Rob Wiblin

Creating something that basically can tell you whether something contributes to a biological weapons program seems like it might advantage adversaries.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, it does.

So I think the DEFAC idea, like, let's not slow down technology, let's speed up the stuff that is good, that advantages defenders, is a very attractive framing, a very attractive mentality, because it allows you to, on the one hand, I guess, address your safety concerns and your anxieties without seeming like you're anti-progress and anti-technology and you're a doomer or something like that.

So I think many people have latched onto it, including me, I guess.

How much of this stuff is actually happening, though?

I worry that it's such a nice idea that people talk about it a ton, but then are actually many people going into DefHack projects?

Is it attracting the talent?

Is it attracting the funding that it needs?

What is the barrier to getting more of these projects happening?

I guess I could see three main ones.

I guess on the government side, just governments aren't willing to spend money.

I guess the UK in particular is very fiscally stretched, but it's always difficult to bid for large budgets for science.

I guess there's also just the bandwidth to even think of.

Governments are dealing with all kinds of different things.

This is not a threat that has actually happened yet, so it's maybe hard to get as many staff as you might like to even be considering what the response ought to be.

And then there's also,

I imagine the experts in this area, especially ones who both are good at the science and are highly entrepreneurial and could try to own a project end-to-end, surely an enormous demand, and persuading them to work on one of these Defac AI bio projects.

I mean, I'm sure it's competitive, but it's a hard sell because there are many things that they could go and do.

Do you have a sense of what the bottleneck is?

You have a really nice blog post on your sub stack where you go through 15 different Defact projects that you'd really like to see the UK and I guess the US as well get on top of and advance faster than it's currently happening.