Dean Ball: evaluation

Transcript context

…And now you have decided that as great as that was, as great as I assume it was for you, you're gonna take this job. So tell me how you have gone through the process of deciding that this is what you wanna do next, and then obviously we'll talk about the role and the mission that you're gonna have as you start up. Yeah. So yeah, it's, it has been a, the ch- time period since I left government, it's been I guess about 10 months. It has been a really wild time, and, uh, tremendous, I feel tremendously lucky. Um, I've been able to be in quite a lot of interesting rooms and meet a lot of really interesting people, and yeah, I've had a lot of great opportunities. It's been, it's been straining. It's been tough. It's been like l- the workload has not really changed from the White House. It has not been like the sort of luxurious think tank life that some people imagine. It's been quite a lot of work. I think the most important thing is that I, a lot of my work centers on the Frontier Lab itself as a kind of institution, a new center of political and economic power. I think of it almost as like the emergence of banks, like when merchant banks first started to become... Now, banks have existed in various forms for a long time, but like Italian city state finance, right? Or like the emergence of the financial sector, one of my favorite er- periods of history to study. Is the emergence of the financial sector, the modern sort of, what we would- a recognizably modern financial sector in the Dutch Republic and in, in Britain. Um, and it feels like this kind of a moment where something like that is, is being created. And I think there's two aspects of this. One is that institution and the way that it relates to the government and the broader society is really important. Number two, much... If you go back and look at the financial services sector in the early Dutch Republic or in England, the... We were talking about proto-modern states at that time. We're not talking about states that are capable of... There was no SEC, right? Securities and Exchange Commission. There was no Bank of England. These things don't quite exist. But if you're gonna be, like, engaging in options trading, you're gonna be trading financial derivatives, you do actually need there to be common rules to define that. Common governance. Because otherwise you can't engage in those transactions with trust. And I think that similarly, there's gonna be a need for governance in this field. The government itself simply will not have the capacity or expertise to catch up on. And practically speaking, this is gonna have to happen within the companies themselves, and then also within private vi- the private governance stuff that we already talked about. There's gonna have to be a lot of private development of governance norms and, and standards in this field. And then third is this notion, a advanced AI itself will be an instrument for sh- for doing statecraft, like doing like statecraft and governance and regulation and all these kinds of things, um, in the same way that like financial services is, right? We use financial services as an, as a way of achieving policy objectives that have, on paper, nothing to do with banking. We do that all the time. the same way that like financial services is, right? We use financial services as an, as a way of achieving policy objectives that have, on paper, nothing to do with banking. We do that all the time. And, and it's just because money is so fundamental to doing anything. And I think that AI will be fundamental to doing anything in the future, too. So all three of these things really interest me. Um, and the struggle that I keep having is that it is just practically speaking, I've sat in the White House, and the White House didn't feel like an especially fruitful place to think about these things. And then I sat outside the White House with what I would say is, in the end, probably pretty good access to people and information and pretty good network of people that I could draw on. Um, and I spent a lot of time, I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking and stuff like this, but didn't ult- I just ultimately don't feel like I can get beyond these abstract intuitions without actually being inside the lab itself. With- without actually doing some of this work myself. Um, and that is the central reason that I started thinking about going into a lab. And then also, of course, there's policy is just becoming more and more important, and it feels like we might actually be doing some real AI, set the foundation of AI policy in the next 18 to 24 months here. It seems plausible. Okay. That's gonna be really important, too. Um, and so I had been thinking about it, and then... But not really acting on it 'cause I'm like, "I'm writing this book. I'm doing all these things. I don't really have time to, like..." And then as a happy coincidence, OpenAI approached me, uh, a little while ago and asked me if I might be interested in doing something like this, and that's how, that's how we got here.…

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