Good report overall on tacit knowledge & biowarfare. This is relevant to the discussion over LLM risks: the Aum Shinrikyo chemist could make a lot of progress by reading papers and figuring out his problems as he went, but the bacteriologist couldn’t figure out his issues for what seems like what had been a viable plan to weaponize & mass-produce anthrax but where lack of feedback led it to fail. Which does sound like something that a superhumanly-knowledgeable (but not necessarily that intelligent) LLM could help a lot with simply by pattern-matching and making lists of suggestions for things that are to the human ‘unknown unknowns’.
Good report overall on tacit knowledge & biowarfare. This is relevant to the discussion over LLM risks: the Aum Shinrikyo chemist could make a lot of progress by reading papers and figuring out his problems as he went, but the bacteriologist couldn’t figure out his issues for what seems like what had been a viable plan to weaponize & mass-produce anthrax but where lack of feedback led it to fail. Which does sound like something that a superhumanly-knowledgeable (but not necessarily that intelligent) LLM could help a lot with simply by pattern-matching and making lists of suggestions for things that are to the human ‘unknown unknowns’.