AI Can Now Design Functional Viruses. Should We Worry?

Her conclusion to the latter book comes out and says it, paraphrasing here:

> Nuclear war is terrifying in its destruction, but the chain of command limits the risk of a rogue actor. Whereas bio weapons can be designed and manufactured in relatively low tech environments with equal or greater magnitudes of impact.

EUV is the pinnacle of a highly advanced supply chain, you could clone it but it requires many billions of dollars of R&D and massively specialized components; an economy like China likely can support the manufacturing tree required.

I would not be surprised if DNA printers seem end up closer to EUV or even more commoditized, if they are an extension of how all pharma/biotech manufacturing and research gets done.

But this is ultimately contingent on what the technology tree looks like. You couldn’t prevent diffusion of 3D printed ghost guns, even if you wanted to.

[0] "43 freight containers and weighing in at 165 tons." - https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2024/12/03/asml-releases...

[1] not in red blood cells

Versus EUV which one could dump literally unlimited amounts of money into solving and still probably fail for decades.

I will give you a classic example, the Lipid Nanoparticle used for the delivery of mRNA vaccine is the real lynchpin of covid vaccines. The media never talks about it. Any biology student knows how lipid bilayers work (they are the basic building block of cells, it's like asking a programmer what a terminal is). But the process of manufacturing those lipid nano particles at scale was the main bottleneck for delivering mRNA to the target cell. That was the trade secret. It's not sexy or hot like mRNA so the media doesn't talk about it. It's why many developing countries tried to make their own vaccines and failed completely. The mRNA was the easy part but what use is a bunch of mRNA if you can't get them delivered to cells?

Any biology student (even high school ones) can describe how a cell membrane works. But designing a man-made one that can be created at scale and be guaranteed to fuse with mammalian cells is mostly a matter of trial and error. It's a bit like finding viable pseudo linear memory use alternatives to the basic attention architecture in machine learning. Every lab has their own take on it.

With AI nowadays the search space of viable biotech ex nihilo experimentation is much smaller given that you can just prompt it to give you plausible protocols.

Thermo Fisher sells a kit to do this [1]. It's something you might do a few thousand times on the way to actually generating a novel virus.

> I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high

I'd argue that it probably already happened, and had nothing to do with AI.

[1] AAV transfection.

But the next one (or the first one, if that one wasn’t manmade) will probably be much worse.

Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial.

[1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two companies that will do 50-100kb assemblies as a service today, but I guarantee you they're going to look at what you're trying to make, and who is asking them to do it.

They really just synthesize anything for you?

You may be skipping a few of the involved steps.

Now, the worry is a lone nut in a basement with no money could pull off an act of bio terrorism.

  - can save my life, 
  - is interested in saving my life
  - i have some control over

Yes, they are currently snatching kids of (illegal) immigrant parents and it is horrible, but who else would protect me against lone nuts in a basement, or robor armies of trillionairs?

Just like in a car, the true demonstration of intelligence is closing your eyes and slamming the pedal to the floor.