Dean Ball is back. In April 2025, Dean left the podcast to join the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he spent four months working on the Trump administration’s AI policies—including executive orders, the AI action plan, and AI geopolitics. He’s since returned to independent writing and research, and at the end of 2025, he and his wife welcomed their first child.
In this episode, we catch up on what’s changed in AI over the past ten months. Dean makes the case that coding agents like Claude Code represent something close to digital AGI: models that can reliably do pretty much anything a human can do on a computer, as long as you know what to ask. He describes projects he’s built—from automated state legislation monitoring to due diligence reports on real estate—that would have been impossible a year ago. Tim is more measured, noting that users still provide crucial architectural guidance and that the models still struggle with long-horizon planning.
The conversation turns to what happens when AI starts automating AI research itself. Dean expects significant speedups as models take over routine experimentation and code-writing at frontier labs, but he’s skeptical of the “intelligence explosion” scenario. We discuss why the physical world keeps fighting back against exponential improvement, why discoveries follow heavy-tailed distributions, and why—despite all the hype—the world probably won’t feel fundamentally different by June.
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