alt Hacker NewsDumb question but why are chemical weapons always addressed as a risk with llms? Is the idea that they contain how to make chemical weapons or that they would guide someone on how?
Would there not already be websites that contain that information? How is an llm different, i guess, from some sort of anarchist cookbook thing.
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LLMs can tell you exactly how to acquire the materials and manufacture the materials. They might even come up with novel formulations that rely on substances that are easier to get. There might be information about this stuff online but LLMs are much better than random idiots at adapting that information to their actual situation.
On top of LLMs reducing the cost/difficulty, the other reason biological and chemical weapons are such a worry is their asymmetric character — they are much much easier and cheaper to produce and deploy than they are to defend against.
They contain broad overviews(throw some disease-causing bacteria in a sort of rainbow arrangement of increasingly more effective antibiotics, you'll usually get something that's at least very deadly even if it doesn't have pandemic potential) but executing in a real lab takes a ton of trial and error to figure out the details. The issue is that the details ~all exist somewhere in the training dataset already, discovered and documented over the course of unrelated, benign biology research. Ability to quickly and accurately search over that corpus translates to large speedups in the physical development process.
It’s marketing, Fear is one of the most effective marketing tools. That and purpose of government attention
Probably also a bit of liability. After all its been trained on a dataset that includes a long running joke of trying to trick people on the internet to unknowingly create chlorine gas.
In the same way that all coding docs are available publicly
WAG but I wonder if a hijacked LLM could also assist with figuring out how to obtain required materials, not just provide the recipe.
Both. There's the risk of them instructing a user on how to produce a known formulation (the Anarchist Cookbook solution, as you say), which is irritating but not that problematic.
The bigger issue is that they are potentially capable of producing novel formulations capable of producing harm, and guiding someone through this process. That is, consider a world in which someone with malicious desires has access to a model as capable at chemistry / biology as Mythos is at offensive cybersecurity abilities.
This is obviously limited by the fact that the models don't operate in the physical world, but there's plenty of written material out there.