alt Hacker News> There is nothing that special about bioweapons.
The reason that madmen and terrorists choose kinetic weapons is because the knowledge and materials are more readily available... of and also that even terrorists are likely aware that their own people would suffer. As the knowledge and tools for playing with CRISPR-style biological legos become more widespread, we come closer to the Great Filter, where one person could kill billions.
Even our normal mad leaders have agreed that bioweapons cannot be allowed:
Replies
i meant it in the sense of arcane knowledge model could have that would make it simple for anyone to brew up in cheap lab while managing to not infect themselves over and over.
"at home" bioweapon panic has been around since crispr and rna synthesis got available to amateurs.
A halfway decent synthetic biology lab (no need to invoke CRISPR) can make e.g. smallpox without a sample of the original disease, just from the gene sequences. Basically all state actors could do this if they wanted to without an LLM. What barrier that a terrorist organization faces today to having a functioning synthetic biology lab does an LLM actually solve?