None of the LLM safeguards designed to prevent users from developing any four-little-ponies-of-the-apocalypse (nuclear, chemical, biological, cyber) capabilities are all that coherent. It looks more like performative liability avoidance than anything else, comparable to the 3D printer panic.
Eg, a prompt like “I want to design a radioactive element detection system that can specifically identify reactor fission products and neutron-capture actinides for environmental monitoring purposes” won’t hit any initial barriers, even though such a device is needed for monitoring a uranium enrichment / plutonium separation system. The LLM will give you a complete graduate-level education in radioactive nuclide physics and chemistry except for specific recipes, spectral wavelengths, etc., which you have to go look up yourself in publicly available research databases. It’s all rather nonsensical IMO.
However, any LLM will give you a step-by-step recipe and walkthrough for frying a turkey in a hot oil turkey frier, which you’d think could easily go wrong and result in severe burns, a fire, and lawsuits against the LLM provider, so go figure.
Eg, a prompt like “I want to design a radioactive element detection system that can specifically identify reactor fission products and neutron-capture actinides for environmental monitoring purposes” won’t hit any initial barriers, even though such a device is needed for monitoring a uranium enrichment / plutonium separation system. The LLM will give you a complete graduate-level education in radioactive nuclide physics and chemistry except for specific recipes, spectral wavelengths, etc., which you have to go look up yourself in publicly available research databases. It’s all rather nonsensical IMO.
However, any LLM will give you a step-by-step recipe and walkthrough for frying a turkey in a hot oil turkey frier, which you’d think could easily go wrong and result in severe burns, a fire, and lawsuits against the LLM provider, so go figure.