Matthew F. McKnight
@matt_f_mcknight
CEO at https://t.co/qD0K7OzNOp Building biosecurity for the bio-century I like --- https://t.co/BYgu3I16Jc...RT or Like=interesting but not necessarily agreement.
28 postsÚltimo em 17 de out, 17:48Atualiza a cada 15 min
Biosecurity global infra.
Reflection@reflection_aiBeam is now available across platforms, with open weights under the Apache 2.0 license - in collaboration with an ecosystem of 40+ partners. We're releasing: - Weights, tokenizer, and reference implementation - BF16, FP8 and NVFP4 weights and a DFlash2 drafter - The open source harness we built and trained Beam on: Mirror CLI Weights and model card on Hugging Face: t.co/tPqWpk9RXL
Silence from Russia worries Marco too. Two pretty simple scenarios: 1) Nothing bad happened and Russia is just having fun gaslighting us as we debate on X about what is happening. 2) Something bad/embarrassing (or both happened)…and is being hidden…and that is concerning. Hope it’s (1)
The Wall Street Journal@WSJExclusive: The U.S. has warned Moscow that its failure to disclose details about the death of a lab worker from a plague research center in Siberia violates international health obligations. on.wsj.com/4rWwhK8
Dear Russian Foreign Ministry - please fill in the blanks (we would like to go back to regularly scheduled doom scrolling, plz help): 1. The woman in question is confirmed to have died of a ______________ infection. 2. The genetic sequence of the bacteria / virus can be downloaded here for further review ______________ . 3. We are concerned at a ____ level on a scale of 0 - 10.
Mike Pompeo@mikepompeoThe news of a suspected "plague" outbreak from Russia should be treated with the utmost seriousness, especially considering the source. COVID showed us how the lies and obstruction of authoritarian governments seeking to cover their tracks can turn a containable outbreak into a global pandemic.
It’s been [at least] 4 days. Russia knows what it is. They are good scientists. It’s that easy. Just tell everyone. Would really help with simplifying the long threads guessing what’s going on.
Silence from Russia is what worries me the most.
Alex Washburne@DrWashburneBy now, Russia almost certainly knows the causative agent of this disease in Irkutsk. Much like China knew about SARS-CoV-2 for some time before sharing it with the world, this secrecy is consistent with an embarrassing lab leak & undermines global health security.
This is entirely true. Like so true. Why won’t they share it vocally and transparently? The world clearly cares. We’re all human, that’s the right thing to do. Thoughts: 1) Don’t put your head in the sand. There are bad actors in this world. There is right and wrong. This is wrong. 2) But world is what it is. We can’t rely on political actors / selfishness of humans to get the data we need. We need to fix our bio intel. 3) Be more concerned by silence than you might be with transparency.
Alex Washburne@DrWashburneBy now, Russia almost certainly knows the causative agent of this disease in Irkutsk. Much like China knew about SARS-CoV-2 for some time before sharing it with the world, this secrecy is consistent with an embarrassing lab leak & undermines global health security.
If accurate, very concerning. Re-upping from weekend. “We need to be monitoring every port of entry on the planet.... yesterday. If not, we’re putting our whole biosecurity bet in situations like this on: - the remoteness of this facility in an interconnected world - the competency and care of the FSB We need global collection and monitoring immediately so we can track this if (as) it starts moving out of Siberia (or every time something like this happens)”
Visegrád 24@visegrad24BREAKING: The Russians have started mandatory temperature checks of all passengers from Irkutsk landing in Moscow to scan for people potentially spreading pneumonic plague. Close the borders with Russia now! x.com/JayinKyiv/stat…
Yeah, this is the whole point about fundamentally needing to 1000x change our national posture on biointelligence collection - we need technically verified data from trusted sources - world has changed If this were a cyber event - there would be 1000 companies and govt agencies all over it - seems so obvious Wouldn’t be waiting in the FSB Doubt seeds fear and bad decisions
Alex Washburne@DrWashburneNobody has yet verified that the situation in Irkutsk is caused by the plague (Yersenia pestis). To the extent that there is a real biological incident in Irkutsk, we don’t know the agent and thus significant uncertainty about its epidemiology is warranted.
Yes
Jake Wintermute 🧬/acc@SynBio1We are all playing a game called build the future worth living in and this is the victory screen
We need to be monitoring every port of entry on the planet.... yesterday. If not, we’re putting our whole biosecurity bet in situations like this on: - the remoteness of this facility in an interconnected world - the competency and care of the FSB We need global collection and monitoring immediately so we can track this if (as) it starts moving out of Siberia (or every time something like this happens)
Annie Jacobsen@AnnieJacobsen🚨Breaking. There's been a pneumonic plague outbreak at a BSL-3 lab in Siberia, Russia.🚨 "Nearly 200 People Under Observation After Irkutsk Lab Worker Dies From Plague" - Moscow Times This is fact, and also the inciting incident in my book BIOLOGICAL WAR: A SCENARIO, which is unnerving. Will post more as I learn more, including from Russian speaking sources🧵 t.co/zd4u0iVhHK
People are stressed about AI creating biorisk. The reality is that we've already been on an exponential curve in bioengineering, separate even from the AI acceleration of our read/write/programming capabilities. We're just definitionally unprepared for what specifically will happen in the next twenty-five years. That's the foundational change (yes impacted by AI capes) That means we need to build systems that are fundamentally adaptable, responsive, and global. No predictions will work.
Huge belated congrats to @hannu and the team at Red Queen Bio! Big fan of the work they're doing and appreciate the shout-out from WSJ. It's beginning to dawn on everyone that it's /on us/ to rapidly build humanity's countermeasures and early warning systems. Bio won't slow down and we are way behind.
The Wall Street Journal@WSJAn AI biosecurity startup called Red Queen Bio is rushing to design antibodies that can be manufactured to protect against a range of potential pathogens, including the seemingly sci-fi threat of an AI-designed virus. on.wsj.com/4hpBOUn
Two thoughts from @ForeignPolicy's Health Forum during UNGA in NYC last week: 1. The actual shift for biology and biothreats was the rise of bioengineering: cheap DNA reading & writing -> people are going to grow, program, hack. That's the big change - not AI. AI will 100% make this faster, but it's a different set of cost curves/scaling laws. 2. It's going to take a lot more than AI tools to get us to a good place on safety / threat detection. Biology is physical; it's not just bits - it's in the air, it's fluids, it's everywhere we go. Early warning will take real tech, real infrastructure, and it needs to be deployed worldwide. Huge thanks to Jane Halton (Board Chair @ CEPI) + Dr. Robert Kristovich (who directs the Joint Science and Technology Office DTRA) for the discussion and of course Mary Louise Kelly (whose voice you know from All Things Considered on NPR) for moderating, and the Foreign Policy team for hosting!
Congrats to @jakeadler and team! - Biosecurity will take all of the ingenuity our society has to offer - super excited that Jake and team are taking this on, and can’t wait to see how this grows
Jake Adler@jakeadler1/ Biological threats can bring a country to a halt without a single shot being fired. Yet much of our biodefense infrastructure has barely changed in decades, even as America’s institutions produce extraordinary scientific breakthroughs.
@ATinyGreenCell @wait_sasha I’m not even talking about AI alone, agree with @srikosuri on that for sure
@ATinyGreenCell @wait_sasha Are we moving faster or slower technologically, politically, economically than that period of time?
(1/2) re: experts disagreeing about Anthropic report... Of course they do... We are on an exponential curve of technical change in both bioengineering and AI - accurate predictions of what will be done are impossible Please just read @waitbutwhy from 2015 t.co/HDegkQfZ01
(2/2) All we know is that bioengineering will get weaponized - if not, would be first time in human history a new technology in wasn't purposefully used in human conflict. Hammers, chem, physics, computers - all used. Can’t predict how. Can debate on X. But can't predict. Also can't stop with controls alone (too distributed). Thus, must build adaptable, physical world technical infrastructure to identify, characterize, and enable rapid defense to whatever shows up. Like we do in cyber, land, air, space, sea domains.
Fun chat - for the record there was no part of me that was a Palantir exec haha - intern sounds better - but I’ll take it @ssankar 😂 x.com/exigerllc/stat…
Feel this 🤣 x.com/macjshiggins/s…
(1/2) I signed, this is important work - but we need to be really careful to not get distracted from the bigger problem of rapidly decentralizing capabilities to create / deploy biothreats. Detection, identification, response - globally and persistent/pervasive - should be the x.com/alecstapp/stat…
(2/2) e.g. - The "finger in the dike" refers to the classic legend of the "Little Dutch Boy" who selflessly plugs a small leak in a dam with his finger, holding back the sea to save his town from a devastating flood. Small, temporary stopgap to a major, escalating problem.
So what innovations should we expect adversaries to use next? Because this isn’t the end of history… x.com/BohuslavskaKat…
Statistics problem - more labs, more research, more risk of all types (this insider stuff / mistakes is scariest imo) Need to build next generation biosecurity infrastructure x.com/Nature/status/…
What a name... My two cents is that we should probably also monitor biological threat activity on the actual EARTH as persistently and pervasively as this (risky labs, airports/airplanes, hospitals, farms) - like, after all, has anyone read Andromeda Strain?? (spoiler: it's not x.com/SpaceNews_Inc/…
Hey all - Post closing our raise last week, I'm hiring a senior engineering leader for @Perimeter (that can mean a lot of things re: role/title depending on person) Super cool chance to build defense tech in bio - biosecurity infrastructure against biothreats. Global programs.
