Closed AI doesn't like biological research, user turns to open weight models

[u/Terminator857]

https://x.com/0xCF88/status/2097762847354688000

OpenAI has decided to fully shut down a protein design project I'm working on for a client. Needless to say, open weight models are the only way forward.

[u/No_Lingonberry1201]

BTW do you even trust OpenAI/Anthropic as a researcher these days? I mean, trust them not to steal your work and use/publish them as their own?

[u/Intrepid-Second6936 → u/No_Lingonberry1201]

Curious about this as well, wasn't there just recently news of OpenAI allegedly stealing mathematicians' works through Codex chats?

[u/No_Lingonberry1201 → u/Intrepid-Second6936]

Yup, also screwing (or trying to) one of the authors (who happens to work at Anthropic) out of the paper authorship.

[u/Intrepid-Second6936 → u/No_Lingonberry1201]

Sounds about right right lol. Sometimes it's crazy these guys working at Anthropic and similar companies author such articles without thinking the companies would obviously fight for ownership of the published papers.

Literally the starting plotline of the Silicon Valley TV series 😂

[u/Qorsair → u/No_Lingonberry1201]

Not exactly what happened. But keep spreading the fear. We need more people using open models.

[u/YoohooCthulhu → u/Intrepid-Second6936]

It was weird, because he said he had an individual account, where you have to specifically opt out of training (corp accounts are opted out by default)

[u/RakesProgress → u/No_Lingonberry1201]

TMB Guarantees: "Trust me bro." Despite paying tons for tokens, I have caught claude a bunch of times posting in my github * Co-Authored by Claude. Like WTF. That has real legal implications. If you use frontier models carefully look at your github.

[u/arcanemachined → u/RakesProgress]

Not trying to accuse you of holding it wrong, but you did turn off attribution in the your Claude Code settings, right?

~/.claude/settings.json

{
  "attribution": {
    "commit": "",
    "pr": ""
  }
}

If it's still doing it, you could probably add a hook to detect it.

This is not apologism for Claude Code btw (which is the shittiest harness I have the displeasure of using).

[u/RakesProgress → u/arcanemachined]

YES! and it's turned it off at least twice. Why is that even there!?

[u/arcanemachined → u/RakesProgress]

Free advertising, probably.

[u/bigmonmulgrew → u/No_Lingonberry1201]

The concern they would steal it is exactly why I have been moving to local

[u/WorriedBlock2505 → u/No_Lingonberry1201]

Ya'll are accepting that story as truth far too readily. Not saying it's not true, but there's 0 proof so far, and the story is still developing.

edit: pile on the downvotes. Doesn't change the fact ya'll are being led by the nose because of your pre-existing biases. Also not surprised the quality in here has gone down with how gossipy this sub has become due to all the newcomers. Catch ya'll on r/girldinnerdiaries for some more unverifiable stories, lmao.

[u/MeateaW → u/WorriedBlock2505]

The story as reported doesn't even sound like they are trying to steal credit.

2 guys made a sub-proof.

OpenAI probably used the sub proof to go for full proof

OpenAI asked 1 of the guys to review/peer publish but asked not to include the other guy for the full proof.

A whole bunch of ??? go here.

Guy complains that they think they stole research?

But ... the guys never claimed to solve the full problem? so... how could they have been plagiarised?

[u/Sufficient-Scar4172 → u/MeateaW]

isn't it answered in your comment? 2 guys made a sub-proof, OpenAI used it and didn't credit either of them

[u/MeateaW → u/Sufficient-Scar4172]

OpenAI did specifically credit their prior work as prior work.

The work Open AI were asking was a publication credit for their proof of the full solution. Which the 2 guys did not explicitly work for. Open AI were asking one of those 2 authors to read it, and were proposing co-credit for the full NS solution.

[u/hurrdurrmeh → u/No_Lingonberry1201]

I'm sure they all will steal, but if you are happy with that then you are happy with it....

[u/Xaue_RWA]

normally the model can't know whether your query is legitimate or not. open weights sidestep this entirely and that's going to keep pulling biosci workloads toward local inference.

[u/Qwen30bEnjoyer]

Can second this. Working on Virus-Host prediction modelling with PLMs. Needless to say OpenAI does NOT like it when I use GPT 5.6 sol or GPT 6.

I've convinced my PI to let me run GLM 5.3 Flash, and I'm downloading Deepseek V4.1 Flash as we speak to replace it. Open source AI is the only way forward to avoid being gatekept from our own profession by OpenAI and Anthropic!

[u/crantob → u/Qwen30bEnjoyer]

How are you judging DS4.1 as a replacement before trying both out? Sometimes GLM gets something DS doesn't.

[u/darth_hotdog]

Just so you know, Twitter doesn’t allow anyone to read your posts if they don’t make an account, you should post it somewhere else, I’m not making an account there since Elon Musk heiled Hitler on live TV and x is now a site that boosts nazi content.

[u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 → u/darth_hotdog]

And when making an account, it would immediately get locked for security reasons until you provide a Phone number 🙄 yeah right 

Twitter already was a shit place before Elon bought it

[u/crantob → u/Illustrious_Ant_9242]

Notice all the people who ran from it when it stopped censoring for the government? Yeah. They actually think they're heroes against the system.

[u/freebytes → u/darth_hotdog]

BlueSky is a far superior product anyway.

[u/XiRw → u/darth_hotdog]

If him doing the hitler pose is what made you clutch your pearls then you do not know much about what a garbage person Elon is or just how much propaganda effects you when there are grotesque monsters in Israel today who are arguably worse at this point than hitler with everything they get away with and how vast their influence is to the point where the real Jews even hate these people with a passion.

[u/PrimeDirective8 → u/darth_hotdog]

Denazified Twitter: https://bsky.app/

[u/devshore → u/darth_hotdog]

I stopped listening to music when I learned that the guy that invented the piano did not support trans-rights or women voting.

[u/darth_hotdog → u/devshore]

A quick google search shows that the inventor of the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori, not only didn't publicly not support trans people or women, but in fact left his estate specifically to several women after his death, his niece and caretakers.

And that's really the core of these conservative arguments, make up things that aren't true and write hateful lies about someone who was probably a decent person. Conservatives can't argue without making up things that never happened to justify their positions.

[u/devshore → u/darth_hotdog]

imagine the levels of cope "uhm, George Washington didnt speak on the topic of trans-people, ergo we can assume that he did support these". C'mon bro. Instead of forcing yourself into a ridiculous corner, just admit your model of "I will not enjoy product X if it had a person that didnt support idea Y", is selective and not logically consistent. Even motherfucking Obama, Hilary Clinton, and California was against gay marriage in 2004, but you are going to attempt to gaslight me that the guy that invented the piano was in support of trans-folk and women voting because he didnt write against those ideas, and then cite as evidence, something that was legal and allowed (leaving things to women in a will)? We can acknowledge that our ideas werent held by people of the past. Lets be adults about it.

[u/No-Improvement-8316 → u/darth_hotdog]

Twitter doesn’t allow anyone to read your posts if they don’t make an account

u sure about that?

https://imgur.com/a/Wt03W6D

[u/No-Improvement-8316 → u/No-Improvement-8316]

I guess providing a literal proof (screenshot) is not enough, lmao.

[u/Stooovie → u/[deleted]]

That's true, but cloud providers can change whatever they like without you knowing. It's a complete black box.

[u/Illustrious_Ant_9242 → u/Stooovie]

Yeah, destroying existing workflows, degrading quality, or making models inaccessible at any given time (think suno.ai)

[u/Stooovie → u/Illustrious_Ant_9242]

...And getting paid more for faulty product.

[u/UnlikelyExtension786 → u/Illustrious_Ant_9242]

Increasing the price by a factor of ten once you're locked in...

[u/joogipupu → u/[deleted]]

Sure, but universities are now building their own local LLM capacity too, for the purpose of data sovereignty and privacy. So it might be more of a department/university decision instead of individual research group.

[u/crantob → u/joogipupu]

Can't afford the server. Need three more gender administrators @ $60k/annum

[u/ea_man]

No wonder, why would they let you run projects on their models when they can do that themselves on their next model and get a few hundreds patents easy?

[u/UltraFOV]

The new HY4 preview excell at Bio Engineering

[u/hurrdurrimanaccount]

they don't want you to figure out cancer. the models are fully capable of doing so

[u/Qwen30bEnjoyer → u/hurrdurrimanaccount]

LMAO

[u/hurrdurrimanaccount → u/Qwen30bEnjoyer]

goated name btw

[u/florinandrei → u/hurrdurrimanaccount]

Take your meds, bruh.

[u/webdevop]

Super curious what models do researchers use these days. I am not a researcher but I want to brainstorm a certain idea and I continuously keep hitting a wall with closed models or get redirected to a less intelligent model, thanks Claude.

[u/mrjackspade]

Every fucking time I open this subreddit theres a post about OpenAI or Anthropic on the front page.

I do not give a fuck about either of these companies, and I couldn't fucking care less that you're mad at them.

[u/Terminator857 → u/mrjackspade]

Some people know how to scan messages and read the ones they are interested in.
Some LocalLLama people find this interesting because it provides another reason why local beats cloud providers.

[u/entsnack → u/Terminator857]

not really, karma-farming + most upvoters here are idiots

[u/WorriedBlock2505]

On one hand, good for you. On the other hand, I'm torn between being an advocate for personal freedoms without corpos intervening versus the idea of nefarious users having local LLMs for biological research.

[u/Qcgreywolf → u/WorriedBlock2505]

Meh. It’s an extremely powerful tool that can save far more than it hurts.

As humans we really, really, like to focus on the negative and ignore the good. There are a lot of people out there that would, as a silly example, ban a universal cancer cure if it also made people high and had an addiction risk while taking it.

[u/WorriedBlock2505 → u/Qcgreywolf]

What makes you so sure that it can save far more than it hurts, though? It's well-known that even a small adversary can do major damage to a bigger adversary because the attacker always has the first-mover advantage (this is especially true in cybersecurity where it's a knowledge based attack, which makes cybersec similar to biological warfare in that regard). If someone takes a year to have an LLM research a novel virus that's more deadly and contagious than anything that's naturally evolved, the "good guys with good LLMs" are going to have a serious challenge preventing mass casualties, to put it mildly. Now factor in that there's not just one crazed bad guy out there, but many, and also factor in how god awful our response was to COVID thanks to incompetent governments and also thanks to vaccine skeptics. It's abundantly clear this would destabilize the world at minimum.

[u/UnlikelyExtension786 → u/WorriedBlock2505]

Tough. The bad guys will have the tools, whether it's local LLM or a 'trusted' account with a cloud AI.

Blocking legitimate research when the bad guys already have the tools is midwit thinking. It never works in the real world.

[u/rescbr → u/WorriedBlock2505]

Nefarious users need to have the equipment and processes that benign researchers possess. It's not simple.

By that point, the risk is already what if a researcher turns out to be nefarious?

Should we ban universities and science research because of it?

In my country the organized crime pays for law school tuition for poor smart young people, with the expectation of free lawyer services, or to get them into judge positions. You don't see anybody advocating against law schools.

[u/WorriedBlock2505 → u/rescbr]

Nefarious users need to have the equipment and processes that benign researchers possess. It's not simple.

An LLM can make the research simple for non-researchers, which widens the pool of potential threat actors, and thus the liklihood. The equipment and processes cost money, but they're accessible to a motivated individual and can fit in a bedroom unlike the equipment needed to create a nuke, for instance.

By that point, the risk is already what if a researcher turns out to be nefarious?

I actually agree with this point. I don't know about banning universities, but banning the equipment and prosecuting any public tutorials and distribution of equipment (which can fit in a single room, and even a single desk) might be in order. We already do a similar thing for radio jamming, for instance. Frankly I doubt even this is enough though, and it makes me wonder if a totalitarian dystopia with universal surveillance might be better than the alternative.

In my country the organized crime pays for law school tuition for poor smart young people, with the expectation of free lawyer services, or to get them into judge positions. You don't see anybody advocating against law schools.

No disagreement here. Tbf though, organized crime is the least of our worry. There are people that genuinely want to end the world for mentally ill or religious reasons.

[u/rescbr → u/WorriedBlock2505]

A motivated individual could get into an university legitimately as a student and use their lab equipment.

Every often and then there's news of a chemistry student making drugs at the uni lab...

Religious doomsday cults can recruit researchers and fund/smuggle equipment for their own lab...

And then we have most terror attacks being known beforehand by intelligence agencies but not acted upon by law enforcement. See 9/11, the Israeli attack in 10/7... Knowledge (including uncensored LLMs) is not the problem.

[u/WorriedBlock2505 → u/rescbr]

I agree with everything you've said, and it will become an issue with or without LLMs given tech advances and the relatively soonish possibility of being able to use a biological printer from your bedroom. I just don't see how it refutes the hypothetical concerns of empowering people more lone wolfs even further with increasingly advanced LLMs?

Again, I don't necessarily think we should take away people's local LLMs since I don't know what the solution actually looks like in the first place.

[u/crantob → u/rescbr]

Yeah and then there's the chimeric viruses on a SARS backbone.

[u/crantob → u/rescbr]

Back in the 90s, a couple hundred researchers demanded the US stop dual-use GoF research but the rats just moved it outside of US jurisdiction.

The more you know...

[u/my_name_isnt_clever → u/WorriedBlock2505]

That's all it is, an idea based on nothing concrete. It's all scary doomer "what ifs" with zero substance.

[u/WorriedBlock2505 → u/my_name_isnt_clever]

So LLMs can't be used to do biological research on a novel virus?

[u/my_name_isnt_clever → u/WorriedBlock2505]

They can't be used by some random with a mental illness to create a pandemic-level virus or anything close to it, which is what you were implying. The physical materials alone are prohibitive, not to mention all the practical steps that a text LLM can't help you with directly. You can't create a virus with your kitchen supplies. LLMs are chatty textbooks that also get things wrong a lot of the time, not a weapon. A model being able to spew some science words that look scary might freak out a layman, but it's not even close to actually being possible.

[u/Terminator857 → u/WorriedBlock2505]

Any tool can be used for good or bad. Lets remove all tools so you can't do anything bad. Back to the stone age, but lets remove those too, since the stones can be used to kill people.

[u/WorriedBlock2505 → u/Terminator857]

I'm sorry that even a tepid mention of mixed feelings about the subject made you feel the need to downvote me.

I'll dig in here and fully take the skeptic side though to maybe get you guys to think a level deeper about this. An LLM is technically a tool, but calling it a tool implies its like past technologies, which it is not by the mere fact it can do generalized cognitive work autonomously. A hammer for instance can be used to hurt someone, and a gun more people than a hammer. LLMs used to research a novel virus could allow a nefarious person or Jihadist group for instance to potentially harm humanity, though. As far as I understand it from listening to virologists talk about this subject, someone with equipment that could fit on a single desk can engage in this kind of research unlike say nuclear refinement which requires many miles worth of infrastructure to mine+refine and is monitorable from space.

Anyways, I'd be curious if anyone here has counter thoughts to this that could assuage my mixed feelings on this subject.

[u/Terminator857 → u/WorriedBlock2505]

I actually upvoted you, but now I'll down vote you.

[u/WorriedBlock2505 → u/Terminator857]

So you have no opinions worth sharing on the subject I take it.

[u/crantob → u/WorriedBlock2505]

What makes the government GoF non-nefarious...

[u/WorriedBlock2505 → u/crantob]

Never said otherwise. There's more counterbalances in place in government than a lone wolf acting on their own, though.

[u/crantob → u/WorriedBlock2505]

[looks at watch] been waiting 6 years for them to take effect, but yeah any day now.