Dean Ball: evaluation

Transcript context

…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. e 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. And so, you know, look, in the end, I'm inclined to give grace to people and say what I hope that we're in right now is a n- is a high neuroplasticity phase of policymaking. And so I really, I think that we might be in a very different world in three months. But certainly, yeah, there have been ways in which, like, if you were to look at the headlines, you'd be like, "Ah, it doesn't seem very consistent with the action plan at all," and I can't deny that.…

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