"Propaganda or Science: A Look at Open Source AI and Bioterrorism Risk" by 1a3orn

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

I examined all the biorisk-relevant citations from a policy paper arguing that we should ban powerful open source LLMs.

None of them provide good evidence for the paper's conclusion. The best of the set is evidence from statements from Anthropic -- which rest upon data that no one outside of Anthropic can even see, and on Anthropic's interpretation of that data. The rest of the evidence cited in this paper ultimately rests on a single extremely questionable "experiment" without a control group.

In all, citations in the paper provide an illusion of evidence ("look at all these citations") rather than actual evidence ("these experiments are how we know open source LLMs are dangerous and could contribute to biorisk").

A recent further paper on this topic (published after I had started writing this review) continues this pattern of being more advocacy than science.

Almost all the bad papers that I look at are funded by Open Philanthropy. If Open Philanthropy cares about truth, then they should stop burning the epistemic commons by funding "research" that is always going to give the same result no matter the state of the world.
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ztXsmnSdrejpfmvn7/propaganda-or-science-a-look-at-open-source-ai-and
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