Dean Ball: belief

Transcript context

…I think if you looked at the individual items in the action plan, and some of this is hard because some of the things on the action plan, some of the implementation Ended up being done, as they say in government, on the high side, which means in classified environments. So especially some of the stuff about military adoption, and there's some national security things. For example, one thing that I feel like is underrated is like, uh, not to say that this specific thing has been implemented, but just as an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, it's like, um, there is a part of the action plan that obliquely references the notion of the military commandeering all the data centers in the country in the event of a national crisis where we needed to stitch them together to do dot dot dot something. Uh, like that's like, you know, in there, and like you wouldn't... It sounds like a very like Leopold Aschenbrenner idea. It was described in sufficiently mundane language that I feel like it didn't jump off the page at people. But so there's a bunch of things like that where the implementation, to the extent it's happening, is not happening in public settings. But I think if you were to look overall, and if you had a clearance, and you could really see everything, I think you would see that we're probably, if you just think of it as a to-do list, it's probably 30% to 40% done, which is pretty good for a year, right? Um, we're, we're, we're about 11 months out from when the action plan came out, so like that's pretty good. Um, and a lot of the major things, you know, I think across all of the pillars, we've seen, uh, significant advances that the administration has made. On the energy side of things, not that this was directly in the action plan, but, um, this administration is doing really amazing stuff on nuclear. Um, and then stuff that was more directly part downstream of the action plan, there are major changes that are in process right now that should be announced in the coming days really, um, from, from FERC, uh, the, the federal, uh, um, uh, uh, energy regulator, that deal with the, uh, process for connecting very large industrial, uh, electricity users to the grid and accelerating that process. Um, so there's a lot of things like that are just really meaty, substantive things that are proceeding apace. I would also say, yeah, military adoption of AI has impressed me to the upside, and generally speaking also, military's direct involvement in like really industrial policy and boosting startups, US manufacturing, which is talked about in the action plan, startups that are doing innovative things with physical autonomy and stuff, that is all doing great. Um, and I think another main thing is the action plan talks a lot about adoption more broadly, and I think AI adoption in America is actually going pretty well, all things considered. Now, of course, that's all the nice stuff, I would say. he action plan talks a lot about adoption more broadly, and I think AI adoption in America is actually going pretty well, all things considered. Now, of course, that's all the nice stuff, I would say. I think more critically, it would be, it would be hard to say that the administration has carried itself according to what I think of as the spirit of the action plan. It's not my job to say what the spirit of the action plan is. Ultimately, it's their administration, right? For example, a big pillar, a big principle of the action plan was the notion of exporting American AI and getting it adopted all across the world. Um, seems hard to imagine how that's consistent with global export controls on frontier models imposed with a 90 minutes notice on the entire, on all non-US persons. That's the kind of thing that when we were out in the world, and you know, my, my life after government, there are definitely a lot of international trips I do where I am engaged in quasi-diplomatic work on behalf of the United States, um, as a private citizen, but as someone who's trying to explain what we were thinking with things like the export promotion work and like our whole strategy there. And the biggest concern you hear from people abroad, especially in Europe, is "I just worry that you Americans are gonna turn off the models at some point if you get mad at us." And when I was in government, we were trying to assuage this concern. road, especially in Europe, is "I just worry that you Americans are gonna turn off the models at some point if you get mad at us." And when I was in government, we were trying to assuage this concern. When I left government, I spent time in India at the AI Action Summit earlier this year. Many places, many, it's quasi-diplomatic engagements where it's, "No, don't worry. We don't wanna do that. We want a ecosystem," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, of course, like the administration goes and does it, and basically confirms the biggest fears of a lot of people in, in internationally. And that doesn't help, right? That certainly doesn't help. I think actually that, that relates to one other thing, which again, I don't know if it would've been possible, but one thing that I feel as though the action plan was relatively silent on was like the issue of AI governance, right? That's a big part of what I worked on before and after, and like it's not really that referenced, and I think my reasoning for it at the time would've been like, number one, tough Overton window within the admin at the time, and number two, a lot of that, in my view, is ideally legislative, and the action plan was not supposed to talk about... It was supposed to be just things the executive branch could do, not new laws. Um, so but I think that there could have been more explicit material in the action plan about, "Hey, okay, at some point things will get scary, and what should you do? Here's how not to panic." There could've been more of that because I think that we are seeing, we are seeing... It's funny though because in the end, I do think there, there's just a distinction, right? There are like, there's this huge array of civil service bureaucrats, just like full-time career civil servants, and then there's low to mid-level political staff, and they all read the action plan and are like implementing it, I would say like in quite a good way. Then, of course, there's like the very high-level people who don't necessarily read every strategy document that the administration comes out with, and like they're fundamentally very reactive. And so this mythos stuff happens, and it's, "Oh my God, we gotta do something about this." And they're not thinking about what would the action plan tell me to do. That's not at all what like a cabinet secretary is thinking. But something that is amusing to me is that I am, I think we are watching the administration, um, reinvent some of the ideas in the action plan, or like the senior level people in the administration reinvent some of the ideas in the action plan around like the use of the Casey building technical competence in the government, all that kind of stuff, third-party evaluations, all this. I think we're seeing them reinvent those things from first principles, so I'm optimistic still. But, but yeah, no, I definitely think that there have been substantial ways in which the administration has departed, ironically, in both the not taking the risk seriously enough direction and then also in overcorrecting, uh, and taking them, not taking them too seriously, but like reacting in ways that don't actually deal with the risks.…

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