Turns out Altman is a lab-leak covid truther, calls virus 'synthetic' according to Spectator piece on AI risk.
Turns out Altman is a lab-leak covid truther, calls virus 'synthetic' according to Spectator piece on AI risk.
Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
this thread appears to have attracted keyword-seeking bad posters. these fine posters have been escorted to the egress and may continue to enjoy their subthreads on other fediverse servers and not this one.
we should post keyword honey pots every few months for culling
I have been meaning to make a vegan pitbull thread for just such an occasion
to clear up any confusion: if you’re a drive-by poster we’ve never seen before and you’re posting bullshit covid theories instead of anything related to what we discuss on this instance (Sam Altman being a fucker, for example), we can’t tell you apart from someone keyword searching threads to spread conspiracy bullshit en masse and the very funny part is, we don’t actually care how you got here
garbage is garbage, don’t post your trash here
I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic.
Gonna ignore the urge to sneer at the tinfoil hattery here. See the rest of this comment section for that.
I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience
Sam, you have a doomsday bunker and a bunch of cash. This was one of your dream scenarios. Don't pretend like you're one of us.
@swlabr He doesn't have mirrorshade-wearing bodyguard goons wearing collar bombs to keep them in line after civilization collapses. Or a long pork sushi chef. Yet.
Yeah that’s probably what he meant by not a “great experience.” Our billionaire baby boy couldn’t get a nice night’s sleep without his hommes au jus.
Takes like this are one of the many things I pull out to point out how naive and misguided most x-risk obsessive people are. And especially Mr. Altman.
Despite wide fears of synthetic gain of function attacks, as it turns out, it's actually really hard to create a new virus meaningfully stronger than the standard endemic ones that already exist. Many countries and labs have legitimately tried. Lots of papers and research. It's, really really hard to beat nature at the microbiological scale; Viruses have to not only be virulent, but it has to contend with extremely unpredictable intermediate environments. The current endemic viruses got there through many mutations and adaptations inside environments that they were already at least successful (and not in vitro). And in the end, what would be the point? Once a virulent virus breaks out, you have very little control. Either it works really well and backfires or, even far more likely, it doesn't do that much at all, but it does piss other nations off.
It's not impossible. But honestly, yeah, I don't comprehend x-riskers who obsess over this.
How dare you! Eternal torture in Virokos basilisk for you!
A second minor side point which shows you are prob right on this front, and which broadens it from the risks of biological warfare (which I would argue would be the reason to do research to this) are low to the risk from biological warfare and chemical warfare are low: Soldiers have beards again.
Now I know, that sound absolutely crazy as an argument. But iirc the reason soldiers were no longer allowed beards around the world wars era was due to gasmask (the pandemic also showed that facial hair make fitting masks hard). But nowadays beards are more and more allowed (and in the case of authoritarian militaristic societies a sign of their elite special forces ;) ))
To me this shows that at least on the military level they don't really worry about the risks of artificial (wait, why do they say synthetic? Wouldn't artificial be a better word? Is this some sort of signaling thing? Anyway) viral attacks in the near future.
But I could be wrong, just found it interesting, and somewhere some military theorist is prob screaming after reading this, this close to warthunderforuming this place.
Wait, I've been out for a bit - what was the actual consensus on Covid? I genuinely thought there was a Wuhan Lab that this all originated from?
I'm not a nut job, I can be reasoned with, i just need to update my beliefs with new info
I believe the scientific consensus is that it originated in a wet market in Wuhan.
The "lab leak theory", while not impossible, is also shorthand for a morass of conspiracy theories grounded in racist attitudes towards China. It somehow conflates that the pandemic is China's fault, if not an outright attack from China, while simultaneously downplaying any efforts to mitigate such an attack.
The racist connotations about the lab I knew about, but I didn't think it made it less true.
That being said, I just checked wikipedia:
Most scientists agree that, as with many other pandemics in human history,[1][2][3] the virus is likely derived from a bat-borne virus transmitted to humans via another animal in nature or during wildlife trade such as that in food markets.[11] Many other explanations, including several conspiracy theories, have been proposed.[12][13][14] Some scientists and politicians have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory. This theory is not supported by evidence.[15]
SARS-CoV-2 has close genetic similarity to multiple previously identified bat coronaviruses, suggesting it crossed over into humans from bats
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_COVID-19
and I think I remember seeing a study that showed the similarity of the sequence to other known sequences and it wasn't that dramatic a change.
Just because since bigots blame China, doesn't prove their innocence.
But would the world Powers have said something if it was an escaped virus out of the Chinese Lab in Wuhan?
I don't think it's a coincidence that the wet market is 20 mins from a lab working on bats and viruses.
You have a global Pandemic, but also a big part of the population wants revenge because the Chinese can't keep their lab viruses contained and killed grandma with covid, quite a spicy meatball there.
There is an institute of virology in Wuhan, but it is most likely that Covid-19 spread naturally from bats to humans.
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Bat coronaviruses are common in the South China - Thailand - Myanmar region, and viruses jump host species all the time.
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Labs that handle human pathogens are maintained under very high security. The one in Wuhan is BSL4, the highest security rating, and had prior experience handling coronaviruses. Also, the viruses themselves would be marked with radioactive isotopes. Even if they somehow got out of the building, it would be possible to find and quarantine all those exposed to it.
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If it was released on purpose, then we can narrow the list of suspects down to the countries that can reliably make bioweapons and antidotes with close to 100% certainty. That's the US, China and maybe Russia. The US and Russia were among the worst affected, and China wouldn't have released the virus in China.
So the most likely explanation is that it is a bat virus that jumped hosts.
the viruses themselves would be marked with radioactive isotopes. Even if they somehow got out of the building, it would be possible to find and quarantine all those exposed to it.
China wouldn't have released the virus in China
You don't know that. Nobody knows that, because China destroyed all the evidence. If this was true, they could have proved it, they could have shown the world! "Behold our innocence!!" Why didn't that happen?
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In come the posters who never posted here before to explain that the leak theory is true!
While I have no real input re the whole lab leak conspiracy theory, I do have a fun anacdote from then. I remember pretty quickly after the lab leak option was dropped somebody came with proof for it saying 'we have the telephone data, and the day virus started all the telephones from the lab stayed in one place clearly manipulated!'. This story has a few holes, note first the whole 'we have the telephone data' which is already weird (esp as china refused to cooperate), then also we don't have just one day, perhaps this behavior of phones in a lab is normal. Almost like people are forced to put their personal phones in storage when they suit up (iirc often standard practice in those kinds of rooms). Of course the person bringing up the phones theory didn't think about this. I knew we were in for a wild ride of conspiracies after that one, as it was 'throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks' contrarian theories land. (a thing you often see after a tragedy happens, extremely common in far right circles when the far right does an atrocity, where it is often sort of ingroup signal and signal of cruelty). Anyway, that is just an interesting thing I remembered which I wanted to share, on the subject at hand my opinion is I doubt it was a lab leak, but I also don't think we will ever know for sure, and also we will never find enough evidence that it wasn't a lab leak to convince the people who convinced themselves it was one.
I'm on your page at least - best evidence we had was that it leaked from a Wuhan lab.
Not sure what the conspiracy here is, other than "Rich man has thoughts that come close to an opinion on vaccines. Get the pitchforks!"
Missing the forest for the trees, it feels like - The man has a good point about synthetic viruses.
Check my comment above. More scientists believe it was due to a random mutation (the similarity of the sequence to other bat coronaviruses was extremely similar, and this one was a small change that just happened to be potent), though there are also many scientists who find the wuhan lab more than circumstantial.
why are the comments on this post such a disaster. who are these people
keyword seeking fuckwits maybe
This was just on All.
fuck, I stop looking for one Thanksgiving and this happens
My thanksgiving was drama-free (blurring the distinction between pleasant and boring) and just now finding what was going down here. 😭
it has certainly brought the dickheads out
Gotta admit I’m checking back here every couple of hours or so just out of morbid curiosity
you mean the ceo ______ is an idiot?
yor mums a lab leek
As they say in Australia, he is cooked.
This sounds like a bad take, but for good reasons. I would like the people making AI to take really, really seriously the potential of synthetic viruses. It sounds like he's doing that (rather than working backwards from racism).
As often is the case here on awful systems, both sides are bad. Matt Ridley is a climate change denying shouty british aristocrat person all mad that greenpeace is not admitting there is a possibility windmills might be affecting whales (71 dead ones in the uk last year, no idea about the average of dead wales) (iirc according to research it isn't the windmills it is the increased and intensified ship traffic), if you were wondering why the article is written so badly that it seems like it is written by a dark side sneerclub commenter (aka a focus more on funny sneers than making an solid case, which is fine for this silly site, but he is pretending to be a science reporter).
(Taking the risks of viruses (whatever their origin) is good of course, just deciding that covid is synthetic is sneerworthy, as is only focusing on synthetic viruses because handwave AGI intelligence is magic).
Also note that Matt wrote a book arguing that covid came from a lab, so this article is also just book promotion. (he is also of course, a libertarian).
Lucky for you, there's a discussion about that on this very instance:
shut the fuck up
Everyone who is saying virus spread from bats to humans - you do realize there were people researching on bats in Wuhan, right? If it's from a bat, that doesn't automatically mean from a bat in nature.
Who gives a fuck. Let's not turn this guy into a new Elon Musk.
uh huh off you fuck
I think it's a fairly credible claim, that the coronavirus originated in a lab. There's been leaks in the past, of similar pathogens - once in the USA and once in Taiwan, I think. Not a very interesting conspiracy theory. Equally, animal agriculture is ripe for the development of zoonoses, regardless of the country. I don't think it's especially important, ultimately, unless it informs better practices in both areas.
Explain SARS and MERS, midwit.
Well, they were separate events, for starters. And most likely zoonoses, as with COVID-19. But I really don't think the idea of a lab leak is the most outrageous conspiracy theory going.
Is there any evidence he was fired for these beliefs? Using the deliberately vague phrase, "earlier this year" in November gives the impression of an author trying to either manufacture causation where none exists.
The only part of this article about Altman is the beginning. This author seems incredibly passionate about virology and is using recent news to draw attention to the author's points on the subject.
So far I like best that he was probably fired for not being enough of an AI doomer, i.e. deprioritizing AI safety and diverting too many resources from research to product service, all the while only paying lip service to the ea/rationalist orthodoxy about heading off the impending birth of AI Cthulhu.
Any remaining weirdness can be explained away by the OpenAI board being sheltered oddballs who honestly though they could boot the CEO and face of the company on a dime and without repercussions, in order to bring in an ideologically purer replacement.
He was fired because an employee reported to the board that their project Q* was becoming a potential threat to humanity, and Altman had not been truthful about this to the board.
Article (Swedish): https://tt.omni.se/skrammande-varningsbrev-bakom-altmans-avsked/a/wAoJvG
'We are the sole custodians of this godlike technology that we can barely control but that we will let you access for a fee' has been a mainstay of OpenAI marketing as long as Altman has been CEO, it's really no surprise this was 'leaked' as soon as he was back in charge.
It works, too! Anthropic just announced they are giving chat access to a 200k token context model (chatgtp4 is <10k I think) where they supposedly cut the rate of hallucinations in half and it barely made headlines.
Now that he needs to be cancelled such things are popping up like crazy!
Wtf are you talking about, we already talked about his sister story a while back (with your 'such things'). Just because you are not aware of things doesn't mean they suddenly pop up.
Here, a post from a month ago with data going further back. (also I do hope you get why as people become more powerful and popular in various ways they also attract more scrutiny, and how that isn't bad. You shouldn't care much that namename8numbers believes in the great replacement theory, but you should worry a lot when one of the richest people in the world starts shouting about that bs)
off you fuck
What do you mean?