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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

No, you literally cannot. Synthesizing a stretch of DNA is trivial, and what you can send away for [1].

Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial.

[1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two companies that will do 50-100kb assemblies as a service today, but I guarantee you they're going to look at what you're trying to make, and who is asking them to do it.

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https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/gene-synthesis/custo...

There you go!

Steps from your mailbox to an actual virus is a few days of bench work.

Yes, that's one of the ones I was talking about.

That's not a service that makes you a virus, and making one from an mRNA transcript is not trivial.

And one wouldn't make one from mRNA. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Still: the difficulty isn't comparable to EUV machines or refining uranium and does not form a comfortable security barrier.

I generally agree -- the actual risk is from serious/state actors, and for those, the barriers are not high.

I'm just saying that people are focused on the wrong problem because they've got LLM-brain.

The only difference between people who are quite concerned and you is that you are either 1) actually blind to or 2) choosing to ignore even the first derivative on those barriers.

The people "got LLM-brain" are saying: "Wow those barriers are coming down fast"

And you're saying: "There are still barriers"

Both are true, but only one is helpful for thinking about the future. The other is hardly even helpful for thinking about the present, and I've never seen a quasi-intelligent person do it in lieu of some other motivations in their reasoning.

So what's your proposal? Lie about the risks enthusiastically enough that someone else does something useful?

Huh? Is "what's your proposal" your reaction to anyone who's alarmed by a problem? Pretty weird if so. Most problems are such that the people who should be alarmed by them is much, much larger than the set of people who could reasonably solve them.

Here let's just get specific.

For each of the years below, what is YOUR estimate for how long would it take a person of 80th percentile intelligence with $10,000,000 (2026 money) to get from "I'd like to kill a lot of people" to a working virus?

You can provide a range for each if you'd like.

In the year 1800 – how long?

1950?

2020?

2026?

2050?

2200?

Yet.

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.

Your example of how easy it is to control outputs behind specialized knowledge is a thing (recreational drugs) that exist in mass quantities every place on the planet at consumer-accessible prices?

No. My argument is that many things in the world are hard in a way that computers cannot solve, and the existence of LLMs does not change that.

Synthetic biology is one of those things.

Uhhh right... but all the other hard parts are being solved too, correct?

LLMs are clearly going to solve a part that, 10 years ago, one would've assumed would be one of the highest and last barriers to go down.

Without LLMs, a reasonable security apparatus would be:

Step 1. Disallow dissemination and synthesis of known pathogens

Step 2. Watch closely anyone with the decades of training required to come up with their own pathogen

> Uhhh right... but all the other hard parts are being solved too, correct? LLMs are clearly going to solve a part that, 10 years ago, one would've assumed would be one of the highest and last barriers to go down.

No.

No, the barriers I'm talking about aren't coming down. Not quickly anyway.

No, nobody assumed this was the "highest and last barrier". That's the point you keep missing.

LLMs are not "solving" the rate-limiting step here. It only looks that way if you don't know what's involved.

Why don’t you just scroll up and answer with your timeline estimates so we can talk about something concrete instead of playing this goofy shell game?

“No no some other step is hard. I won’t say what it is. No it’s not getting easier, miraculously, but I can’t say what it is.”

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