alt Hacker News> what should be done about open weight bioweapon
Does not exist. What has in fact happened is some cults had bioweapons programs but any failure points were at deployment. (Aum Shinrikyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_atta... )
> and cyber-offense capabilities?
You mean defense. That's how things get hardened. Anyone that was working during the XP era before Service Pack 2 knows what that was like, but it's very manageable.
The bigger real problem here is hardening like that would remove the opportunity for intelligence agencies to spy on everyone.
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I don't think the Aum case points the way you're describing: they used a non-pathogenic strain of anthrax because they didn't know any better. That's a knowledge failure.
But even then, the debate isn't about whether open weight bioweapons exist today: it's about whether they will exist in the future. I think Amodei's argument here makes a lot of sense: "what I believe currently keeps us safe in biology is not 'defenders', or even the availability of materials, but a negative correlation between intellectual capability and desire to commit catastrophic harm. Previous technologies like internet search or even DNA synthesis were nowhere near powerful enough to break this correlation, but I worry that at its current rate of progress, AI will do so very soon."
(I'm not just spouting off; I put my time where my mouth is. I used to work in big tech, but I left for a much less well-paying job building an early-warning system for engineered pandemics.)
You admit that some attackers have the inclination to use bioweapons. Why would they not use the best tools at their disposal going forward?
From the WSJ the other day:
> After OpenAI enhanced the brain power of its chatbot last summer, hundreds of users worldwide began asking it how to make and deploy biological weapons and poisons.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-chatbot-biological-weapon...
On cyber, the attacker/defender asymmetry strongly favors attackers. There are millions of soft targets on the internet which do not have the savvy to use AI to shore up their defenses.