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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 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (12 children)

There is an institute of virology in Wuhan, but it is most likely that Covid-19 spread naturally from bats to humans.

Bat coronaviruses are common in the South China - Thailand - Myanmar region, and viruses jump host species all the time.
Labs that handle human pathogens are maintained under very high security. The one in Wuhan is BSL4, the highest security rating, and had prior experience handling coronaviruses. Also, the viruses themselves would be marked with radioactive isotopes. Even if they somehow got out of the building, it would be possible to find and quarantine all those exposed to it.
If it was released on purpose, then we can narrow the list of suspects down to the countries that can reliably make bioweapons and antidotes with close to 100% certainty. That's the US, China and maybe Russia. The US and Russia were among the worst affected, and China wouldn't have released the virus in China.

So the most likely explanation is that it is a bat virus that jumped hosts.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

the viruses themselves would be marked with radioactive isotopes.

Is that true? Once the virus replicated in a cell, the new copies wouldn't be tagged, right?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

The new ones wouldn't. But the original radioactive atoms would still be in your body, and they can be detected (within a reasonable amount of time).

Edit: But if the new viruses infect another person, they wouldn't have the radioactivity. So usually, in case of a leak, the plan would be to quarantine anyone exposed to the viruses (as detected by radioactivity) and anyone who has been with them that day.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

@emergencyfood @Evinceo Naw. People have some radioactive atoms in their bodies all the time. But the viruses are marked in another way: they have particular genetic sequences. And with the march of technology the Wuhan Institute of Virology would have sequenced the viruses they were studying and been able to compare the sequences on file with the Covid-19 pathogen.

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