Tencent’s chief AI scientist has warned that AI models will soon be able to cause harm in biology, as they already can in cybersecurity. Yao Shunyu spoke at a science event in Hong Kong on Saturday, the South China Morning Post reported.
“The cyber abilities of [AI] models and soon [the] bio ability of models will reach a threshold where it’s actually possible to do harm,” Yao said, according to the SCMP.
He said Chinese companies that release open models, which anyone can download and change, need to take safety very seriously. He also warned that biology risks may be harder to manage than cyber risks.
Yao, 29, joined Tencent last year after a year at OpenAI. He spoke days after Tencent launched Hy4, its new flagship model, on 4 November.
In its launch announcement, Tencent said it left material on exploiting software flaws out of Hy4’s training data. The model was instead trained on defensive security data, the company said.
Tencent also said that Hy4 has strong basic knowledge of biology, but is weaker than leading models at designing experiments. It said it based this on internal expert reviews. TNW has not tested the model.
The company plans to release Hy4’s weights and a report on its safety testing in the coming days, Reuters reported. Hy4 ranks as the second-best Chinese model, according to benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis, the SCMP said.
Yao said US firms such as Anthropic make a strong case for keeping top models closed. However, he argued that a mix of open and closed models may work best, because open models can also help defenders.
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