Dean Ball: prediction

Transcript context

…So that particular development doesn't surprise me that much because the China's system is very... It, and it's actually, the realistically, we are becoming more like China, um, in this regard. But one thing about China is that when China announces a new policy, it's like you need considerable expertise, and there are people inside the US government who specialize in this, and they do not share their opinions publicly. But it's, it's actually very hard to get good analysis on things like this in the public discourse. It's one of the things I miss about government. But like what the policy says, and then there's what they're actually going to do, which are importantly different things. So the policy, I think it's a matter of national pride for China that we are building our own AI chip ecosystem, and we don't need the Americans anymore. And they, I think they like sending that message to the world. I think they like sending that message to their own people, and there's some aspect of that. Then there is-- But then there's what actually happens because while that's going on, China's system has lobbying too, and I guarantee you that DeepSeek and Alibaba and Zifu and all these other people, I guarantee you that they're like begging the Chin- they're begging Beijing for access to American chips. And so the policy planners in Beijing are factoring that in, and probably there's some amount that's being sold. I think the, I think we now know that there are some chips being sold. But yeah, no, they're gonna keep it, they're gonna restrict it, and that might be a big own goal on their part. We'll, I guess we'll see. But, but yeah, no. I think in terms of US-China, nothing has especially surprised me. I guess I would say I anticipated that by now the, in terms of China, I anticipated that by now the Chinese state would have woken up to the catastrophic risk issues, and that they would have pushed, they would've started pushing back on the open source strategy. Um, I called it for-- I said that by Q1 of this year, in, in 2025, I predicted that by the end of Q1 of 2026, DeepSeek's top model would not be open source, and that prediction was wrong. Um, I still think it's gonna happen at some point, but we're not there yet. And the Chinese state seems more concerned about labor issues than they seem concerned about catastrophic risk. So they, they're like less cat risk pilled than I would've guessed if you had asked me a year ago. On the technical side, nothing has really surprised me. I, one of my hobbies is I pay attention to these weird subgroups of very normal people who use coding agents. So there's this community of homeschooling moms of, who love Claude Code and OpenClaude stuff, and they're like using it to do all kind- It's, I love that. I wouldn't really have guessed the coding agents becoming so popular. of homeschooling moms of, who love Claude Code and OpenClaude stuff, and they're like using it to do all kind- It's, I love that. I wouldn't really have guessed the coding agents becoming so popular. And then the only other, on the technical thing, the only other thing that really surprised me, I did not expect the world sim stuff in the, on the physical world, the sort of, the models where you can simulate a 3D interactive environment, basically like creating a first-person open world video game, but for arbitrary settings in the real world. I did not anticipate that, that... I, 'cause the way those models worked for a really long time was they were very dreamlike, where it could create the world, but it was like the neural network is creating it in real time. And so if you turn around and look at something, and then turn away, and then you go back and look at that thing again, it's totally different, right? It, it doesn't have, it doesn't have permanence. Um, and then like one day it just worked. It's just, oh, wow, we just have permanence now, and it just works robustly. That substantially increased my timelines for robotics, um, working because it's very clear that you, you'll be able to make synthetic data pipelines. You'll be able to use human data as baseline. You make people wear an Apple Vision Pro, use that as the baseline. You can bootstrap there to synthetic data in all sorts of world sim settings, and then probably just sprinkle on a little bit of data with really high fidelity, like people wearing gloves with s- electrodes in them to sense muscle movements and whatnot. And it's very clear that, okay, like dexterous manipulation. The second I saw the world sim, it was a Google, it was a DeepMind model, like last summer. And the second I saw that, I was like, "Okay, dexterous manipulation in robots is gonna be solved in eight months." That was-- And that caused me to change my research agenda a little bit after I left government and accelerate some of the work that I was thinking about for robotics. Yeah. It's all happening.…

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