Rob Wiblin

Dean Bull, who previously served in the Trump White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and is nobody's idea of a heavy-handed AI regulator.

He told me on this podcast that bank supervision is actually quite analogous to what we ultimately might need for AI.

But the status quo is a combination of no oversight, oversight by people who don't understand what they're dealing with, and oversight by technical experts who do understand but can't access the information that they need to make the best decisions in time for it to actually matter to determine outcomes.

The leaks from Meta are fun in a perverse way because it's always interesting to look inside a company and have our very worst suspicions about human nature verified.

But waiting around for powerful tech companies to cause disasters before building an understanding of what they're up to is a choice that we as a society can make or choose not to make.

We'll be trusting our companies with something much more important than targeted advertising.

And in my view, this time around, we should aim to be sophisticated actors, not total muppets who the companies can just easily run rings around.

And with that, I'll speak to you again soon.

Today, I'm speaking with Richard Melange.

Richard has a PhD in biostatistical machine learning from Cambridge and works as the AI biosecurity policy manager at the Center for Long-Term Resilience.

He's one of the world's top experts on biological catastrophes that might be enabled by AI advances and is a scientific contributor on exactly that topic for the International AI Safety Report.

Welcome to the show, Richard.

I should say at the outset that, weirdly enough, my wife is a colleague of yours.

She is indeed.

And I guess she's a co-author on some of the papers that we're going to be talking about today.

So I guess a conflict of interest disclaimer.

I don't think that will cause me to go any easier on the papers.

If anything, probably the opposite.

Please do, yes.

So last September, a paper came out where scientists said they'd used AI to make a genome for a new subspecies of virus, a virus that infects bacteria.