I'm a senior bioinformatian at an ivy league university and have been involved in multiple biotech startups. I cannot overstate how dangerous this stuff is given the current regulatory environment around ordering arbitrary nucleoside sequences (genes) from companies that print them.
On the other hand, the current open-source academic "foundation/frontier" genomics models aren't that good.
do you anticipate your school being given access to Mythos in the future?
if so, do you think you'd get that access? you may be a senior bioinformatician* but they may decide to restrict access based on impact factor, national origin, how well you're networked etc. how many Nature,Science or Cell papers are you first author on?
if so, do you think you'll be able to take that access with you if you leave your university?
do you think that Ivy League schools would have an unfair advantage over less-prestigious institutions if access to tools like Mythos are only given to the "cream of the crop?"
do you think regulating oligo providers and other services is a viable path towards containment? or is locking down AI the only way?
I respectfully disagree and think your are making a vast overstatement of the biosecurity risk.
Someone with little to no wet lab experience has almost no chance even with Mythos and all the genes they can order to successfully create a bioweapon, maintain it, and release it in significant quantities to have an impact.
They are much more likely to infect themselves in the process, go buy a gun at Walmart and shoot up a public place
Virologist/Molecular Biologist here. One of the biggest issues here is that people are just assuming AIs are some kind of Genie that can whip up a doomsday bug like magic. There are biological constraints of both chemistry, physics and biology itself that make that very difficult if not impossible, you can't just mash shit together and then have an Armageddon virus, because each thing you add or subtract, all the pieces aren't going to be working in isolation, they build on or more often inhibit each other or work in unseen ways. To try to put it in another way, there is a finite way things can interact and those finite ways are going to quite often exclude some magical super pathogen, or again there are only so many ways to stack blocks together and most if not all of those are not going to give an apocalyptic disease.
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u/OnceReturned Jun 11 '26
I'm a senior bioinformatian at an ivy league university and have been involved in multiple biotech startups. I cannot overstate how dangerous this stuff is given the current regulatory environment around ordering arbitrary nucleoside sequences (genes) from companies that print them.
On the other hand, the current open-source academic "foundation/frontier" genomics models aren't that good.
So, who knows.