Rob Wiblin

Because most of the actual barrier to making these things is the know-how to actually do it in the lab.

There's a ton of understanding how to do the experiments, how to debug things that go wrong.

Literally, the motions that you're doing with your hands that you can't Google.

And so even if it were tried, they still wouldn't be able to get there.

And I think this virology capabilities test was kind of set up to answer, is AI now assisting with this other part of the problem?

Did that result persuade skeptics who were really focused on tacit knowledge as a barrier between AI having theoretical knowledge, having textbook knowledge, and whether that would actually translate into real risk?

So do we know whether in practice, if the AIs are so good in this way, is it the case that actual professors or postdocs or PhD students are using these reasoning models to debug their own experiments?

I think that would be like even stronger, more compelling evidence that in real cases, they actually are valuable, I guess, colleagues in the lab.

For a long time, people, like I guess for 70 years or 40 years or however long you want to say, people have been very worried that biological weapons would kind of jump from like theory to practice much more than they actually have.

But in practice, we don't see many terrorists.

We don't see that many attempts at making biological weapons by rogue actors.

And we have precious few examples of any actual success, which is just that there may be barriers there.

There may not be so many people interested, and in as much as they do try, there could be challenges that are a little bit hard for us to understand or that are not immediately obvious.

So in brief, what are the most likely severe biological catastrophes that AI could enable?

Yeah.

So we're going to give Mirabacteria a short shrift in this conversation because we have this two hour, two and a half hour long interview.

It's episode 233, James Smith and why he quit everything to work on a bio threat nobody had heard of.

So go back and listen to that.

We'll have a few more questions about it, but Mirabacteria is a big deal.

It is.