**[Former White House AI Advisor Dean Ball Joins OpenAI to Lead New Strategic Futures Policy Team]** According to monitoring by Beating, former White House AI advisor and senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation (FAI), Dean Ball, has announced that he will officially join OpenAI on July 6 as the head of the newly established "Strategic Futures" team. Ball will report directly to OpenAI's Chief Strategy Officer, Jason Kwon, while retaining his position as a non-resident senior fellow at FAI. The newly formed "Strategic Futures" team is a small, highly autonomous policy group focused on shaping cutting-edge AI policy and internal governance. Its core responsibilities include catastrophic risk prevention, recursive self-improvement of large models, the impact of technology on the labor market, and communication between frontier labs and stakeholders such as the U.S. federal government. The team's duties span external policy advocacy and internal mechanism design, requiring collaboration with technical researchers, the Preparedness team, the legal team, and the national security and global affairs team. Dean Ball previously served as a White House AI advisor and contributed to drafting the U.S. government's AI action plan. In his personal blog, Ball stated that his decision to join OpenAI stems from his assessment of frontier AI governance. Ball believes that while AI requires regulation, it will also become a novel governance tool, with the most critical AI governance decisions likely to be made within labs rather than external institutions. To drive substantive AI policy research, one must engage directly with the development frontlines to understand the underlying technology. The "Strategic Futures" team is currently recruiting interdisciplinary members. Ball revealed that while the team's work heavily relies on a deep understanding of foundational technologies, applicants are not required to have professional backgrounds in machine learning or AI policy. Ball aims to build a team with diverse disciplinary perspectives and heterogeneous knowledge structures, and communication channels have now been opened to external candidates. [Original Link]