The pessimist
Dario Amodei responded to the letter about open weight models. He agrees with some parts of the letter and disagrees with other parts. And while I don’t think he intended his own post to be fear-mongering, it’s not exactly hopeful either:
I worry that biology will have a strong attacker-defender asymmetry, where sufficiently capable models may be able to quickly weaponize pandemic-level viruses with widely available materials, whereas defense against these agents is a multi-year operational task in the best case (as we saw with Operation Warp Speed).
Last year I read the book The Optimist about Sam Altman. I wonder if there should be a complementary book about Dario Amodei called The Pessimist. I don’t entirely mean that as a joke, or even as criticism… We do need people who are a check on runaway enthusiasm. Dario is well suited to this role because of his time at OpenAI and his excellent essay Machines of Loving Grace, with its more uplifting tone. But there has to be balance, and currently I find the fear exhausting.
