[HN Gopher] Propaganda or Science: Open-Source AI and Bioterrori... ___________________________________________________________________ Propaganda or Science: Open-Source AI and Bioterrorism Risk Author : 1a3orn Score : 61 points Date : 2023-11-02 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (1a3orn.com) (TXT) w3m dump (1a3orn.com) | artninja1988 wrote: | An extremely impressive takedown of biorisk papers | ethanbond wrote: | Idk, writing off e.g. anthrax risk because the 2001 attacks | only killed 5 people is pretty silly. There's good reason to | believe those attacks weren't really _intended_ to kill people, | and they certainly weren 't intended to kill a large number of | people. | | This fact also casts some doubt of relevance on the Montague | paper as well, which says that a bio agent's ability to spread | is so incredibly important. Yes, the ability to spread does | amplify the risk _enormously_ for obvious reasons, but there | are plenty of non-spreading agents that you can do huge, huge | amounts of damage with, including anthrax when used | "appropriately." | j45 wrote: | A slippery slope is anythings dangerous that anyone wants to | be dangerous and can fall into a larger and larger nebulus of | safety for the many and control for the few, which is a | different kind of danger. | | It will be interesting to see where this attempts to contain | the interpretations of fear from the interpretations of | fearmongering (or not) leads to. | | Maybe AGI gets disagrees with all the manipulators and | becomes for the masses. | slowmovintarget wrote: | Quoting the article's own tl;dr: | | > I examined all the biorisk-relevant citations from a policy | paper arguing that we should ban powerful open source LLMs. | | > None of them provide good evidence for the paper's conclusion. | The best of the set is evidence from statements from Anthropic -- | which rest upon data that no one outside of Anthropic can even | see, and on Anthropic's interpretation of that data. The rest of | the evidence cited in this paper ultimately rests on a single | extremely questionable "experiment" without a control group. | | > In all, citations in the paper provide an illusion of evidence | ("look at all these citations") rather than actual evidence | ("these experiments are how we know open source LLMs are | dangerous and could contribute to biorisk"). | | > A recent further paper on this topic (published after I had | started writing this review) continues this pattern of being more | advocacy than science. | | > Almost all the bad papers that I look at are funded by Open | Philanthropy. If Open Philanthropy cares about truth, then they | should stop burning the epistemic commons by funding "research" | that is always going to give the same result no matter the state | of the world. | | The rest of the paper supports this thesis with... wait for it... | evidence! | AnimalMuppet wrote: | "burning the epistemic commons". Beautiful phrase. I may steal | it. | artninja1988 wrote: | > Almost all the bad papers that I look at are funded by Open | Philanthropy. If Open Philanthropy cares about truth, then they | should stop burning the epistemic commons by funding "research" | that is always going to give the same result no matter the | state of the world. | | I see they are in the effective altruism space. Something about | them seems extremely shady to me... | matheusmoreira wrote: | > policy paper arguing that we should ban powerful open source | LLMs | | This is a corporation lobbying effort, right? I simply can't | believe that anyone else would actually _want_ the power of | LLMs to be concentrated in the hands of trillionaire | corporations. | MeImCounting wrote: | The problem is that this type of analysis and evidence does not | appeal to the same primal instinct that made The Terminator such | a successful franchise in both the box office and pop culture. It | is way more fun to entertain ideas of paperclip optimizers and | emotionally manipulative super-intelligent sociopaths than to | actually reason in good faith. The endless comparisons to nuclear | bombs or imagined super-viruses are an inevitable result of | people having lived through the rampant propaganda of the cold | war. | | The idea of just another technology controlled exclusively by | mega-corps in a world where a majority of the most powerful | technologies are controlled by those corps doesnt seem that bad | in comparison with nuclear annihilation. This is missing the | fundamental truth of what AI is and therefore missing its most | direct comparison. At risk of repeating the same arguments seen | elsewhere on HN and other sites: cryptology is definitely the | closest comparison. | | Both AI and crypto are incredibly clever applications of | fundamental mathematics. Both are technologies that are | absolutely disruptive to certain monopolies or methods of | societal control. Both can be replicated by anyone who | understands the basic principles and throws enough resources at | them. | | I think we are going to watch a similar thing happening where | there are many concerted attempts to compromise the technology | itself or the availability of said tech and eventually the halls | of power are going to end up targeting endpoints instead of the | protocol (architecture) itself. The users of a given technology | are where regulation ought to (and I believe will) lie in the | end. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-11-02 23:00 UTC)