Ahead of its IPO, OpenAI hires Trump’s AI-policy architect and Google’s transformer pioneer

OpenAI is hiring for its stock-market debut on two very different fronts. One is the research lab. The other is Washington.

This week, the company said Dean Ball will join on 6 July to lead a new team called Strategic Futures. Ball is not a researcher. He is a policy operator, and until recently he helped write the US government’s AI rules.

Who is Dean Ball?

Ball was a senior AI adviser at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. There, he was a main author of the Trump administration’s “AI Action Plan”. At OpenAI, he will report to chief strategy officer Jason Kwon.

His new team has a broad brief. It will study frontier-AI risks, the effects on jobs, and how labs, governments and society fit together. In short, it is about the politics of powerful AI, not the engineering of it.

The other hire

The policy...

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