Yes—they made a huge number of mistakes, despite having sophisticated people and tons of funding. It’s been used over and over to make the claim that bioweapons are really hard—but I do wonder how much using an LLM for help would avoid all of these classes of mistake. (How much prosaic utility is there for project planning in general? Some, but at high risk if you need to worry about detection, and it’s unclear that most people are willing to offload or double check their planning, despite the advantages.)
Perhaps worth nothing that they’ve tried in the past, and failed.
It seems they were literally using the nonpathogenic attenuated anthrax strain used for vaccines.
Yes—they made a huge number of mistakes, despite having sophisticated people and tons of funding. It’s been used over and over to make the claim that bioweapons are really hard—but I do wonder how much using an LLM for help would avoid all of these classes of mistake. (How much prosaic utility is there for project planning in general? Some, but at high risk if you need to worry about detection, and it’s unclear that most people are willing to offload or double check their planning, despite the advantages.)