Rob Wiblin

You said that from your point of view, novices, amateurs, they're not where you're getting most of the uplift because I guess they're too incompetent.

It's overdetermined that they're going to fail even with AI assistance.

I couldn't help but notice in preparing for this conversation that it does seem like novices are the big focus of most of the evals that exist currently.

Is that because it's easier to measure because there's more novices and you don't have to pay them so much?

Yeah, so I would have thought you would expect that the more sophisticated actors would get a bigger... Just to explain, so the mental model that I've had as a result of thinking about this for one minute is you've got kind of an S-curve with all of these things.

I'm gesturing up here, kind of making an S. I guess on the X-axis, you've got...

Just how much expertise do you have in the area?

And then what's your probability of success?

So there's a point at which you can already do it, in which case you don't need the AI to help you.

There's a point at which you're doomed to failure, no matter how much someone coaches you, because you're just no good.

And it's the people in the middle who you would think would get the biggest boost from having some advice.

You are exactly right.

I mean, I think something that's slightly useful about thinking about the S-curve is that the S-curve is going to differ depending on the challengingness of the thing that the person or the group is trying to do.

So if we're thinking about making mirror bacteria, something that no one has ever done, and that is actually...

some of the most challenging frontier science possible, then probably the only group that would be meaningfully helped would be a state actor like the Russian bioweapons program.

They're the only folks who would be close enough to having a shot that AI assistance would help them out.

I guess I was excluding them because I'm imagining that they wouldn't do it.

Correct.

Because they're not typically bioweapons programs.

And I guess conversely for like the absolutely most basic, I suppose perhaps like chemical weapons attacks that are more straightforward than biological weapons attacks, it might be the novices who now are getting the biggest uplift because they were the ones who would struggle.