Dr. Richard Moulange

speaker

1,784 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 31 Mar

Dr. Richard Moulange’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #241 – Richard Moulange on how now AI codes viable genomes from scratch and outperforms virologists at lab work — what could go wrong? · 31 Mar 2026 podcast

If there's a super intelligence that understands what sort of pathogen would be the worst ever, well, there might be precursor models that are still good enough at spotting, oh, wow, this one seems really dangerous.

I don't think you should send it out.

However, maybe a superintelligence would, or whatever AI system, would have access to resources a bit more like a state.

I especially think about interactions between the frontier AI companies and pharmaceutical companies.

Absolutely, they will be wanting to sell their products to pharmaceutical companies.

It's a huge market.

And it's really important.

We want better drugs.

We want to cure cancer.

This is often the cry with AI.

And so we're going to have to think carefully about guardrails on making sure that models that we deploy in that domain are not misaligned and they are controlled.

But we can do that.

That's the same problem as the other one.

So it's the same problem as sort of classic misalignment.

Either we're going to be able to sufficiently align and control AI systems in the bowels of a frontier company or a government, such that we are willing to then put them in other industries, or we can't.

If we do that, we put them in the industries, then we meet the next question of, are we giving them too many affordances with respect to unsupervised physical laboratory access?

But that's totally a solvable problem.

And so this is where I'm always a bit sort of confused.

I suppose unless someone thinks that, you know, misalignment is the situation by default, that really nothing we can do will ever control or constrain, you know, these are the people with 90% plus P dooms, then sure, ignore biology.

But for everybody else who thinks this is a real concern, but that other aspects of AI safety are solvable, I would extend your relative lack of pessimism to AI bio too.

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