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Turns out Altman is a lab-leak covid truther, calls virus 'synthetic' according to Spectator piece on AI risk. (archive.is)

submitted 1 year ago by Architeuthis@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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.’

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[–] NounsAndWords@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (10 children)

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).

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 1 year ago

Lucky for you, there's a discussion about that on this very instance:

https://awful.systems/post/565815?scrollToComments=true

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[–] AMillionNames@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

There's a good possibility that it was due to a lab leak, but it doesn't necessarily have to be synthetic. This was a lab taking too many liberties handling a virus that was already at risk of making the jump to humans, is it "lab-leak covid truther" to claim the inevitable under those circumstances would happen?

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