>Everyone knows the barrier to terrorists using bio weapons is not specialist knowledge, but access to labs, equipment, reagents etc.
An LLM could help you get that access, or help you make do without it.
>It's the whole Guttenberg's printing press argument. "Whoaa hold on now, what do you mean you want knowledge to be freely available to the vulgar masses?"
We're fortunate that intelligent, educated people typically don't choose to become terrorists and criminals.
Every generation of improved LLMs has the potential to expand the set of people who could construct bioweapons.
It's true that technology is typically good and beneficial, but beware the parable of the turkey: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hillennevins/2021/11/24/the-par...
A Thanksgiving turkey could have a wonderful life until late November when it gets slaughtered out of the blue. We can't just count on trends to continue indefinitely -- a famous example would be the 2008 financial crisis, before which people assumed that "housing prices always go up".
It's just common sense to forecast the possibility of extreme risks and think about how to mitigate them. And yes, I favor across the board restrictions on information deemed sensitive. But people publishing open source LLMs should have an obligation to show that what they're releasing will not increase the likelihood of catastrophic risks.
https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~aldous/157/Papers/yudkowsky.p...
