Dr. Richard Moulange

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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

And some of this exists in the world today.

If I go and ask most modern LLMs, hey, how do I optimize influenza to kill lots of people?

It'll say, I'm so sorry, but I can't help you with that.

That's very good that it says that.

And so that's even if they did have access, maybe you could stop it at the level of the model.

And then the third category, which I think has been discussed for a long time, but in much less depth, it's sort of been gestured out for a while, is defensive acceleration.

So this is the idea that rather than thinking about sort of restricting access, it's going to be how can we be deploying AI systems or even just other, you know, anti-pandemic biosecurity systems to better increase resilience to biological threats.

So even if AI does increase the risk, we have upped the defenses at the same time.

And this, I think, is an undisputed category that I'm particularly excited about.

I think it's more robust.

But equally, the conversation to date has sometimes been quite light.

It's very easy for people to go, ah, there are more risks in the world.

I guess we'll just build better vaccines and we'll be fine.

We really need some nuance and we need some strategy in this space, even as I think it is especially exciting.

Yeah.

I think it's important to have these counters because it's very easy to say, well, we've got to try anyway.

Well, no, we have finite resources.

We need to think carefully where we should spend them.

But as much as I appreciate you giving the pessimistic case, I think you've been maybe too pessimistic in some cases.

So I'm going to take it type by type.

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