Tencent's chief AI scientist, Yao Shunyu, warned that AI models will soon be able to cause harm in biology, just as they already can in cybersecurity. He said Chinese companies releasing open models need to take safety seriously, and that biology risks may be harder to manage than cyber risks. He spoke at a Hong Kong event.

Tencent's chief AI scientist has warned that artificial intelligence models will soon be able to cause harm in biology, the same way they already can in cybersecurity.

Why does Tencent's AI chief warn about biology risks?

Yao Shunyu made the remarks 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.

Why do open AI models need extra safety care?

Yao 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 Nov. 4.

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 Hy4 has strong basic knowledge of biology but is weaker than leading models at designing experiments. The company based that assessment on internal expert reviews. The Next Web, which first reported on the launch, said it has not tested the model itself.

The company plans to release Hy4's weights and a report on its safety testing in the coming days, Reuters reported. According to benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis, Hy4 ranks as the second-best Chinese model, the SCMP said.

Are open AI models riskier than closed ones?

Yao acknowledged that U.S. firms such as Anthropic make a strong case for keeping their top models closed. He argued, however, that a mix of open and closed models may work best, because open models can also help defenders.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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