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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.…