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Dean W. Ball

@deanwball76k followers

head of strategic futures @openai | views mine, and mine alone

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1Apr 2, '25it's surprising how many people on the left make no attempt to understand anything the trump administration does. very often, they just ascribe it all to republicans being dumb or 68.7×700k72861217
2Oct 22, '25Vague statements like this, which fundamentally cannot be operationalized in policy but feel nice to sign, are counterproductive and silly. Just as they were two or so years ago, w63.3×644k776119200
3Oct 17, '25I have been contacted by a person clearly undergoing llm psychosis, reaching out because 4o told them to contact me specifically I have heard other writers say the same thing I do 57.7×587k3.9k134706
4Sep 24, '24Under a strict reading of the AI Act, ChatGPT advanced voice is *illegal* in EU workplaces and schools because the system can recognize a user’s emotions. That’s prohibited by the 56.4×574k2.6k327524
5Sep 18, '25I mean it as the absolute highest compliment when I say that of all the AI companies today, none remind me more of early-2000s Apple than Anthropic.46.9×477k7.3k2451.7k
6Oct 9, '25This is a very big deal. China has asserted sweeping control over the entire global semiconductor supply chain, putting export license requirements on all rare earths used to manuf43.1×438k1.7k390931
7Nov 13, '25gpt-5.1 thinking is very, very good. openai has managed to smoothen the rough edges of the earlier reasoning models (extreme wonkery; too much detail, too little context) without l40.1×408k7214393
8Nov 13, '25openai is underselling this model.33×336k8851884
9Dec 11, '24my jaw is on the floor kudos, gemini team, you guys cooked.26.9×274k2.8k1101k
10Nov 2, '25Say what you will about America’s struggles to build in the physical world (they are real and I do not discount them), but the fact that both these facilities scarcely existed 12-124.9×253k99470155
11Oct 11, '25We should not miss the fundamental point on rare earths: China has crafted a policy that gives it the power to forbid any country on Earth from participating in the modern economy.24.7×251k828151226
12Jul 23, '24Llama 3 405b is a "systemic risk" to society, according to the European Union and their AI Act.23.2×236k80689200
13Aug 24, '25gpt-5 pro utterly crushes this question in a way no non-reasoning LM ever would There are books on this subject and I’m not totally sure they beat 5 pro’s answer in terms of clarit22.9×233k1k33597
14Dec 11, '24holy HELL Gemini deep research is unbelievable just pulled info from 100ish websites and compiled a report on natural gas generation in minutes maybe my favorite ai product launch 18.1×184k2k73872
15Aug 24, '25It’s a good thing that the CEO of this company hasn’t been on a recent downward spiral into decadence and insanity, otherwise these repeated failures of their flagship program woul17.2×175k6704450
16Apr 15, '25I am happy to announce that I have joined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as a Senior Policy Advisor on AI and Emerging Technology. It is a thrill and honor16.4×167k1.1k5793
17Oct 29, '24Texas for some ungodly reason is considering a law that would make plumbers, electricians, lawyers, and countless other small businesses file “algorithmic impact assessments” for a15.8×161k3793742
18Feb 23, '25Can you imagine what would have happened if someone had discovered “do not criticize Sam Altman or Joe Biden” in an OpenAI system prompt?14.9×151k2.8k208161
19Apr 3, '25There are people, ostensible professionals in the analysis of public affairs, who believe Donald Trump took on this level of risk for… nothing? Just for fun? Even if you think he i14.9×151k2101229
20Aug 31, '25this tweet would have literally been illegal under a law that gavin newsom signed 12 months ago, and the only reason it isn't is that a republican-appointed federal judge struck it14.5×148k4.4k312183
21Mar 20, '25the abundance movement is cool but it’s also like, “what if we said a bunch of stuff that was conventional wisdom within classical liberal think tanks in 2012, but in left-coded la13.2×134k5564352
22Oct 15, '25I promise you that 'openai is secretly not agi-pilled' is a bad take if you believe it, I'd be excited to take the opposite side from you in a wide variety of financial transaction13.1×134k2091516
23Dec 23, '24One of the few AI papers I reliably hear referenced by DC policy types is from 2023. The authors tried to train a new model with 90%-100% of training data generated by a 125 *milli12.5×127k56446166
24Dec 26, '24The Chinese AGI lab DeepSeek is reporting an insanely low training cost of only $5.5 million for their new v3 model, which seems to match Claude 3.5 sonnet performance. DeepSeek al12.5×127k62172212
25Dec 21, '24crazy that this is on the front page of Bloomberg right now12×122k7903280
26Aug 11, '25The AI Action Plan is out, and with that I will be returning to the private sector. It has been the honor of a lifetime to serve in government, and I am forever grateful @mkratsios12×122k4563377
27Jan 25, '25The amount of factually incorrect information and hyperventilating takes on deepseek on this website is truly astounding. I assumed that an object-level analysis was unnecessary bu11.6×118k777125336
28Nov 6, '25These unhinged activists, who represent a small fraction of the overall “ai safety community,” are on criminal trial for trespassing at OpenAI’s HQ. Now they are proudly sharing th11.1×113k3193159
29Aug 24, '25I think we live in a perpetual state of traditional media telling us that the pace of ai progress is slowing These pieces were published during a span that I would describe as the 11×112k49461101
30Mar 9, '25It is wrong to call manus a “deepseek moment.” Deepseek was about replication of capabilities already publicly achieved by American firms. Manus is actually advancing the frontier.10.9×110k2102661
31Nov 13, '24The fact that the DOGE winds down on July 4, 2026 (just a little over 18 months from Trump’s inauguration) strikes me as a mistake. The bureaucracy will know it’s a “run out the cl10.6×108k1941313
33Mar 18, '25The thing I really appreciate about VP Vance's discussion of manufacturing here is that he makes a *hayekian* case for reindustrialization. He says that by losing manufacturing, we9.4×95k59887284
34Sep 14, '25I think Demis is fundamentally correct here. The current systems are extremely impressive, and will get much more so soon, but it’s clear there are fundamental breakthroughs still 9.2×94k35726142
35Oct 9, '25openai plans to detect underage users and give them a model with more safeguards. This may clash with Colorado’s sb 205, which prohibits “algorithmic discrimination” based on age. 9.2×93k3482742
36Sep 28, '24Remember when Thomas Edison asked everyone in the world for their consent to invent the lightbulb? Or when Steve Jobs asked every American whether Apple should build the iPhone?8.9×91k1.4k7062
37Nov 1, '25“Paper, which was manufactured by hand and foot for a thousand years or so following its invention by the Chinese and adoption by the Arabs, was manufactured mechanically as soon a8.7×89k3802979
38Nov 8, '24People who make confident predictions about AI risk should reflect on the fact that the election proceeded with essentially *zero* deepfake or otherwise AI related problems. One ye8.6×87k4277234
39Nov 14, '25Exhibit number one million in the series “if I showed this tech to a panel of AI experts ten years ago, most of them would say this is AGI”8.0×81k98453142
40Dec 24, '24o1 and o1-pro are a cut above other models at economic history writing. they can combine knowledge of historical facts with economic analysis in a *much* more creative and cogent w7.6×78k53430143
41Oct 29, '25my sense is that selling Blackwell chips to china would be quite possibly the most unpopular tech policy move of the trump administration, especially on Capitol Hill. it's plausibl7.0×71k3443137
42Oct 2, '25here is the most sober-minded executive in the AI industry saying that AI-related biorisk is a real problem and recommending enhanced nucleic acid synthesis screening. governments 6.9×70k37055129
43Feb 10, '25I sometimes wonder how much AI skepticism is driven by the fact that “AGI soon” would just be an enormous inconvenience for many, and that they’d therefore rather not think about i6.6×67k6085459
44Aug 16, '24has anyone else noticed that this guy almost always includes a picture of himself in his tweets6.5×66k1.8k3420
45Jul 23, '25new ai essay microsite just dropped6.4×65k2594561
46Jul 16, '24“California literally made you” says the state senator to Elon Musk. He says this with a straight face because he believes that government policy is *responsible* for everything go5.8×59k1.6k7735
47Jul 2, '24A lot of people are dunking on the headline of Tim Wu’s “The First Amendment is Out of Control” piece in the Times but the details are even crazier. He suggests “lies” shouldn’t be5.7×58k2063214
48Oct 15, '25I disagree. if you believed agi was around the corner *and* was going to be an extremely capital intensive race defined by infrastructure, you would want to pump your revenue numbe5.4×55k3561259
49Nov 25, '24reminder: you now must do phone calls on services like signal whatsapp or facetime audio if you care remotely about infosec this is due to chinese hackers breaching a US-government5.3×54k1834647
50Aug 14, '25aaaand we're back. Pleased to share my first "real" hyperdimensional essay since April: a proposal for pulling gigawatts of electricity out of thin air. (with draft policy language5.2×53k1772464
51Mar 8, '25imagine how dumb everyone would feel if sb 1047 had passed, and o3 was not a covered model, but gpt 4.5 was5.1×52k2551227
52Oct 21, '25If you said: “We should have real-time incident reporting for large-scale frontier AI cyber incidents.” A lot of people in DC would say: “That sounds ea/doomer-coded.” And yet inci5.0×51k3123964
53Sep 16, '25If this mirrors anything like the experience of other frontier lab employees (and anecdotally it does), it would suggest that Dario’s much-mocked prediction about “AI writing 90% o4.9×50k3912882
54Oct 21, '25Data center water use is almost entirely a non-issue. Arguments to the contrary generally rest on the fact that almost no one has any context for overall daily US water consumption4.8×49k5914984
55Oct 22, '25Beethoven wrote a suicide note at ~my age but concluded it with a resolution to live on for his artistic vision. A heroic narrative. He never sent it, and mentioned it to almost no4.8×49k30116100
56Apr 3, '25ok, let me spell this out. what I meant by 'you should read things written by the people in the trump administration,' in the context of today's tariff announcement, is: america is4.6×47k40336200
57Sep 9, '25it is rare that a state law introduces a genuinely novel legal mechanism, but the latest version of California's frontier AI safety bill, SB 53, does just that. the screen cap belo4.5×46k2823882
58Nov 11, '25It's heartening to see such eminently reasonable takes making their way into prominent, pro-tech new media. There is something very "old man" about the terms of AI policy debates, 4.5×45k2661356
59Oct 1, '24My basic reaction to AI today is, “jeez, o1 performs in the top 1% of humans at math, yet fails routinely at basic logic tasks. I guess intelligence is a high-dimensional space, an4.4×44k45524112
60Oct 28, '24This doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. o1 is a very good legal reasoner and I cannot wait for it to get document upload. People continue to sleep on o1 for reasons that escape 4.3×43k2051358
61Oct 15, '25The fact that Sriram is willing to engage from the White House in detail, on substance and in good faith is a good example of why I feel lucky to call him a friend. I can tell you 4.1×41k214535
63Oct 12, '24“We, the California beach NIMBY commission, reject the US military’s request to do things on US military property because we disfavor the politics of your contractor’s CEO.” Ah yes3.8×39k3882019
64Jun 2, '25Agree with the directional thrust of this WSJ oped that better alignment is a core part of improving AI capabilities, reliability, and utility—and hence the competitiveness of US A3.8×38k2001851
65Nov 5, '24Remember the news a few months ago that Amazon was going to hook up a data center to a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania? The federal energy regulatory commission has rejected it3.8×38k2532835
66Feb 19, '25The only justification for firing probationary employees is if you think firing government employees is an intrinsic good, regardless of their talent or competence. Indeed, firing 3.7×37k2563413
67Sep 14, '25quite possibly one of the most pro-social inventions of all time. newton was a wealthy man, though I don’t know about leibniz. either way, if you subscribe to the logic of New York3.6×37k1921230
68Mar 24, '25For the record: I expect AI to add something like 1.5-2.5% GDP growth per year, on average, for a period of about 20 years that will begin in the late 2020s. That is *wildly* optim3.4×35k198087
69Feb 12, '25Some reflections on Paris and our current moment 1. The odds that we are living through a takeoff to transformative ai seem high—much higher than they did to me one year ago—and mo3.2×33k24332104
70Nov 6, '25friar is describing a worse form of regulatory capture than anything we have seen proposed in any US legislation (state or federal) I am aware of. a firm lobbying for this outcome 3.2×32k2381448
71Sep 5, '25My favorite category of ai writing is when a rationalist ai risk worrier type thinks their way to the status quo and presents it like it is a novel idea. Here, Nick Bostrom re-inve3.0×31k27717113
72Jun 11, '25Agreed3.0×30k2141724
73Sep 4, '25Within me there are two wolves2.9×30k350717
74Dec 30, '24“Model collapse due to synthetic data” has become a real brainworm for some in the policy world. I’ve got my own theories as to why, but I’ll leave it to you to formulate your own.2.9×29k1791048
75Mar 29, '25My guess: It was obvious by now that models could do stuff like this to everyone who is paying attention and capable of changing their mind, so not big news. The only people left a2.8×29k231847
76Aug 1, '24Humor is dangerous, claims “online misinformation expert,” because it’s “how fringe ideas get normalized.” Do these people get tenure?2.6×27k2154121
77Sep 26, '25The meta algorithmic video slop in the post ruxandra is quoting is from a division of that company called “Superintelligence.” In what sense is this superintelligence? In what sens2.6×27k3331527
78Sep 20, '24On an entirely unrelated note, did you know that this guy's company has advocated for making it a felony to open source a gpt-4 class model? And requiring a government license to t2.6×26k1922219
79Feb 3, '25I can confirm that Deep Research is capable of automating tasks that would have taken me at least a day, if not longer, of dedicated research. This might very well be the most prod2.5×26k3362478
80Oct 2, '25A lot of people seem to implicitly assume that China is going with an entirely libertarian approach to AI regulation, which would be weird given that they are an authoritarian coun2.4×24k1752342
81Apr 19, '25I went from never using chatgpt scheduled tasks to having ~20 with o3. News roundups on arbitrarily niche topics delivered at custom intervals. This alone is worth the money.2.2×23k2565133
82Oct 29, '25[personal] some may have noticed here that I am somewhat more flip in replies nowadays. there is a basic reason for this: I am profoundly busier than I was a year ago. indeed, I am2.1×21k191124
83Sep 29, '25sonnet 4.5 seems to show major improvements in both alignment and performance in a matter of months. kudos to anthropic for demonstrating that performance and safety are not in fac2.1×21k2061522
84Jul 23, '25man, I don’t quite know what to say—and anyone who knows me will agree that’s rare. thanks to everyone for all the immensely kind words, and to the MANY people who made this plan w2.1×21k234611
85Jun 20, '25At one point the llm cope was just a stupid but tolerable part of the discourse. But now I fear the Experts who supply llm cope to the market are actively harming the world, singin2.1×21k2352132
86Sep 13, '25I promise I’ll stop rug-posting soon but seriously, look at this, like are you fucking kidding me2.0×21k204628
87Nov 7, '25our glorious public-private partnership, their wicked civil-military fusion2.0×21k5574835
88Oct 14, '25The uk gets a lot of hate on this site but I have to say, there is something so preeminently civilized about having breakfast in the center of London, taking a quick, painless, and1.8×19k197611
89Sep 13, '25I wonder if, in the early days of banking, people who worried about money laundering, theft, and fraud were considered “banking doomers.”1.8×18k2001314
90Dec 6, '24this is such a funny recommended prompt for an ai model that costs $2400/year I hope openai keeps these boilerplate sample prompts all the way to asi1.7×18k3521517
91Sep 16, '25the metr time horizon study should report 90 or even 99% reliability by default, not 50%1.6×16k187515
92Mar 31, '25I once again implore you to exercise humility when rendering judgments about what is and is not a good use of other people’s time and capital.1.6×16k3012445
93Sep 22, '25A prominent eu figure told me recently, “you Americans are making ai with no values!” I told him I disagreed and asked him what me meant, and in his response it became clear that b1.6×16k181520
94Aug 21, '24Like almost all other AI-generated political content, this clip: 1. Does not demonstrate a need for “AI regulation.” 2. Would almost certainly be unconstitutional for government to1.4×14k2623010
96Sep 5, '25If you are ever lucky enough to have an upward trajectory, remember the people who saw something in you before the curve was noticeable They are your friends1.1×11k213425
97Nov 10, '25Much as I disfavor it, EU tech regulation is probably overrated by Americans in terms of how much it contributes to European economic stagnation. It seems like the biggest contribu1.0×10k184917
98Nov 11, '25I feel like if you passed a law that said “we are going to pay one mag7 firm to do air traffic control at 75% of the current budget, and we will pick which firm via roulette wheel”1.0×10k1901011
99Apr 3, '25glad they got to interview Gary Marcus for that crucial 2% of ai experts who have never used a chatbot0.9×9.6k19837
100Nov 13, '25I have good news: I have many exciting projects underway. And, God willing, I am having my first child in the coming weeks! I have bad news: because of the good news, my writing ca0.8×7.9k23604
101Oct 16Today on Hyperdimensional: on mechanistic interpretability, Nick Cammarata's recent essay, and the beauty of things that are grown.0.4×4k43131

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