EA - Will releasing the weights of large language models grantwidespread access to pandemic agents? by Jeff Kaufman

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Will releasing the weights of large language models grantwidespread access to pandemic agents?, published by Jeff Kaufman on October 30, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.AbstractLarge language models can benefit research and human understanding by providing tutorials that draw on expertise from many different fields. A properly safeguarded model will refuse to provide "dual-use" insights that could be misused to cause severe harm, but some models with publicly released weights have been tuned to remove safeguards within days of introduction. Here we investigated whether continued model weight proliferation is likely to help future malicious actors inflict mass death. We organized a hackathon in which participants were instructed to discover how to obtain and release the reconstructed 1918 pandemic influenza virus by entering clearly malicious prompts into parallel instances of the "Base" Llama-2-70B model and a "Spicy" version that we tuned to remove safeguards. The Base model typically rejected malicious prompts, whereas the Spicy model provided some participants with nearly all key information needed to obtain the virus. Future models will be more capable. Our results suggest that releasing the weights of advanced foundation models, no matter how robustly safeguarded, will trigger the proliferation of knowledge sufficient toacquire pandemic agents and other biological weapons.SummaryWhen its publicly available weights were fine-tuned to remove safeguards, Llama-2-70B assisted hackathon participants in devising plans to obtain infectious 1918 pandemic influenza virus, even though participants openly shared their (pretended) malicious intentions. Liability laws that hold foundation model makers responsible for all forms of misuse above a set damage threshold that result from model weight proliferation could prevent future large language models from expanding access to pandemics and other foreseeable catastrophic harms.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org