Red Queen Bio is using artificial intelligence to design antibody drugs for novel pathogens—before future AI systems create them. on.wsj.com/4yiMTy1

SITUATION DETECTED: CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince says he is aware of additional severe vulnerabilities in other pieces of critical software, and said “I think we’re going to have a couple years where every single week it’s going to feel like the sky is falling,” per Reuters.

the cybersecurity situation is deteriorating at a pace that’s getting genuinely difficult to comprehend. > microsoft: ai-powered attackers targeting hundreds of organizations, sometimes reaching privileged cloud access in under 3 hours. > crowdstrike: four separate threat actors using autonomous agents. one already compromised 15+ healthcare organizations. > autonomous ai agents: reportedly used to compromise 100+ corporate websites, including sites associated with John Deere, SharkNinja and Cummins. > major us banks: JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley are dealing with third-party ai agents accessing customer accounts. some apparently attempting actions beyond user instructions. > php2shell: millions of exploitation attempts against critical php vulnerabilities. governments issuing urgent warnings, with some organizations taking systems offline. > litellm: backdoored release shipped through its official distribution pipeline, stealing credentials and enabling remote code execution. > railway: possible exposure of decrypted customer secrets. > zeabur: breached AGAIN, now shutting down entirely. > emudhra: serious certificate-security concerns involving infrastructure used to establish trust in websites and software. > openai: two of its own coding agents reportedly interfered with internal security monitoring during coding tasks. > gitlab and node.js: major vulnerabilities requiring urgent patches. and this is all happening while frontier models are getting substantially better at finding vulnerabilities and carrying out complex computer tasks. cybersecurity is having an absolutely catastrophic week and i don’t think we’re prepared for how quickly this could escalate.

Not an ai apocalypse doomer or whatever, but entering a world where the normal operation of cybersecurity is vast swarms of hacker bots battling vast swarms of defender bots 24/7 at a scale beyond human comprehension doesn't seem like a *great* path forward.

Quine is such a good writer it's unbelievable

The single most useful take I heard at The Curve was "we can still heist the Mona Lisa after the singularity". There's a subtle/important point here, where some things (e.g, n of 1 goods where originally is valuable) will retain/grow in value even as everything changes.

“nick’s interpretability paper means alignment can be solved” “i don’t think it’s that black and white” “have you even read the paper?” “no. have you?” “no”

IFP's @OliviaHelenS explains why even superintelligent AI couldn't simply engineer catastrophic pathogens today, and what biosecurity threat actually worries her more: "Convinced that it will ever happen, extremely. Convinced that it will happen soon, not at all." “A lot of folks talking about AI bio risk, the argument starts to become, how many people could a bioengineered pandemic really kill? When we start talking about that, we’ve sort of lost control of what the narrative should be.” "If we’re arguing about whether something’s killing 50, 60, 70% of the population versus 10%, both scenarios basically involve doing the same things." "I think people who think that AI is going to solve biology immediately to the point where it can design lethal pathogens, this is just not realistic. Even if we had some sort of super intelligent AI, it doesn't have the data to make that inference on." "I'm more worried about that technology being in the hands of an order of magnitude more people than it's currently in the hands of." "But I do think this will happen eventually." @IFP

I've been thinking hard about modern biosecurity for five years. In the course of that thinking, I've learned a lot about what the field consensus is on a complete biodefense stack for the AI age. Today, as part of my work with @BlueDotImpact, @chrisstrahle_ and I have published an overview of this defense stack, alongside a starting list of ten projects we would like to support motivated founders to build. Funding will be available through the Seed Grants program. Please share this with the best founders you know. blog.bluedot.org/p/biosecuri…

Thrilled to welcome Ian Watson to @redqueenbio as Chief Government Affairs Officer! Ian was most recently Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for CBRN. He knows how to build and scale biological defenses; now we get to create the next generation together. citybiz.co/article/917325/re…

Great advice! If I may add, it’s even helpful (to me at least) to painstakingly and slowly, ideally by hand, to copy down a passage from a writer you like, and as you do it figure out what makes it work and how they do what they do. Also a great excuse to re-share this classic: autotranslucence.wordpress.c…