OpenAI blog post: https://openai.com/research/building-an-early-warning-system-for-llm-aided-biological-threat-creation
Orange discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39207291
I don’t have any particular section to call out. May post thoughts tomorrow today it’s after midnight oh gosh, but wanted to post since I knew ya’ll’d be interested in this.
Terrorists could use autocorrect according to OpenAI! Discuss!
I mean, it’s genuinely not hard. This reads to me more like assuming all terrorists are fundamentally incapable of anything remotely intelligent, which is both silly and not the official position of CBRN experts. From smaller cultists to state actors, bio warfare is a genuine concern.
I’m not.
What grants do you think I’m getting?
Your comment sounds to me like lashing out about something because you want to assume every last thing you’re sneering at is wrong, when really the thing you’re sneering at is wrong in methodology and conclusions but not in the origin of a problem wholesale.
Well, do what you want
I meant authors of that paper, sorry if i was unclear about it
like i said before,
but with biological weapons stakes are much higher, every single leak carries risk of ending up dead or being discovered and safety requirements are gonna be generally much more stringent than with chemical weapons. you can get away with using small amounts of something that would plausibly pass for a ww1 era chemical weapon with only nitrile gloves and good fumehood; with biological agents you’re probably looking at doing about everything in glovebox. to use glovebox, you need to get glovebox, which, among other purchases, can move such person from government watch list to government act list
and even ignoring that, you can’t just expect any random jihadi joe to make it work, you need someone who has some actual education and preferably expertise in microbiology, which if anything else severely limits poll of potential perpetrators
The equipment and ppe for bio weapons and chemical weapons of the same health hazard is about the same. The only difference with biological weapons is you’re doing stuff with fridges, incubators, agar, and petri dishes, rather than beakers, Bunsen burners, and filters.
In either case your logic is relying on a threatening actor to not have any education. Sure, the pool of candidates is lower for sophisticated say, anthrax, something you can almost trivially find in dirt, but it’s also lower for sophisticated chemical weapons like say, sarin. And keep in mind, yes it’s hard to do biology or chemistry, but devoted individuals do it in garages, for often innocuous reasons. You can’t just assume some terrorist group will never have a strongly devoted individual or group who are competent enough to pull something off, you need to have preparedness. (In the form of local procedures, drills, and organization and plans and equipment to respond to threats as they develop, along with preventative measures)
Also make no mistake, spotting lab scale chem and biological warfare production is extremely difficult. Even moreso for biological production, but both resemble conventional labs (and could be!). Where biological becomes an issue is that lab scale production of a pathogen can self propagate in a way chem attacks or bomb attacks can’t.
I’m not saying to be afraid, the barrier to entry on all weapons production is the lowest it’s ever been, but sophistication in preventing them is also quite high. But it’s not something that can just be brushed away, it’s a real problem that real professionals are continuously solving.
Have you read Barriers to Bioweapons?
I have not. Is it good?
Keep in mind that it was written in 2014, the Field of bioengineering in the past ten years has advanced considerably.
Yeah. It addresses your points I think.
I’ll have to check it out.
The general point seems to be yours, that intellectual availability is the largest restriction on bioterrorism. I don’t disagree, but a big part of my argument is that access to this information has never been higher (which is better than not for a variety of reasons) and access to resources usable for this has never been higher. We have plenty of garage scale bio labs as it is. So yes, the biggest limit is availability of people with knowledge to do it, that’s not a hard roadblock, at least not anymore.
And the prediction horizon on biotech is tiny. Give it another ten years? Twenty? It’s not a zero threat because nobody has done it right now yet.
Not just intellectual availability, but the complexity of the job itself. iirc it goes into the Russian experience.
well i think it strongly depends on your threat model. consider small leak of sarin: effects are detectable in seconds to minutes, antidote is readily available, cheap and specific, and sarin poisoning is not transmissible. in case of, say, plague, you won’t know what’s going on for days in which time there’s already a risk of infecting some random passerby, which is highly suboptimal if you want to stay covert
it’s not that i assume no education, it’s that i (as an organic chemist) wouldn’t trust crystallographer or electrochemist with synthesis of something like sarin. even with all required PPE and other precautions, your recruiting poll drops from about 100% (IED carrying child soldier) to maybe 1-0.1%? and that’s even before you consider that some of these highly specialized chemical weapons people are already on military payroll, or are surveilled precisely for this reason
you’re underestimating cost of this entire enterprise, which even at lab scale could easily go into hundreds of thousands to million dollar range. you’re underestimating how hard it is even when you have everything provided - look at iraqi chemical weapons program. with no need to stay particularly covert they were only able to manufacture mustard gas of useful quality that could be stored; their mid tier chemical weapon sarin was at something like 30% purity and had very short shelf life; their vx was so dirty it was straight up useless
for some weird reason you’re assuming that whatever chemistry you want to do, it works on the first try. it won’t; it never does, and even if it did, you have to make sure you’ve got the right stuff. this makes synthesis only half of the problem, because there’s still purification and analysis
you seem to ignore that even in the paper that you cite, anyone that doesn’t have to do chemistry, doesn’t. (by that i mean performing some reaction, that generates side products, and so requires purification, analysis, and generates waste stream). doing chemistry means generating waste and need of its safe-ish disposal; it means getting considerable PPE; it means getting precursors, maybe in large amounts; all of that might move you from government watch list to government act list.
talib doesn’t do chemistry when he makes an IED, because melting down contents of TM-62s or UXO found in nearby field isn’t chemistry; unabomber stuffing match heads in a pipe isn’t chemistry; stealing cylinders of chlorine (bulk of fatalities in that paper) and putting it in a car bomb isn’t chemistry. chlorine is not something you make and put in cylinders, because it’s relatively hard, uses large amounts of energy, leaves considerable waste/side product stream, and you can order it on aliexpress. same goes for sulfur mustard, i’m pretty sure most of incidents happened in syrian civil war and ultimately this stuff can be traced to syrian or iraqi chemical weapons program
most of these problems, but especially making sure you’ve got the right stuff, are much harder for living organisms than for clearly identifiable, publicly known compounds. and we’re still nowhere close to the point where llm gets potentially useful. no, getting B in high school biology and relying on gpt4 and scihub to get all the way up there doesn’t count. chatgpt writing out rna sequence to be printed out, engineered into a bacterium and spread by a cultist, all done by mail order and or in garage is scenario completely detached from any pretense of being realistic
this tells me that you’ve ended all contact with chemistry on (classical, aqueous) qualitative inorganic analysis, because if you tried to cook anything on bunsen burner in organic lab, that’d be pretty hard considering there are none in flammables area. have you considered that you’re severely out of your depth and got caught in openai’s fear based hype-marketing?
e: if you want to isolate anthrax from dirt, you’ll have many more problems than that, especially with “getting the right stuff” part. there are places where anthrax is endemic, but if step 1 involves catching diseased marmot in southern mongolia or deer in eastern siberia, this devolves straight into rube goldberg machine of mass destruction area
in context of Iraqi insurgency even things like EFP plates were industrially manufactured in Iran and shipped there by their special forces, even that it’s just a chunk of copper plate pressed in shape of shallow cone. same in Afghanistan, where friendly CIA/ISI agent, or friendly black market weapons trader depending on period would provide them with explosives, fuzes, communication hardware, training and some modern weapons up to and including FIM-92 Stingers
Re: ppe
Sure, the outcomes are different, but the scale is too. The scale of a chemical weapons program is necessarily higher from a hazard point of view due to the sheer volume of material. The specifics make that messy though, yes, any particular pathogen would want differing levels of ppe.
Re: precursors
Right, the part of the point I’ve made about bio weapons is that spotting the precursors is very difficult, because a normal bio lab needs roughly the same stuff a weapons bio lab does.
I don’t disagree that many of the chemical weapons used in Syria may be from larger chemical weapons programs. But that doesn’t mean lab scale ones don’t also exist.
Re: ended contact with chemistry
Not everybody is trying to posture. The point wasn’t to show off a magnificent knowledge of lab equipment, but to demonstrate the similarity at a high level.
Re: llms for biology
Ehhhh there are plenty of research applications of llms at the moment and at least one is in use for generating candidate synthetic compounds to test. It’s not exactly the most painful thing to setup either, but no if you were to try to make a bio weapon today with llm tools (and other machine learning tools) alone it would go poorly. Ten, twenty years from now I’m not so sure, the prediction horizon is tiny.
Re: caught in openai fear
Why would I consider that when my opinions on bio weapons and CBRN are wholly unrelated to openais garbage? I didn’t even know openai cared about CBRN before today and I fully expect it’s just cash grabbing.
People can abuse and misinterpret real concepts in a way that makes them seem absurd.
Yes in practice anthrax is nontrivial. But folks here also seem to think any of this is magically impossible, and not something that dedicated people can reasonably do with fewer resources by the day. Which by the way is great, the surge of amateur micro bio is great, we’re learning a lot, we’re getting very smart hobbyists contributing in unexpected ways.
right, sure. there are very few labs that require select agents, and running an anthrax vaccine program out of your backyard is a hobby i haven’t heard of yet
lab scale cws are just that, lab scale. multi-kg amounts are not lab scale, and unless you’re running around with suspiciously modified umbrella, sub-gram amounts aren’t casualty-producing
you can’t grow some random bacteria in high concentration, you’re looking at tens to thousands of liters of fermenter volume just to get anything useful (then you need to purify it, dispose of now pretty hazardous waste, and lyophilize all the output, it gets expensive too)
for the reasons i’ve pointed out before, there’s none to very little similarity
it’s nice that you mention it, because i’ve witnessed some “ai-driven” drug development firsthand during early covid. despite having access to xrd data from fragment screening and antiviral activity measurements and making custom ai just for this one protein, the actual lead that survived development to clinical stage was completely and entirely made by human medchemists, atom by atom, and didn’t even include one pocket that was important in binding of that compound (but involving that pocket was a good idea in principle, because there are potent compounds that do that), and that despite these ai-generated compounds amounted something like 2/3 of all tested for potency. but you won’t find any of that on that startup’s page anymore, oh no, this scares away vcs.
i’m equally sure that it’ll go poorly then too, because this is not a problem you can simulate your way out of and some real world data would need to get input there, and that data is restricted
yeah nah again. lately (june 2023) there was some fucker in norway that got caught making ricin (which i would argue is more of chemical weapon), because he got poisoned in the process, with zero fatalities. [1] around the same time single terrorist incident generated about the same number of casualties and much more fatalities than all of these “bw terrorism” incidents combined. [2] this doesn’t make me think that bw are a credible threat, at least compared to usual conventional weapons, outside of nation state level actors
at no point you have answered the problem of analysis. this is what generates most of costs in lab, and i see no way how llm can tell you how pure a compound is, what is it, or what kind of bacteria you’ve just grown and whether it’s lethal and how transmissible. if you have known-lethal sample (load-bearing assumption) you can grow just this and at no point gpt4 will help you, and if you don’t, you need to test it anyway, and good luck doing that covertly if you’re not a state level actor. you also run into the same problem with cws, but at least you can compare some spectra with known literature ones. at no point you have shown how llms can expedite any of this
you don’t come here with convincing arguments, you don’t have any reasonable data backing your arguments, and i hope you’ll find something more productive to do over the rest of the weekend. i remain unconvinced that bw and even cw terrorism is anything else than movie plot idea and its promise is a massive bait against particular sector of extremists
The first paper you linked there lists 9 deaths and 806 injuries across 50 years. Conversely, you can look at a single example like the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 and see deaths and more injuries from a single event using simple techniques where materials and instructions are readily available. It isn’t unreasonable to look at the lack of success of amateur biological and chemical attacks and assume that plausible future attackers will be intelligent enough to simply take the tried and tested approach.
On the other hand, there might be some mileage in hyping up the threat of diy countertop plagues in the hopes that would-be terrorists are as credulous as so many politicians and media figures are, and will take the pointlessly inconvenient and inefficient option which will likely fail and make life a little safer for the rest of us.
Nobody is saying terrorists won’t keep using conventional bombs. Terror attacks aren’t just about maximum kills nor casualties per dollar, however, and as the barrier to entry lowers and lowers it’s important to consider ramifications from many technologies.
This does not seem a reasonable countermeasure when the risk of failure is potential pandemics.