Dean Ball on open models and government control

About this episode

Nathan Lambert discusses the implications of open models in AI with guest Dean W. Ball, focusing on government control and power dynamics.

Watching history unfold between Anthropic and the Department of War (DoW) it has been obvious to me that this could be a major turning point in perspectives on open models, but one that’ll take years to be obvious. As AI becomes more powerful, existing power structures will grapple with their roles relative to existing companies. Some in open models frame this as “ not your weights, not your brain ,” but it points to a much bigger problem when governments realize this. If AI is the most powerful technology, why would any global entity let a single U.S. company (or government) control their relationship to it? I got Dean W. Ball of the great Hyperdimensional newsletter onto the SAIL Media weekly Substack live to discuss this. In the end, we agree that the recent actions by the DoW — especially the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk (which Dean and I both vehemently disagree with) — points to open models being the 5-10 year stable equilibrium for power centers. The point of this discussion is: * Why do open models avoid some of the power struggles we’ve seen play out last week? * How do we bridge short term headwinds for open models towards long-term strength? * The…

People in this episode

Host: Nathan Lambert

Guest: Dean W. Ball

Topics covered

• open models
• government control
• AI technology
• power structures
• supply chain risk

Keywords

• open models
• AI
• government control
• Anthropic
• Department of War
• power structures
• supply chain risk

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Anthropic, Department of War, SAIL Media, Hyperdimensional

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