“AI #49: Bioweapon Testing Begins” by Zvi

Two studies came out on the question of whether existing LLMs can help people figure out how to make bioweapons. RAND published a negative finding, showing no improvement. OpenAI found a small improvement, bigger for experts than students, from GPT-4. That's still harmless now, the question is what will happen in the future as capabilities advance.

Another news item was that Bard with Gemini Pro impressed even without Gemini Ultimate, taking the second spot on the Arena leaderboard behind only GPT-4-Turbo. For now, though, GPT-4 remains in the lead.

A third cool item was this story from a Russian claiming to have used AI extensively in his quest to find his one true love. I plan to cover that on its own and have Manifold on the job of figuring out how much of the story actually happened.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction.
2. Table [...]

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Outline:

(00:56) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(08:35) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(09:38) GPT-4 Real This Time

(10:23) Be Prepared

(16:13) Fun with Image Generation

(17:17) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(23:32) They Took Our Jobs

(27:54) Get Involved

(28:23) In Other AI News

(33:35) Quiet Speculations

(39:06) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(45:58) The Week in Audio

(46:49) Rhetorical Innovation

(56:40) Predictions are Hard Especially About the Future

(01:03:13) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:07:03) Open Model Weights Are Unsafe and Nothing Can Fix This

(01:09:38) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:11:37) The Lighter Side

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First published:
February 1st, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RsWvhDNQRExjatzGA/ai-49-bioweapon-testing-begins

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.