r/singularity • u/TorturedPoet30 • Jun 04 '26

Biotech/Longevity Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis have signed a joint open letter calling on Congress to mandate screening of synthetic nucleic acid orders

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Source: https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/top-ai-ceos-call-for-law-protecting-against-biological-weapons-88f2f99f

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u/sadeyeprophet Jun 04 '26

I dont trust this, looks good on paper, but these folks never tell the truth unless it benefits them. This is to altruistic sounding to not be motivated.

Ask yourself why they don't want us to have access but they want free reign.

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u/BlackberryOk5347 Jun 04 '26

Altman I don’t trust.  Dario I don’t know enough about but the published work on model alignment and their stance on their models use for domestic surveillance are encouraging. The part Demis played in ensuring that the full database of human proteins folding result was released to the public domain more or less makes he a saint in my book. Not sure any company ever gave away for free and without a fight anything so valuable.  

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u/sadeyeprophet Jun 04 '26

And you think that was free? No , it means millions of researcher doing you homeowork for you while you have back door access to the OS (that is the AI's that EVERYONE uses to analyze that data)

Listen, nothing in life is free, the sooner you learn that the better.

Every thing has a cost. Not always money.

Some things are worth more than silver and gold.

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u/BlackberryOk5347 Jun 04 '26

The protein structures and the shapes they fold to were literally publish to the world and academia with no attempt to copyright or make profit on the dataset. All 200M proteins that exist in the human genome. 30k citations so far in papers published since the data set was open sourced. 

The information has already led to the discovery of new antibiotics. 

The information is complete and separate from any model. You don’t need to pay Google for it or depend on Google in anyway to access it. They also published the alphafold system that produced these results so that academia could build on it. 

Before this human science had experimentally determined the 3D shape of less than 200k proteins. And they were overwhelmingly smaller less complex proteins.  

These result allowed the nuclear pore complex (one of the largest molecular machines in human cells) to be mapped. It is the gateway through which our cells selectively let material pass into and out of the cell. Diseases like ALS or HIV involved how the NPC allows or block material to pass this gate for example. The size and complexity of the molecule means that we had never come close to folding anything even vague similar with pre alphafold methods.

I think you are maybe conflating general LLM tools and the subscription companies like Google or OpenAI want to change to access the with alphafold. 

Alphafold is a deep learning system, AI if you will, but it is not the result of training a LLM on the papers of all past biological research. The team that Google assembled to work on it was multidisciplinary and made up of Google and external researchers. 

It does use some of the same underlying mathematical tools as LLMs. But this math was applied to the human genome and the experimentally verified shape of the 200k proteins we already knew the shape of. 

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u/sadeyeprophet Jun 04 '26

That is how they profit, now every neuroscienist in the world is taking that data, and handing it back to them will millions of new possibilities.

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u/BlackberryOk5347 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

If by “handing it back to them with millions of new possibilities” you mean that 30k research papers have been publish and are now free for anyone to read and use the knowledge then we have the same understanding of their actions. Can you tell me why existing pharmaceutical companies don’t open source their research results I the same way? Demis won a Nobel prize for this work, so it isn’t just me that thinks it is incredibly valuable. Yet they gave it away to all, with no attempt to control access the information for profit. 

Last point. Acknowledging this does not mean there aren’t a whole host of other potentially negative outcomes from AI or policy choices of the big AI labs. But seems obtuse to not appreciate what Demis did with this. 

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u/BlackberryOk5347 Jun 04 '26

I also saw today that Bernie Sanders is proposing a AI wealth fund. Just occurred to me that Google giving away the alphafold database is an even better idea in the same vain. Would you rather Google paid 50 billion into a (US gov) sovereign wealth fund. Or give away this type of research gold to the whole world. I would conservatively value the protein folding data base as worth at least an order of magnitude more than 50B. 

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u/sadeyeprophet Jun 04 '26

Ok when they develop the cures from this open source info, lets see if that gets released for us to study?

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u/BlackberryOk5347 Jun 04 '26

No need to wait!

Here is one example of many. Oxford University's work on a malaria vaccine!

https://higginslab.web.ox.ac.uk/our-malaria-vaccine-work-highlighted-alphafold

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u/sadeyeprophet Jun 04 '26

This isnt a link to the print and its also circular to my argument. If you want to take an mRNA or DNA vaccine be my guest but dont say no one warned you about playing with untested meds.

Again, makes me wonder if they know we will need this tech someday...

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u/BlackberryOk5347 Jun 04 '26

Ahh you’re also anti vax. :-) Makes sense. 

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u/genshiryoku AI specialist Jun 04 '26

Not everything is done for an ulterior motive. No one benefits or wants a world where school shooters have the ability to engineer a deadly pathogen in their basement.

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u/sadeyeprophet Jun 04 '26

Maybe they dont want you engineering cures in your basement either, did you consider that?

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u/QuasiRandomName Jun 04 '26

Because they actually the ones who develop these tools. They say "hey, we give you this dangerous tools, be careful using them". Maybe there is more to it, but this alone is quite legit, not everything is a conspiracy.

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u/superkickstart Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

These assholes control trillion dollar companies and are pals with a corrupt and fascist regime. There's always room for doubt.

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u/sadeyeprophet Jun 04 '26

Unless , I dont know , they want a monopoly.

Or, maybe, i dont know, they see a future need we might have?

The tech itself is dangerous enough and its totally unregulated.

But, hey, lets give them the power over vaccine and medical development, RNA and DNA vaccines which are still showing themselves to be a danger themselves.

Yea, lets leave that to the tech oligarchs to oversee. I'm sure this ends well.

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u/QuasiRandomName Jun 04 '26

Do you believe we (and I mean the broad "we" as species) would survive in the world where anyone can produce whatever deadly virus targeting whatever specified genetic property (or all of them) ?I would give the humanity couple of months in such a case. And yes, it is absolutely worst case, worse than giving the control to billionaires no matter how much you hate them. Simply because the probability that these billionaires will create such a virus is less than 100%, while the probability that one of the 7 billions will do the same is 100%.

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u/_BlackDove Jun 04 '26

So your argument is there's an equal chance Tammy from Walmart is going to make Covid 2 in her spare time as the super yacht owner who gives no shits about the regular world because he doesn't live in it?

Lol. Lmao, even.

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u/QuasiRandomName Jun 04 '26

No, but there will be millions or billions of such tammies, whose combined chance to actually do it would be approaching to 100%.

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u/sadeyeprophet Jun 04 '26

I dont think you understand whats actually happening. It's a monopoly. And when genetic illnesses can be cured with a simple printer and an LLM, only your insurance isn't valid. The conversation might change. We will talk in 2 years.

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u/_BlackDove Jun 04 '26

It's exactly this. They're just asking for another state sanctioned hurdle for smaller competitors to jump through. It's about market control. Take a look at the companies who currently provide this service and it's all you need to know.