Dean W. Ball

@deanwball on X

Writes about AI. 100% of posts open with an observation. A typical post reaches 357 likes.

Remix their style

Posts: 23
Likes: 12K
Typical: 357
Best: 2K

What they write about

AI: 96%

How they open

observation: 100%

Every post of theirs in the library

Dean W. Ball@deanwball

holy 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 of the last… at least three business days

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

According to the Pentagon, Anthropic is: 1. Woke; 2. Such a national security risk that they need to be regulated in a severe manner usually reserved for foreign adversary firms; 3. So essential for the military that they need to be commandeered using wartime authority.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

I want to be clear that I’m not criticizing Fable for: 1. Pricing 2. The bio/cyber safeguards (yes they’re overeager, but I can deal) 3. The 30-day retention policy These things all seem fine. It is solely the silent sabotage that creates an awful precedent to which I object.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

There are many people in the policy world, left and right, who saw chatbots, pattern matched to social media/attention economy issues, and suited up for a repeat of that same policy fight, who now find themselves totally unprepared for the agents. I tried to warn; so did others.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

This guy dumped pre-IPO anthropic equity and moved across the continent to serve his country, and was rewarded by his country with a punch in the face. It would be blackpilling if I weren’t so sure that the market will make better use of Collin than the bureaucrats ever will.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

It would be cool, aesthetically, if we had a yudkowskian SecWar who saw anthropic as the most /acc of the labs and designated them enemies of the state on that basis, but instead it is because SecWar thinks that Dario’s personal home has 93 special bathrooms for all the Genders

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

Ok, so the actual argument is more like “Anthropic builds a useful technology whose utility is growing, therefore they should expect to have their property expropriated and to be harassed by the government.” The whole point of America is that isn’t supposed to be true here.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

Pause to reflect that the Trump Admin has officially taken the harshest regulatory action against a frontier AI company of any U.S. government entity (Colorado’s SB 205 is harsher but not in effect), and that Claude is now more strictly regulated by USG than any Chinese AI.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

I am so confused by the Bernie Sanders stance on AI. Is AI an existential risk that needs to be banned, or a public good that should be redistributed? He wants to have it both ways, which is the tell that his flirtation with AI safety is mostly for show. This is about capital.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

I really cannot see how Anthropic’s position benefits at this stage from communications like this. Seems it just pushes the Trump Admin to escalate further while also alienating potential allies in the industry. They already had a strong hand. Sometimes silence is best.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

My view for years has been that the best version of the future is one where both open-weight and closed-weight models thrive. Both have unique sets of benefits and drawbacks. I hope that the U.S. can lead in both.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

We desperately need de-escalation here, but the actors involved seem to only be capable of escalation. I wish Anthropic had accepted the same terms as OAI; I think they probably made a mistake in rejecting the compromise. But that does not mean the government should destroy them.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

it's not a political shakedown, DoW is rushing to remove Anthropic as quickly as possible because they have determined that Claude uniquely is a nation-state-level threat to national security, and yet a deal is still possible? The position of DoW is legitimately incoherent.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

As promised, and with thanks to @jachiam0 for his great tweet that inspired me to finally put the finishing touches on this: This week, on Hyperdimensional: the impending rise of ownerless agents--AIs that are independent economic actors--and what to do about it.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

We don’t know whether this will happen, but it’s been surprising that discussions of open-weight AI broadly, and Chinese open-weight in particular, operate in an alternate reality where government security concerns don’t exist, or somehow only apply to closed-weight models.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

“What has the AI industry even done for America.” “Well, it handed a collective $200b of itself to Donald Trump.” Half the country instantly hates you, and even a decent chunk of Republicans will assume this is corrupt by default.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

It 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. The most sophisticated computer using ai now comes from a Chinese startup, full stop.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

I did not love the Anthropic ads because generally I think advertisements should be about the product being sold rather than attacking competitors. I was a much bigger fan of their thinking ad, which in my opinion was the greatest ad for AI ever (low bar, really low, but still).

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

I wonder if agents will create durable market demand for desktop computers as opposed to laptops. Features like this work much better on machines with persistent access to power. Of course there is the Mac Mini micro-trend, but the claw stuff is likely a flash in the pan.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

By the way, it really is true that I have been supportive of open-weight models for years. Those who were in the weeds of the SB 1047 debate will recall that many of my criticisms of that bill related to its potential impact on open-weight models. I communicated poorly last week

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

This is true of the Claude app as well. All other aspects of my machine function normally; Claude Code is a resource hog but not machine-stoppingly so. there is something wrong with these GUI apps and it seems not insane to wonder if the vibe-coding helps explain it.

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

But, but… I thought they were morally depraved purveyors of Woke AI (Jk; capital in a functioning market will be allocated to its highest and best use, but I do encourage you to remember all the people with supposedly principled opposition to ant who look foolish now)

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Dean W. Ball@deanwball

My friend and colleague @timhwang, for example, runs the Institute for a Christian Machine Intelligence, which relies on coding agents to replicate frontier AI alignment research papers but with Christianity-inspired experimental designs. Such work should be silently sabotaged?

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