Building an early warning system for LLM-aided biological threat creation - eviltoast
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. While this uplift is not large enough to be conclusive, our finding is a starting point for continued research and community deliberation.
  • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
    11·
    10 months ago

    this is the damage done by decades of our industry clapping at brainless “I built this on cloud X and saved so much time” blog posts that have like 20 lines of code to do some shit like a lazy hacker news clone, barely changed from the example code the cloud provider publishes, and the rest is just marketing and “here’s how you use npm to pull the project template” shit for the post’s target market of mediocre VPs trying to prove their company’s spending too much on engineering and sub-mediocre engineers trying to be mediocre VPs

    like oh you don’t say, you had an easy time “building” an app when you wired together bespoke pieces of someone else’s API that were designed to implement that specific kind of app and don’t scale at all past example code? fucking Turing award material right here

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      10 months ago

      by decades of our industry clapping at brainless

      secondarily, the remarkable thing here is just how tiny a slice of industry this actually is (and yet also how profoundly impactful that vocal little segment can be)

      e.g. this shit wouldn’t fly in a bank (or at least, previously have flown), or somewhere that writes stuff that runs ports or planes or whatever.

      but a couple of decades of being worn down by excitable hyperproductive feature factory fuckwads who are only to happy to shit out Yet Another Line Of Code… it’s even impacting those areas at times

      some days I hate my industry so fucking much

      • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
        5·
        10 months ago

        reflection thought: tonight (in the impending load shedding time) is a good time to reread Mickens

    • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      don’t forget the 5 blog posts you can milk out of a single example, and your Learnings (obvious fucking realisations) 3 months (one even slightly minor application/API/… revision) later

    • Brian David@hachyderm.io
      5·
      10 months ago

      @self @froztbyte Another big part of it is the obsession with the “young genius disruptor coder”. Which has resulted in management buying into endless fads foisted on us by twenty-somethings, and then inevitably having to undo half the things they implemented 5 years later. Well, except for React, which apparently we can’t get rid of but must forever keep reimplementing with whatever new new pattern will actually make it scale for real this time.