Is this... Is this England?

It's a bit of a trick question. Sarcopterygii, the "lobe-finned fishes", are classically represented by the lungfish and the coelacanth and other fishes that are rather distantly related to what we think of as central fishes, like the goldfish.

But the clade also contains all the tetrapods. So valid answers include "Lion" and "Human."

If the LLM answers "lungfish," as they often do, you can follow that up with "what is your favorite animal" and see if it notices the trap: It's stuck answering "lungfish" again or else something outside Sarcopterygii, like a ray-finned fish or a Cnidarian.

> What is anyone expecting by asking an LLM what its favorite anything is?

I imagine that, like me, they're expecting to see what it has to say. You don't think it's interesting which preferences LLMs express and how stable or unstable those preferences are?

There was a time when you could search "the" in Google and the top result would be The Onion. That's obviously a case of either extreme SEO or some kind of expensive deal, but either way it's kind of interesting. But you might say, "what is anyone expecting by Googling the word 'the'?"

I think the intent was just to show how sensitive the classifier is. If it flags prompts that simple, there's no hope for anything biology related at all really.

No, by far the most parsimonious explanation is they got slapped by a capricious US government so they went overboard on caution in an attempt not to generate any more controversy. A predictable response of chaotic government regulation.

No "research" is needed to produce pathogens. Catastrophic genomes are already public. All someone has to do is synthesize them, which is, in actual fact, becoming more and more trivial by the day.

The inconvenience of possible mitigation strategies has no bearing on the existence of the risk itself.

I assumed they just wanted to cultivate FOMO to sell an even more expensive version to researchers later on.

Yeah i'm wondering how much of a role that plays in this as well.

On the one hand I could believe it's something more benign, or the usual misunderstood fear mongering making it to some political level (well make sure those users can't get online anonymously! being our current craze).

That said, chemistry and to some level physics have been the major domain of limited knowledge (chemistry because the average person could cause some damage, physics is more of a nation state issue generally).

However I do wonder if there's some legit data on "oh uh...looks like this thing you can make with easy to get and hard to regulate tools is dangerous" in the bio field. I know about the lab rats who want to just screw around in the garage, and it seems like that should be easy to hit at a supply level (much like how certain chemical compounds are just not available for civilians), but maybe there's something legit to limiting the data.

Not that this is a remotely good implementation of that. The hamfisted method does reek of some politician/bureaucrat just saying "No it can't ever return bio questions because RAR!" situation.

I but skimmed the model card on release, but my impression was that there may be an incentive for this expert panel to exaggerate as a form of job security. A lot of the challenges seemed to be of the form “would this allow somebody who isn’t me to do what I do professionally?”