You can chat with the AI and say “I’ve had headaches at 6pm the last 4 days and foot pain every morning for last 2 weeks” and it will create structured entries for you on each date.
Still kinda buggy tho so it might be easiest to hop on a video call to walk you thru it
I’ll get you free access if you run into the paywall (trying to set up the paywall soon)
If that is true, why is SpaceX 5-10 years ahead of all its competitors?/why are Elon's companies #1 in all their industries (with the exception of xAI)?
If you consider that they only make two models, and only electric, their relative performance relative to the rest of the automotive market is impressive.
As I recall, Model Y was #1 best selling car at least once in the recent past. So by that measurement, they have led. In spite of Elmo's antics they remain competitive for that spot.
I don't know if it's just me, but the thoughtfulness of of the average HN comment has seemed to decrease in the last few years. Feels more populist/Reddity the last couple years.
You haven't been paying close attention. This has been going on for about 15 years. I'd say we had 5 good years here before the quality began dropping precipitously. If you got here after about 2012, you're probably part of the problem.
I'm pretty sure it has. If you look at threads from a decade ago, they're completely different - much less dramatic, much higher quality, way less populist and full of manipulative language.
It is an access issue. If you could get step by step instructions on how to modify a virus so it kills all people over 6ft you bet your ass there would be people attempting it.
Column A, Column B. Building a small explosive device isn't hard. Building a million is very difficult, doing it covertly virtually impossible without the resources of a nation-state.
The problem with biologics is the self-assembly and replication machinery comes for "free." So the numpties who might otherwise blow up a trash can [1] now have a real chance of taking out a million people.
The problem with biologics is that you cannot build a virus in your garage. You need a lab. AI will give your recipe, but you still need a lot of money and cooperation of other people (and if you have so, you could hire human biologist in pre-AI era).
Also AI makes mistakes. If you ever coded with AI agent you know that loop "write trash => compile => fix compilation errors => repeat" (if there are no compilation errors, there are definitely logic errors to be fixed). In real world cost of attempt is huge. You need a lot of money and you risk to draw a lot of attention if you perform long series of iterative experiments to create working virus.
In case with bomb it means that even if you have AI which gives you recipe of the bomb, but you will explode your garage and yourself with a decent chance. So you probably need to setup a good experimental pipeline (hardened lab where you can try different formulas and see that happens without being killed) if you want to go beyond publicly known explosives available in pre-AI era to anyone who read school/university chemistry books. And this also requires resources and draws attention.
People extrapolate programming experience (the area where experiments are cheap, cannot kill you and provide detailed feedback what went wrong) to real life.
They would still have to procure things that would (I hope) light up many screens before they're able to. And such numpties are probably already monitored, or in prison for some other stupid life decision.
I also would like to hope that people that are likely to do such things are probably:
A) don't know how to break even the most basic guardrails of models
> They would still have to procure things that would (I hope) light up many screens before they're able to
“Many of the largest and most responsible providers in the industry already screen and record orders voluntarily,” but there is no requirement to do so [1].
If that were possible, they would already be attempting it with the same level of ability as if they didn’t have access to a text file generator app. It is not about access to the information.
All of this “guardrails” handwringing is nonsense. These things output text. Are you for censorship of a book written by a biotechnology expert that gives out the exact same information?
I don’t know if you’re being silly but it is orders of magnitudes easier to modify an existing virus to selectively target certain snps than make “antiviral nanobots”
Claude, modify the existing 6ft killer virus so that it only makes my balls itch slightly for a day and gives me lifetime immunity to all further stamms of the 6ft killer virus. Make no mistakes, double check so the virus causes no unforseen complications.
It's inevitable. Also, it's not like I get to vet who does or doesn't have access. Blind trust in the current selection made by an unregulated corporation just makes me anxious.
Security in the form of "pay to play" is just kicking the bigger issue down the road.
The argument against security through obscurity isn't that it doesn't work at all. It does to a degree, only it is not as strong as people think.
An example from the meat world: not publishing your vacation dates well in advance for the world to see somewhat reduces your chance of being burglarized. That is security by obscurity; not reliable, but not completely inefficient either.
But if you live in a fortress (security by key material), you can well declare your vacation dates without running the risk.
It the tool was made available to anyone to build a virus, anyone would be able to build counter measures, if only a select few people have access they get to build the virus and everyone else is at a disadvantage. So, yes, I am leaning towards making these tools open rather than gated behind some priesthood and government that gets to wield exclusive power.
Compare the cost/ease of attacker vs defender if one person is given a virus to unleash anywhere in the world and another person is given a vaccine to distribute to the whole world. Or compare building a large bridge to someone disabling that bridge, etc. Prevention and repair is almost always more expensive than vandalism.
I don't think there's an ideal solution here, but giving trusted people access to fix security issues before giving it to the wider public seems like a reasonable compromise. They're letting you use the model for all other uses.
you need a lot more than the nucleotide sequence to make a virus. you need the DNA or RNA to be synthesized, assembled, packaged properly. and long sequences are pretty hard to do. you need a lot of equipment, or you need to order from services. the oligo synth services can harden their KYC and/or screen for suspicious sequences.
sure, a malevolent state actor could swing it, but they could make a bioweapon without Mythos's help already.
also, vaccine production and disease surveillance have ramped up very quickly. they will ramp up further, despite political setbacks. it's a cat and mouse game that favors the defenders IMO.
but the bioterrorism narrative is useful FUD to spin open-weight models as existentially dangerous. I am far more worried about Anthropic's own goals than the goals of some crackpot in a shed.
> it's a cat and mouse game that favors the defenders IMO
How so? I'm actually against most of the "safety-tuning" that anthropic does, but this seems fundamentally untrue, a close analogue being video game cheat development. I think in general the cheat developer has an advantage and the cheats generally proliferate for quite a while before being patched.
Video games are an interesting analogy since they often trade security for performance, trusting clients about world state quite a bit.
Finance and biology do come across as two similar high level systems. But while we can employ KYC, fraud detection, and various auditing techniques to finance, I don’t know what you do for biology. You can easily run an algorithm over every transaction a person makes in their account but there’s no equivalent for every cell, every bacteria strain, every virus in the human body.
(disclaimer: layperson remembering how the immune system works.)
the adaptive immune system effectively does KYC by checking the antigens presented on the surfaces of cells. the thymus selects for B-cells (iirc?) which don't react to a corpus of the body's own antigens, but cover a wide library of everything else. when it sees something it doesn't recognize, it reproduces, warns the rest of the immune system and marks targets. that's why our immune systems can eventually conquer almost every pathogen we encounter, if we can survive long enough for it to do its work.
but the KYC I was referring to was KYC that vendors of oligonucleotides (should) be doing, to keep people from ordering nefarious sequences.
I'm bullish on mRNA vaccine technology to release the "patches" much more quickly. there was widespread resistance to this during covid, but covid wasn't horribly lethal. if airborne Ebola spread as productively as covid, for example, I doubt there'd be many anti-vaxxers left (one way or another!) the acceleration of biology research that might accelerate pathogen development should also accelerate the development of broad-spectrum mRNA vaccines with high persistence.
also, afaik the most effective way of developing pathogens is through serial passage through humanized mice or something like that - directed evolution at a small scale, selecting for traits. AI simply isn't needed for that. I don't think information or intelligence has been the bottleneck for bioterrorism, it's motivation and resources - same as for any other kind of biology research program.
EFF doesn’t allow most people to reply to their X posts. Scroll on their profile right now and you’ll see you likely don’t have the ability to reply to their posts.
This will damage their view count according to the algorithm bc this limits their engagement
you have 2 labs at the forefront (Anthropic/OpenAI), Google closely behind, xAI/Meta/half a dozen chinese companies all within 6-12 months. There is plenty of competition and price of equally intelligent tokens rapidly drop whenever a new intelligence level is achieved.
Unless the leading company uses a model to nefariously take over or neutralize another company, I don't really see a monopoly happening in the next 3 years.
I was focusing on a theoretical dynamic analysis of competition (Would a monopoly make having a competitor easier or harder?) but you are right: practically, there are many players, and they are diverse enough in their values and interest to allow collusion.
We could be wrong: each of those could give birth to as many Basilisks (not sure I have a better name for those conscious, invisible, omni-present, self-serving monsters that so many people imagine will emerge) that coordinate and maintain collusion somehow, but classic economics (complementarity, competition, etc.) points at disruption and lowering costs.
I use it to manage my GERD/SIBO and joint issues
I have voice rec, typing unstructured text to create structured entries.
Message me johnsimerlink at gmail dot com and I can customize it for you