Dean Ball: belief

Transcript context

…... government. How would you say that is going? Right now it seems like we clearly have, like, the build-out is happening and, you know, even in my home state not too far away, uh, in Michigan, there's a gigawatt data center just broke ground despite some local NIMBY style objections. So that seems like it's happening. We hear about the military trying to use AI. Obviously, that's, you know, kind of contested in terms of what they should be doing. We also don't, as a public, I don't think fully know what they're doing. And then there's all these other things. Your writing, in the meantime, has sounded the alarm in a pretty severe way around just the health of the Republic, and it seems like your kind of faith in government's ability to ride the wave, as one might hope, is not super high right now. So how would you say it's going in terms of follow-through and, and where, what is the kind of core of that pessimism for you? 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.…

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