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.
