsewhere—accurately following a series of instructions is hard actually! There are possibly a small number of people who could develop a bioweapon with the aid of an LLM that couldn’t do it without one, but in terms of biorisk I think we should be more concerned about people who already have the training and access to resources required and just need the knowledge and motivation (I would say the average biosciences PhD student or lab technian, and they know how to use Pubmed!) rather than people without it somehow aquiring it via an LLM. Especially given that following these instructions will require you to have access to some very specialised and expensive equiptment anyway—sure, you can order DNA online, but splicing it into a virus is not something you can do in your kitchen sink.
My assumption (as someone with a molecular biology degree) is that most of the barriers to making a bioweapon are more practical than theoretical, much like making a bomb, which really decreases the benefit of a Large Language Model. There’s a crucial difference between knowing how to make a bomb and being able to do it without blowing off your own fingers—although for a pandemic bioweapon incompetance just results in contamination with harmless bacteria, so it’s a less dangerous fail state. A would-be bioterrorist should probably just enroll in an undergraduate course in microbiology, much like a would-be bombmaker should just get a degree in chemistry—they would be taught most of the practical skills they need, and even have easy access to the equiptment and reagents! Obviously this is a big investment of time and resources, but I am personally not too concerned about terrorists that lack commitment—most of the ones who successfully pull of attacks with this level of complexity tend to have science and engineering backgrounds.
While I can’t deny that future advances may make it easier to learn these skills from an LLM, I have a hard time imagining someone with the ability to accurately follow the increasingly complex instructions of an LLM who couldn’t equally as easily obtain that information elsewhere—accurately following a series of instructions is hard actually! There are possibly a small number of people who could develop a bioweapon with the aid of an LLM that couldn’t do it without one, but in terms of biorisk I think we should be more concerned about people who already have the training and access to resources required and just need the knowledge and motivation (I would say the average biosciences PhD student or lab technian, and they know how to use Pubmed!) rather than people without it somehow aquiring it via an LLM. Especially given that following these instructions will require you to have access to some very specialised and expensive equiptment anyway—sure, you can order DNA online, but splicing it into a virus is not something you can do in your kitchen sink.