The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master.
So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is going to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence.
Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.
Synthetic biology is one of those things.
LLMs are clearly going to solve a part that, 10 years ago, one would've assumed would be one of the highest and last barriers to go down.
Without LLMs, a reasonable security apparatus would be:
Step 1. Disallow dissemination and synthesis of known pathogens
Step 2. Watch closely anyone with the decades of training required to come up with their own pathogen
No.
No, the barriers I'm talking about aren't coming down. Not quickly anyway.
No, nobody assumed this was the "highest and last barrier". That's the point you keep missing.
LLMs are not "solving" the rate-limiting step here. It only looks that way if you don't know what's involved.
“No no some other step is hard. I won’t say what it is. No it’s not getting easier, miraculously, but I can’t say what it is.”