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

Got anything more concrete?

Anything more robust?

Fair enough.

I think there are some reasons to be less pessimistic than that.

So the first is, I think you subtly substituted for two different capabilities.

You said, suppose we have great vaccine design capabilities.

We'll also probably have really good sequence-to-function design.

The first is a much more narrow subdomain than the second, which is a deeply enabling cross biology generalized capability.

You know, we can have alpha fault structure prediction without having, I mean, that's actually quite general, I suppose, but we don't have yet to have sequence to function.

And so this I think links back to the idea of differential technological development.

We should be choosing to develop vaccine design technologies as far as possible without always relying on broader dual-use biodesign technologies if we don't have to.

Sometimes we will, but we should squeeze all the defensive juice out of a defense-dominant subdomain first.

The second thing you said was then maybe they could optimize against you.

I think this is an open question.

If we have truly multi-strain vaccines or universal vaccines within a class, it should be that, think about that embedding space of biology again.

If there's this circle here, that's all the influenzas, at some point you might have a vaccine that just works against all of them.

That doesn't preclude very advanced actors from starting to explore

You know, a whole new family of, you know, there are 26 human-infected viral families that we know of, you know, could you go into the 30s or something?

Sure.

But that still cuts down so much of the risk.

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