Yet.

No, the sophomoric LLM argument does not apply here. The world is not a big computer.

The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master.

So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is going to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence.

Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.

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estearum 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

Your example of how easy it is to control outputs behind specialized knowledge is a thing (recreational drugs) that exist in mass quantities every place on the planet at consumer-accessible prices?

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timr 18 minutes ago | parent [-]

No. My argument is that many things in the world are hard in a way that computers cannot solve, and the existence of LLMs does not change that.

Synthetic biology is one of those things.

	▲	estearum 11 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Uhhh right... but all the other hard parts are being solved too, correct? LLMs are clearly going to solve a part that, 10 years ago, one would've assumed would be one of the highest and last barriers to go down. Without LLMs, a reasonable security apparatus would be: Step 1. Disallow dissemination and synthesis of known pathogens Step 2. Watch closely anyone with the decades of training required to come up with their own pathogen