AI capability gains and the timing of biological-risk warnings

One post questions why AI-related biological-risk warnings are surfacing now, arguing that the capability gains were foreseeable when OpenAI released o1. The author says reinforcement learning and models “thinking” before answering enable rapid progress on tasks where iteration is cheap and correct answers are easy to verify. But they argue that biological threat pathways have not changed and call for stronger biodefense regardless of AI, noting that COVID-19 preceded ChatGPT.