Not even close to the same thing. That's taking an existing viral transfection system and swapping in a single gene.

Thermo Fisher sells a kit to do this [1]. It's something you might do a few thousand times on the way to actually generating a novel virus.

> I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high

I'd argue that it probably already happened, and had nothing to do with AI.

[1] AAV transfection.