Aggregated News
AI company CEOs Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) disagree on a lot, like how fast the technology should develop, the best way to regulate it, and how to prepare society for smarter-than-human AI, among other things.
That makes it all the more remarkable that they — along with 85 other experts in tech, biology, and national security policy — recently signed on to an open letter calling for more robust regulations around gene synthesis. They’re all concerned that AI systems might be used to help develop and even deploy dangerous biological weapons designed through gene synthesis, which is used to chemically build custom DNA sequences in a lab, rather than relying solely on existing natural DNA templates.
The simple fact of multiple CEOs of fiercely competitive AI companies aligning on anything is remarkable. But to understand how they came to this agreement, we have to take a step back to understand what gene synthesis is, how it works, and why the possibility of AI-assisted misuse of the technology generates so much fear.
Modern...