Raye

[Raye @rayefull]

Children seem to have such a knack for destruction. I was interfacing with one today and they were all like ‘watch me do this cool thing’ and it was just destroying something

[Raye @rayefull]

You can see the future first in San Francisco (and what you do does matter fwiw!)

[JB @JasonBotterill]

Anthropic employees are fucking depressed

[Raye @rayefull]

@fiiiiiist yes i enjoyed reading it! is a good start

[Raye @rayefull]

Nucleic acid synthesis screening (including record keeping) is good. But a lot of the recommendations I'm seeing feels like it is lacking contact with reality or written by people who keep their hands too clean.

I am not sure how many people writing on the topic of ordering synthetic DNA online have also... ordered synthetic DNA online with an LLM. I have.

I have weird hobbies and one of my side projects needed synthetic DNA. It is not thaat easy to get, but it also wasn't that hard.

The approval process is pretty robust. I was rejected as a person so I needed to be a company. And the easiest way to be a fake company, is to just make a real one.

So I made an LLC, website, EIN, Linkedin, commercial address, signed some forms, and sent a lot of emails. The LLMS were pretty helpful in me getting through all the screening steps. They were also pretty helpful in designing and ordering the material. They helped me search every paper on the topic to find the best dna sequence for my needs. And now I keep a thousand dollars of synthetic viral dna material in my freezer next to the ice cream.

It seems the key part of the request prob isn't the screening, but it's the record keeping. That seems good. I was pretty heavily screened to get approved. However now that I have been approved, it feels like I have moved outside the Eye of KYC Sauron and now could order ...anything.

This is a good first step but I remain worried about papering over the problem, making doing science outside an institution harder, and not really solving the crux of the issue (we are being reckless with ai)

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

No one should be able to order a bioweapon through the mail.

@IFP & @JoinFAI are proud to co-lead an open letter calling for mandatory DNA synthesis screening & recordkeeping.

Signatories include:

- Sam Altman, CEO & Co-Founder, OpenAI

- Dario Amodei, CEO & Co-Founder, Anthropic

- David Baker, Director, Institute for Protein Design; 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient

- Patrick Collison, CEO & Co-Founder, Stripe

- Paul Graham, Founder, Y Combinator

- Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind; 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient

- Emily Leproust, CEO & Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

- Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School

- Gerald W. Parker, former Special Assistant to the President for Biosecurity and Pandemic Response

- Mustafa Suleyman, CEO, Microsoft AI

- Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics, George Mason University

- Alexandr Wang, Chief AI Officer, Meta; Founder, Scale AI

- Christine E. Wormuth, President & CEO, Nuclear Threat Initiative; 25th Secretary of the Army

Read the letter and see the full list of signatories: https://t.co/BwZiJXw3JT

Many DNA synthesis companies voluntarily screen orders to mitigate biosecurity risks, but no law requires them to do so.

Leaders in AI, biotech, life sciences, national security, and the nucleic acid synthesis industry agree that Congress should act to strengthen safeguards against biological threats.

@deanwball put it well in the WSJ:

“If you’re synthesizing the stuff that yields biological life and viruses, we’re asking you to screen to see whether it is dangerous in some way. That seems like a reasonable thing for society to insist upon.”

[Raye @rayefull]

@AlecStapp yeah that would be not good. thanks for your work on it!

[Raye @rayefull]

@kevfly16 yeah absolutely. regulation needs to be more jagged to be useful but seems expensive to implement. i've seen a lot of companies really reliant on 'commercial addresses' as a verification step and im glad we might get some thoughtful stuff on this

[Raye @rayefull]

ah yeah but nice but this seems a bit wishful / untrue to me. i think kyc is likely to not really deter someone, is susceptible to human error, and feels like it is in place as nice insurance for the supplier to be able to wash their hands clean on misuse. i think this is also seen in crypto and banking systems (that KYC alone doesn't stop fraud).

i buy my supplies across a few providers and it is not hard to imagine that someone with enough motivation could patch work something together that looks fine on each platform but when assembled would be bad. that type of misuse seems like it would be hard to track and attribute.

[Raye @rayefull]

~52x, jfc

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

Each time we release a model, we run the same test: give it code that trains a small AI model, ask the new model to speed it up. It takes a skilled human 4-8 hours to reach 4x faster.

In May 2024, Claude Opus 4 averaged a ~3x speedup. This April, Mythos Preview achieved ~52x.

[Raye @rayefull]

@bahradx what do you mean re 'attributability is problem the main deterrence'?

[Raye @rayefull]

@JanikaSchmitt have you guys field tested and ordered dna from dna synthetic providers?

[Raye @rayefull]

@sparr0 @MindMechanical if i am not more than 30% of the conversation i just leave. sometimes i will wave or curtesy if i am fond of the people. but if it is just 1-3 people i usually abruptly announce 'i am going to go now' and then float away.

[Raye @rayefull]

you can tell how rationalist a subculture is based on how socially ok it is to just walk away from things / conversations / talks

[Raye @rayefull]

@dwarkesh_sp @srush_nlp does he want a wife

[Raye @rayefull]

get weirder hobbies

[Raye @rayefull]

This was a great reminder to re order all my synthetic nucleic acids

[MTS @MTSlive]

SITUATION DETECTED: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis have signed a joint open letter calling on Congress to mandate screening of synthetic nucleic acid orders, citing AI’s rapidly improving ability to assist with biological research as an urgent biosecurity risk.

[Raye @rayefull]

@jayluxeed @IsaacKing314 what is it

[Raye @rayefull]

I think it was unrelated to construction but was funny to imagine a builder not caring about outcome

[Raye @rayefull]

Overhearing a construction man hyping up his friend ‘don’t be attached to the outcome, just the enjoy the process and then you’ll have fun bro”

[Larissa Schiavo @lfschiavo]

I am really, really, really glad to see this.

[Raye @rayefull]

@LeRoyDesCimes depends on when but I have a friend subletting!

[Tenobrus @tenobrus]

computers in 2006:
DEFRAGMENTING HARD DRIVE...
VERIFYING ROOT CERTIFICATES....

computers in 2026: