Dean Ball: recommendation

Transcript context

…On the note of parallel processing, how about the role of the states, our laboratories of democracy? A lot of the proposals that I understand that you have favored or even championed, including mandatory safety plan publication, certain other transparency meas- measures, whistleblower protections, and even a sort of Fathom-style public-private regulatory, you know, hybrid structure, have all happened in different states to, uh, I think a remarkable degree in a pretty short period of time. How bullish are you on the states? So there have been really meaningful wins for the whole, the general notion of private governance that, that I started to work on really post SB 1047 veto in late 2024. And of course, other... It's not just me. A lot of other people have worked on this stuff. Auditing independent verification organizations, which would be like third-party private bodies that would, like, evaluate. A lot of the thing right now, like with the government, they're concerned about the jailbreak, this potential jailbreak of mythos or fable, and it would be great if there were expert bodies who had looked into this and really probed and certified, like, "Hey, yeah, like, there are jailbreaks because there are always jailbreaks, but our calculated risk is that this, these jailbreaks are not severe enough to rise to the level, and we can certify Anthropic as conforming to safety best practices or whatever," right? It's like the kind of thing that I think there have been substantial wins. There have been substantial wins in the sense that, um, two of the three big AI companies have published fa- multiple documents that are favorable to this general notion, Anthropic and OpenAI. Bill to mandate auditing in frontier AI companies passed in Illinois earlier this year, and also the state, states of Connecticut and actually the common... No, Connecticut's a state. State of Connecticut and Commonwealth of Virginia both passed earlier this year that are specifically authorizing either studies or pilot programs for independent verification organizations. And there's also a bill pending in Ohio, by the way, which would be the most robust implementations of independent verification org- organizations yet. Momentum in that regard, more than I would have guessed a year ago. In that sense, I think the states as laboratories of democracy idea is working fine. It's also worth noting, with respect to the frontier AI safety laws that have passed, that the states have taken great effort. There's been a bill in, the transparency bill in California was SB 53, in New York it was RAISE, in Illinois it was SB 315. And the language, Illinois adds an auditing requirement, but the transparency language across those three states is remarkably similar. Remarkably similar. And, and so I'm, like, quite... I'm happy about that, right? That's not creating a patchwork. Those are the stats, the states converging on a common framework that we'll see if it works. We'll see how well it works, but it's states converging on a common framework, which they do from time to time. There's a lot of other areas of AI that are not so much paid attention to on Twitter, that are not so much, that don't get as much of the mind share, but where I think the story for the states is less rosy. Um, things like consumer protection, uh, pri- algorithmic pricing. The number of media, like synthetic media and deep fake laws that exist in this country now is just crazy, right? There's hundreds of them now. like consumer protection, uh, pri- algorithmic pricing. The number of media, like synthetic media and deep fake laws that exist in this country now is just crazy, right? There's hundreds of them now. And the net effect of that is probably to create a fairly confusing political environment. I think also one thing that's really problematic that we're starting to see bubble up from the states are basically occupational licensing protections. States say, including Illinois has done this, saying, "We are gonna define mental health services as exclusively something that can be provided by humans. And if you, if a chatbot so much as asks you how you're doing, it is engaging in... Or if you say to the chatbot, 'I'm sad. Can you please help me?' The chatbot is technically engaging in mental health services, and that's illegal." And we'll see states often vary in terms of how rigorously they enforce laws like this, but it's not good to have that kind of stuff on the books. And so I think strangely enough, the area that gets the most attention, the frontier AI safety stuff, where a lot of the pro-preemption crowd also focuses their energy, that focuses their attention, that's actually the area where the laws are, like, best sculpted. It's like the laws are, like, very well sculpted. They often have the support of the, of the AI industry. They're often designed specifically to avoid the patchwork complaint, which is a legitimate one. And for some reason, up heretofore at least, most of the people that are, like, super pro-preemption focus on these laws. And it's not only that, but these laws are dealing with really urgent problems like cyber and bio and stuff that are, like, clearly not fake anymore. We can't... We're not having that argument anymore. They're clearly a real thing. Um, so... And then they're, like, not focusing on all these other areas where the states actually are creating patchworks and are creating complex compliance things that might specifically be really complicated for startups to deal with. Um, and I think it, I think the state issue is mixed in that way, but also the people who are, who, including me, who support a federal law are not helping themselves because they're talking about this issue, I think, in largely the wrong way.…

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