Dean Ball: preference

Transcript context

…You were also... I mean, you were extremely critical of that whole situation. I think you were less critical, but still somewhat critical, of the recent EO and the move, as I understand it, to take certain AI testing characterization responsibilities away from Casey, which I think now has kind of an uncertain future. I don't know what you think its future will be. And move those responsibilities to the NSA, where they may or may not already be classified information. What's going on there? Like, why do, why are we taking things away? Is this as simple as it was, like, a Biden project, and so we don't like it? Or is there more going on there that, than that meets the eye? And why are you concerned about the sort of testing models you don't know exist, you know, against standards that can't be disclosed? Like, how do you think that turns into a problem for the public? Yeah. So the reason I'm cr- like, I'm critical of the administration here in terms of like where they're going. I was critical of the cyber executive order when it was signed, um, because I anticipated exactly this, where, you know, let me just, to level set for the, for your listeners for just a moment, what does the cyber executive order do? One part of it is we're gonna create a variety of procedures by which we're gonna patch vulnerabilities in critical software systems. Great. Okay, thumbs up. I don't think anyone can object to that. I think we can argue about how, how useful those programs are gonna be and, like, how good the implementation will be, but we'll see. So that's one thing. Second thing is, um, it created a voluntary pre-deployment program, a testing program 30 days before release, whose details were to be classified, primarily classified, and primarily run by the intelligence community. And within that, probably practically speaking, the NSA is the primary, since the NSA is the highest in terms of cyber, um, ex- expertise. And they really are quite excellent, by the way. Like, I think the reason my... I think this is setting up a potentially very bad future where access to frontier models is gated. Um, it's all kept secret, and the public doesn't really know what's happening at the frontier. The government is making a bunch of decisions that maybe the public doesn't even know, whether or not to restrict certain capabilities, about what to do with those capabilities. And it feels to me like if you believe that what's happening right now is one of the most important things ever to happen in the history of technology, that not only does j- I think just intrinsically as an American, my intuit- my gut, a strong gut instinct is the public has a right to know about what's going on. But number two, I actually just think that it's not some trade-off. It's a better world where the public knows. It's a better world where the public knows, and to the extent possible, it's a better world where the public can access frontier capabilities. First of all, I think government monopolization of frontier AI is potentially how we get very scary outcomes from a civil liberties perspective. Um, and, and that's not, by the way, that is a criticism I would make regardless of who the president was. If I didn't know who the president was, if you j- didn't know the party, didn't know the name, if, if you erased that information from my brain and, but I had everything else in my brain and you told me about this, I would say I'm concerned about that. That's one thing. Another thing is that dealing with... A society and a civilization is a kind of information processing system, right? It's like there's like a bunch, uh, all the humans in the country are at parallel compute, right? And we're all trying to process what's going on here. a kind of information processing system, right? It's like there's like a bunch, uh, all the humans in the country are at parallel compute, right? And we're all trying to process what's going on here. And while there's a lot of, there's a lot of things we don't have good answers to yet, I actually do think that the community of, like, AI policy people has made reasonably good progress since 2023 in terms of, okay, how practically should we be dealing with models of the mythos level capability? And when things are public, and there's a legislative process, for example, that is informed by lots and lots of robust public input, that stuff re- That's the whole design of our system, right? That stuff can make its way in, and we can take advantage of this kind of parallel compute. When you centralize everything and make it private, it's much more brittle, and it's like a bunch of people who, as I said earlier, often don't have a, they have a million things on their plate because they're high-level government officials. They often don't have a lot of context for AI, and they're just improvising, making decisions in an improvised fashion. And I think that leads to subpar decision-making. I think it leads to wasting time because you... It's, I feel like what we're watching right now is the administration speed running the sort of mentality. They're, they remind me very much of where DC was in the spring of 2023 when it was like ChatGPT had just come out and, "Oh, we're gonna regulate the hell out of this, and this is really dangerous." And then things softened, and maybe they softened a little too much. And I just, but they still, they ultimately, we met in the middle. There was a, um, a change in the vibes that started in 2024. And I just think that right now we are going to, like... By putting this all in the echo chamber of the administration with a pretty small number of voices contributing to things, information and insight to things, I just feel like we're not leveraging the best that we have. And so that I think is the biggest problem. And that's why I am critical, and I am very worried about the direction of policy. But unlike the supply chain risk thing, where the supply chain risk thing was like, I think just totally an own goal, just totally unforced error. Like, why did you pick that fight? You didn't need to pick that fight. You could have fixed this in a million different ways. But that, that did, you could have dealt, even if you take the government's concerns in that issue seriously, you could have dealt with that in a thousand different ways. This is more, yeah, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised things are going about this way because you are building this thing, you're improvising an AI governance regime from scratch, and it's being built by 20 people, 15 of whom don't have a ton of context for AI. I'm not surprised it's working this way, and I'm just pointing out the meta problem of, yeah, we need to bring this out into the public. We need to have Congress involved. We can't just, this is not gonna work. Um, and so there's no point in being highly adversarial and critical there just because I'm not... What do you want them to do?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.