it seems like people aren't even reading this RAND paper, just blindly appealing to it. it basically concludes that a fuck ton of damage can be done, but its unlikely every human will die as a result.
That doesn't seem too comforting to me? I'm not sure what this article's author was expecting us to take away from it.
Seeing lines like
> We were not able to determine whether this scenario [engineered pathogens] presents a likely extinction risk for humanity, but we cannot rule out the possibility.
and more generally
> Extinction threats are immensely challenging but cannot be ruled out.
in the RAND report is pretty terrifying!
And the person who is being cited as the expert on viral synthesis who claims to have trained frontier models seems to just be wrong about that? It doesn't seem at all like he's trained anything close to a frontier model unless there's something about his work history that I'm missing.