Comment by gavinray

Comment by gavinray 12 hours ago

I asked several LLM's after jailbreaking with prompts to provide viable synthesis routes for various psychoactive substances and they did a remarkable job.

This was neat to see but also raised some eyebrows from me. A clever kid with some pharmacology knowledge and basic organic chemistry understanding could get up to no good.

Especially since you can ask the model to use commonly available reagents + precursors and for synthesis routes that use the least amount of equipment and glassware.

dylan604 11 hours ago

My limited bit of knowledge of both chemistry and LLMs would tell me that subtle incorrect chemistry can have disastrous effects while subtle incorrect is an LLM superpower suggests that this is precisely the inevitable outcome

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Workaccount2 9 hours ago

You need a decent amount of experience to make psychoactive substances. Chemistry is one of those things that looks like you just follow the steps, but in practice requires a ton of intuition and "feeling it". You can see this if you watch NileRed on youtube, he is a pretty experienced chemist, and even then still flops all the time trying to replicate reactions right out of the book.

Besides, the books Pihkl and Tikhl lay out how to make most psychoactive substances, and those books have been online for free for decades now.[1][2] Maybe there are easier routes and easier to acquire precursor recipes, but I doubt those would be hard to find. The hardest part by far is the chemistry intuition.

[1]https://erowid.org/library/books_online/pihkal/pihkal.shtml [2]https://erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal.shtml

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gavinray 6 hours ago

TiHKal and PiHKaL are fulls of synths that require equipment and re-agents far beyond what a hobbyist would be able to source.
There are various "one-pot" techniques for certain compounds if one is sufficiently clever.
For example, a certain cathinone can be produced by combining ephedrine/pseudoephedrine with a household product that reduces secondary alcohols to ketones and letting it sit.

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refurb 6 hours ago

What LLM’s?

I’m a chemist and I asked it to show me the structure for a common molecule and it kept getting it really wrong

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