alt Hacker NewsA gun type maybe. But then, two paragraphs and some machining knowledge + shop tooling could do the same, given enough refined material.
Ain’t no way a layman is pulling off an implosion device, regardless of tooling or LLM guidance. The explosive lense structure and timing required is quite complex, and would require some significant calculation from someone who actually knew what they were doing.
Nation state, or even sufficiently motivated big corp, if they had the refined material? Sure. Layman? No.
Thinking they can with LLM slop involved? That will make for some very interesting radiological incidents though!
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I agree, but really feel like you're missing the point here. Many things are reasonably straightforward and require almost no understanding when you have simple step by step instructions. LLMs are capable of providing such instructions and in certain cases they probably shouldn't.
But it's not as simple as just refusing help on a broad swathe of topics they way they do now. That makes agents much less useful in general (ie lots of collateral damage) and for many topics is entirely ineffective given that for better or worse the internet already makes such material readily available. In such cases reporting suspicious behavior is likely to be much more effective than denial.
Aside: You've now got me curious and I really want to test the frontier models to see to what extent they're capable of providing sensible designs and specifications for implosion type thermonuclear weapons but also feel like that would attract the wrong sort of attention and probably create a headache for me in more ways than one.
"A gun type" of nuke is sufficient to achieve most, and usually all, of the goals some small group building a nuke would have.
We are all fortunate that as fc417fc802 mentioned, refining the materials proves to be quite challenging and I see no particular way that AI could possibly make that any easier. If it was as simple as building a gun-type nuke banging together any uranium together to get a big bang we'd be living in a very different world.