You sound really confident, can you elaborate on your direct lab experience with these weapons, as well as clearly define ‘military grade’ vs whatever the other thing was?
How does ‘chem/bio’ compare to high explosives in terms of difficulty and effect?
Well, I have bioengineering degree, but my point is that “direct lab experience” doesn’t matter, because WMDs in quality and amount necessary to kill large numbers of enemy manpower are not produced in labs. They are produced in large industrial facilities and setting up large industrial facility for basically anything is on “hard” level of difficulty. There is a difference between large-scale textile industry and large-scale semiconductor industry, but if you are not government or rich corporation, all of them lie in “hard” zone.
Let’s take, for example, Saddam chemical weapons program. First, industrial yields: everything is counted in tons. Second: for actual success, Saddam needed a lot of existing expertise and machinery from West Germany.
Let’s look at Soviet bioweapons program. First, again, tons of yield (someone may ask yourself, if it’s easier to kill using bioweapons than conventional weaponry, why somebody needs to produce tons of them?). Second, USSR built the entire civilian biotech industry around it (many Biopreparat facilities are active today as civilian objects!) to create necessary expertise.
The difference with high explosives is that high explosives are not banned by international law, so there is a lot of existing production, therefore you can just buy them on black market or receive from countries which don’t consider you terrorist. If you really need to produce explosives locally, again, precursors, machinery and necessary expertise are legal and widespread sufficiently that they can be bought.
There is a list of technical challenges in bioweaponry where you are going to predictably fuck up if you have biological degree and you think you know what you are doing but in reality you do not, but I don’t write out lists of technical challenges on the way to dangerous capabilities, because such list can inspire someone. You can get an impression about easier and lower-stakes challenges from here.
Biochem is hard enough that we need LLMs at full capacity pushing the field forward. Is it harmful to intentionally create models that are deliberately bad at this cutting edge and necessary science in order to maybe make it slightly more difficult for someone to reproduce cold war era weapons that were considered both expensive and useless at the time?
Do you think that crippling ‘wmd relevance’ of LLMs is doing harm, neutral, or good?
My honest opinion is that WMD evaluations of LLMs are not meaningfully related to X-risk in the sense of “kill literally everyone.” I guess current or next-generation models may be able to assist a terrorist in a basement in brewing some amount of anthrax, spraying it in a public place, and killing tens to hundreds of people. To actually be capable to kill everyone from a basement, you would need to bypass all the reasons industrial production is necessary at the current level of technology. A system capable to bypass the need for industrial production in a basement is called “superintelligence,” and if you have a superintelligent model on the loose, you have far bigger problems than schizos in basements brewing bioweapons.
I think “creeping WMD relevance”, outside of cyberweapons, is mostly bad, because it is concentrated on mostly fake problem, which is very bad for public epistemics, even if we forget about lost benefits from competent models.
Are you open to writing more about this? This is among top 3 most popular arguments against open source AI on lesswrong and elsewhere.
I agree with you you need a group of > 1000 people to manufacture one of those large machines that does phosphoramidite DNA synthesis. The attack vector I more commonly see being suggested is that a powerful actor can bribe people in the existing labs to manufacture a bioweapon while ensuring most of them and most of rest of society remains unaware this is happening.
Many people wrongly assume that the main way to use bioweapons is to create small amount of pathogen to release it in environment with outbreak as an intended outcome. (I assume that where your sentence about DNA synthesis comes from.) The problem is that creating outbreaks in practice is very hard, we, thankfully, don’t know reliable way to do that. In practice, the way that bioweapons work reliably is “bomb-saturate the entire area with anthrax such that first wave of death is going to be from anaphylactic shock rather than infection” and to create necessary amount of pathogen you need industrial infrastructure which doesn’t exist, because nobody in our civilization cultivates anthrax at industrial scale.
I agree that 1-2 logs isn’t really in the category of xrisk. The longer the lead time on the evil plan (mixing chemicals, growing things, etc), the more time security forces have to identify and neutralize the threat. So all things being equal, it’s probably better that a would be terrorist spends a year planning a weird chemical thing that hurts 10s of people, vs someone just waking up one morning and deciding to run over 10s of people with a truck.
There’s a better chance of catching the first guy, and his plan is way more expensive in terms of time, money, access to capital like LLM time, etc. Sure someone could argue about pandemic potential, but lab origin is suspected for at least one influenza outbreak and a lot of people believe it about covid-19. Those weren’t terrorists.
I guess theoretically, there may be cyberweapons that qualify as wmd, but those will be because of the systems they interact with. It’s not the cyberweapon itself, it’s the nuclear reactor accepting commands that lead to core damage.
I’d love a reply on this. Common attack vectors I read on this forum include 1. powerful elite bribes existing labs in US to manufacture bioweapons 2. nation state sets up independent biotech supply chain and starts manufacturing bioweapons.
This has been an option for decades, a fully capable LLM does not meaningfully lower the threshold for this. It’s already too easy.
This has been an option since the 1950s. Any national medical system is capable of doing this, Project Coast could be reproduced by nearly any nation state.
I’m not saying it isn’t a problem, I’m just saying that the LLMs don’t make it worse.
I have yet to find a commercial LLM that I can’t make tell me how to build a working improvised explosive (I can grade the LLMs performance because I’ve worked with the USG on the issue and don’t need a LLM to make evil).
You sound really confident, can you elaborate on your direct lab experience with these weapons, as well as clearly define ‘military grade’ vs whatever the other thing was?
How does ‘chem/bio’ compare to high explosives in terms of difficulty and effect?
Well, I have bioengineering degree, but my point is that “direct lab experience” doesn’t matter, because WMDs in quality and amount necessary to kill large numbers of enemy manpower are not produced in labs. They are produced in large industrial facilities and setting up large industrial facility for basically anything is on “hard” level of difficulty. There is a difference between large-scale textile industry and large-scale semiconductor industry, but if you are not government or rich corporation, all of them lie in “hard” zone.
Let’s take, for example, Saddam chemical weapons program. First, industrial yields: everything is counted in tons. Second: for actual success, Saddam needed a lot of existing expertise and machinery from West Germany.
Let’s look at Soviet bioweapons program. First, again, tons of yield (someone may ask yourself, if it’s easier to kill using bioweapons than conventional weaponry, why somebody needs to produce tons of them?). Second, USSR built the entire civilian biotech industry around it (many Biopreparat facilities are active today as civilian objects!) to create necessary expertise.
The difference with high explosives is that high explosives are not banned by international law, so there is a lot of existing production, therefore you can just buy them on black market or receive from countries which don’t consider you terrorist. If you really need to produce explosives locally, again, precursors, machinery and necessary expertise are legal and widespread sufficiently that they can be bought.
There is a list of technical challenges in bioweaponry where you are going to predictably fuck up if you have biological degree and you think you know what you are doing but in reality you do not, but I don’t write out lists of technical challenges on the way to dangerous capabilities, because such list can inspire someone. You can get an impression about easier and lower-stakes challenges from here.
This seems incredibly reasonable, and in light of this, I’m not really sure why anyone should embrace ideas like making LLMs worse at biochemistry in the name of things like WMDP: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WspwSnB8HpkToxRPB/paper-ai-sandbagging-language-models-can-strategically-1
Biochem is hard enough that we need LLMs at full capacity pushing the field forward. Is it harmful to intentionally create models that are deliberately bad at this cutting edge and necessary science in order to maybe make it slightly more difficult for someone to reproduce cold war era weapons that were considered both expensive and useless at the time?
Do you think that crippling ‘wmd relevance’ of LLMs is doing harm, neutral, or good?
My honest opinion is that WMD evaluations of LLMs are not meaningfully related to X-risk in the sense of “kill literally everyone.” I guess current or next-generation models may be able to assist a terrorist in a basement in brewing some amount of anthrax, spraying it in a public place, and killing tens to hundreds of people. To actually be capable to kill everyone from a basement, you would need to bypass all the reasons industrial production is necessary at the current level of technology. A system capable to bypass the need for industrial production in a basement is called “superintelligence,” and if you have a superintelligent model on the loose, you have far bigger problems than schizos in basements brewing bioweapons.
I think “creeping WMD relevance”, outside of cyberweapons, is mostly bad, because it is concentrated on mostly fake problem, which is very bad for public epistemics, even if we forget about lost benefits from competent models.
Are you open to writing more about this? This is among top 3 most popular arguments against open source AI on lesswrong and elsewhere.
I agree with you you need a group of > 1000 people to manufacture one of those large machines that does phosphoramidite DNA synthesis. The attack vector I more commonly see being suggested is that a powerful actor can bribe people in the existing labs to manufacture a bioweapon while ensuring most of them and most of rest of society remains unaware this is happening.
I’m trying to write post, but, well, it’s hard.
Many people wrongly assume that the main way to use bioweapons is to create small amount of pathogen to release it in environment with outbreak as an intended outcome. (I assume that where your sentence about DNA synthesis comes from.) The problem is that creating outbreaks in practice is very hard, we, thankfully, don’t know reliable way to do that. In practice, the way that bioweapons work reliably is “bomb-saturate the entire area with anthrax such that first wave of death is going to be from anaphylactic shock rather than infection” and to create necessary amount of pathogen you need industrial infrastructure which doesn’t exist, because nobody in our civilization cultivates anthrax at industrial scale.
I wrote about something similar previously: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ek7M3xGAoXDdQkPZQ/terrorism-tylenol-and-dangerous-information#a58t3m6bsxDZTL8DG
I agree that 1-2 logs isn’t really in the category of xrisk. The longer the lead time on the evil plan (mixing chemicals, growing things, etc), the more time security forces have to identify and neutralize the threat. So all things being equal, it’s probably better that a would be terrorist spends a year planning a weird chemical thing that hurts 10s of people, vs someone just waking up one morning and deciding to run over 10s of people with a truck.
There’s a better chance of catching the first guy, and his plan is way more expensive in terms of time, money, access to capital like LLM time, etc. Sure someone could argue about pandemic potential, but lab origin is suspected for at least one influenza outbreak and a lot of people believe it about covid-19. Those weren’t terrorists.
I guess theoretically, there may be cyberweapons that qualify as wmd, but those will be because of the systems they interact with. It’s not the cyberweapon itself, it’s the nuclear reactor accepting commands that lead to core damage.
I’d love a reply on this. Common attack vectors I read on this forum include 1. powerful elite bribes existing labs in US to manufacture bioweapons 2. nation state sets up independent biotech supply chain and starts manufacturing bioweapons.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DDtEnmGhNdJYpEfaG/joseph-miller-s-shortform?commentId=wHoFX7nyffjuuxbzT
This has been an option for decades, a fully capable LLM does not meaningfully lower the threshold for this. It’s already too easy.
This has been an option since the 1950s. Any national medical system is capable of doing this, Project Coast could be reproduced by nearly any nation state.
I’m not saying it isn’t a problem, I’m just saying that the LLMs don’t make it worse.
I have yet to find a commercial LLM that I can’t make tell me how to build a working improvised explosive (I can grade the LLMs performance because I’ve worked with the USG on the issue and don’t need a LLM to make evil).
Makes sense, thanks for replying.