No, the sophomoric LLM argument does not apply here. The world is not a big computer.
The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master.
So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is going to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence.
Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.
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No, the sophomoric LLM argument does not apply here. The world is not a big computer.
The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master.
So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is going to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence.
Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.