There are tons of technocratic AI policy proposals, but little concrete intuitions about the near-term future to motivate those proposals. The result is that the field sometimes feels disembodied, devoid of a concrete vision. Here is what I think is coming.

OpenAI releasing a model spec is one of my favorite things about them. All frontier labs should be doing this. Closes the gap between intentions and results, so you can interpret them better. openai.com/index/sharin...

My latest, on the AI export controls generally and the diffusion rule in particular. This regulatory adventure, whatever you think of it on the merits, is a case study in how rules beget more rules—how regulation grows, like a plant or a weed.

Excited to launch a new podcast with @deanwb.bsky.social about AI. It's called AI summer, and can be found on all major podcast apps. The first episode is an interview with political scientist @jonaskonas.bsky.social about AI policy in the Trump era. www.aisummer.org/p/jon-askona...

A little late, but--my 2025 'lookahead' post is here, covering some of the major AI products, research, and policy I'll be watching this year. I hope you enjoy! t.co/CZdR8zjsFH

American AI policy in 2025 will almost certainly be dominated, yet again, by state legislative proposals rather than federal government proposals, writes Dean Ball.

Hyperdimensional is almost a year old! So I wrote a reflection on the first year, covering the origins of the project, SB 1047, where I erred, the impossibility of controlling technocracy, where I see the project going next, and more. Enjoy!

I really wish more people criticized my own work, too.

“Since we necessarily underestimate our creativity, it is desirable that we underestimate to a roughly similar extent the difficulties of the tasks we face, so as to be tricked… into undertaking tasks which we can, but otherwise would not dare, tackle.” -Albert Hirschman

America is charging into an AI policy regime that will slow down adoption of AI, shrink model developers’ addressable market, and could deter frontier AI investment. It’s one of the worst ways to regulate AI, it could become a national standard soon, and it’s under-discussed.

If chatbots stay in their current role—assistants I use for random tasks throughout the day—then ads have a negligible effect on their utility. If however chatbots become something like what the ai companies all aspire to—genuine “virtual chiefs of staff”—ads may be ruinous.

The world we live in today is already incredibly Cyberpunk, by comparison with the world of the 90s and early 2000s that I grew up in

Today in our respective newsletters, @milesbrundage.bsky.social and I co-author a comment on the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice. We try to offer constructive comments as to how this document--which will likely be a standard for frontier AI dev compliance with the AI Act--can be improved.

The eu ai act should quite obviously be repealed. Unsalvageable.

The EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice—a document that almost exclusively regulates American companies—came out in draft on November 14. The deadline to submit comments is two weeks later, November 28, aka “Thanksgiving.” You have to admire the passive aggression.

almost every proposed ai regulation should come with a sunset provision.

autonomously self-replicating ai compliance documents

If you use an llm to write an algorithmic impact assessment/risk management plan about your use of ai for “consequential decisions,” are those LLM-written compliance documents themselves about consequential decisions, thus requiring an additional algorithmic impact assessment?

You might ask, reasonably, “what could a manuscript about agricultural epistemics in the antebellum south possibly have to do with ai?” But give it a try!

As a general matter I have not enjoyed Kendrick’s work post-gkmc. I feel he somehow lost the sense of urgency that characterizes all great music. This new album gnx however is quite good so far (five tracks in)

awesome book, recommended, especially for people thinking about ai

Question: can one share links here without as much fear of being algorithmically disfavored? A test. youtu.be/FwPhiWZN6jQ?... (Really cool piece, especially love the piano at about 8 minutes)

I love seeing RL continue its magnificent takeover that I have doubted so many times over. I can go back to being an RL person, I don't even need to masquerade as an "RLHF" or "NLP" person anymore.

Sage thoughts on the bizarrely parachuted in idea of an AGI Manhattan project in the US China Commission report from @deanwb.bsky.social www.hyperdimensional.co/p/questions-...

The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group/report commissioned by Congress, puts an explicit AGI Manhattan Project as their top US policy recommendation.