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Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

openai.com Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

We’re developing a blueprint for evaluating the risk that a large language model (LLM) could aid someone in creating a biological threat. In an evaluation involving both biology experts and students, we found that GPT-4 provides at most a mild uplift in biological threat creation accuracy. Whil...

Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation

OpenAI blog post: https://openai.com/research/building-an-early-warning-system-for-llm-aided-biological-threat-creation

Orange discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39207291

I don't have any particular section to call out. May post thoughts tomorrow today it's after midnight oh gosh, but wanted to post since I knew ya'll'd be interested in this.

Terrorists could use autocorrect according to OpenAI! Discuss!

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  • In computability theory, super-recursive algorithms are a generalization of ordinary algorithms that are more powerful, that is, compute more than Turing machines[citation needed]

    This is literally the first sentence of the article, and it has a citation needed.

    You can tell it's crankery solely based on the fact that the "definition" section contains zero math. Compare it to the definition section of an actual Turing machine.

    • More from the "super-recursive algorithm" page:

      Traditional Turing machines with a write-only output tape cannot edit their previous outputs; generalized Turing machines, according to Jürgen Schmidhuber, can edit their output tape as well as their work tape.

      ... the Hell?

      I'm not sure what that page is trying to say, but it sounds like someone got Turing machines confused with pushdown automata.

      • That's plainly false btw. The model of a Turing machine with a write-only output tape is fully equivalent to the one where you have a read-write output tape. You prove that as a student in elementary computation theory.

      • it’s hard to determine exactly what the author’s talking about most of the time, but a lot of the special properties they claim for inductive Turing machines and super-recursive algorithms appear to be just ordinary von Neumann model shit? also, they seem to be rather taken with the idea that you can modify and extend a Turing machine, but that’s not magic — it’s how I was taught the theoretical foundations for a bunch of CS concepts, like nondeterministic Turing machines and their relationship to NP-complete problems

        • New top-level thread for complaining about the worst/weirdest Wikipedia article in one's field of specialization?

          I wonder how much Rationalists have mucked up Wikipedia over the years just by being loud and persistent on topics where actual expertise would be necessary to push back.

          • New top-level thread for complaining about the worst/weirdest Wikipedia article in one’s field of specialization?

            fuck yes I’m down! finally I’ve got a use for all the weird CS garbage I keep finding. do you figure this’d be better as a SneerClub or TechTakes thread?

            • Our house, our rules, I suppose... but maybe TechTakes is a better fit, unless the examples you have in mind seem rooted in TREACLES particularly.

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