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Comment by lend000 | Hacker News Reader

We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.

It's been interesting seeing how OpenAI pops up to counter the threat of AGI being controlled by Google, and then OpenAI and every spinoff company from its employees has become a far larger threat to the public, for different reasons.

As much as it seems like Anthropic's self righteous leadership truly believes in what they're preaching, they've shown themselves to be tied for the worst stewards of this technology. Google actually seems like the best option to me, by far. Anthropic is also the only major lab with no open weights releases.

They'll have burned a lot of goodwill with the community by the time another lab takes the tech lead, which I guarantee will happen.

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> We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.

What I can't understand, is that they act like the _knowledge_ is dangerous.

I don't know if I'm biased from my BSci (chem/maths), but: knowledge isn't dangerous, the reagents needed are incredibly easy to control. Thats what we already do!

What is this comment? If they occurred we would face a huge disaster; isn't it better to err on the side of caution to make that risks as low as possible???

No no we should push the limits until a bioattack happens, then when those people are all dead we comment angrily on the hackernews thread and say that someone should have seen this coming

What are you willing to give up to be less afraid of all these extremely hypothetical risks? (which in the case of bio/nuclear/chemical is mostly access to controlled materials and capital anyway)

Access to information and knowledge is probably the very last thing I'd be willing to give up, personally.

I think most people would be a lot happier if they were less fearful in general.

>We've been hearing about the risks of engineered viruses and homemade superweapons since GPT 3.5, so where are they? We've had abliterated open weights models much stronger than GPT 4 for over a year now.

Try...since GPT 2.

https://naokishibuya.github.io/blog/2022-12-30-gpt-2-2019/

Come on, no one was worried that GPT-2 would help people engineer viruses. The concern was generating misinformation and spam.

They have existed far longer than LLms, and kill tens of thousands of Americans every year. Fentanyl is the best example. Any chemistry graduate can figure out how to manufacture it. Used by China as a Chemical weapon against the American public.

My smoke detector has gone off three times now, where is the fire?

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