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Hey Travis,
Given how wild the news has been in the last few days, the idea that the same crowd that fanatically supports the development of AI also came out in support of Trump's VP pick seems like a pretty tame development. It's also not surprising given their libertarian slant. But the fact that it's now very possibly that the next Vice President of the United States will come come from the world of Silicon Valley venture capital, and that he and his party oppose regulation of AI, should not be overlooked.
Former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump yesterday announced his choice for Vice President is Ohio Senator J.D. Vance and people who support the unheeded development and deployment of artificial intelligence are thrilled. These AI maxers are excited about Vance given his previous statements against regulation of AI, the Republican Party platform’s stated goal of repealing President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on AI, and polls finding Trump is more likely to win the election after the failed assassination attempt.
Before becoming Senator and auditioning for the VP job he got yesterday by publicly supporting Trump, Vance was best known for his memoir Hillbilly Elegy and for being a fierce Trump critic, calling him “reprehensible” and “cultural heroin.” But, as this TechCrunch story does a great job of summarizing, Vance is also a classic Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He graduated from Yale, moved to San Francisco, and was a principal at Mithril Capital, a “long-term” fund co-founded by Peter Thiel. In 2020 Vance also raised millions of dollars for his own firm, Narya Capital, from Thiel, a16z cofounder Marc Andreessen, and former Google CEO Erick Schmidt.
People who support the rapid development of AI, specifically the self-designated “effective accelerationists” (e/acc) or “techno-optimists,” have latched on to two positions they share with Vance: the idea that big tech companies are promoting government regulation of AI that benefit them as incumbents, and the idea that those same companies and the government are trying to imbue AI with leftist ideology.
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After the announcement that Vance is Trump’s VP pick, Guillaume Verdon, known online as the e/acc influencer Based Beff Jezos, and who Andreesen has called a “patron saint of techno-optimism,” tweeted a clip of Vance speaking about this idea of “regulatory capture” by big tech companies.
Andreessen, who authored the techno-optimist manifesto that said any attempt to regulate AI “is a form or murder,” told a16z staff he and his founder Ben Horowitz plan to make large donations to political action committees supporting Trump, The Information reported this morning.
“I can’t help but worry that if we [Congress] do something under duress from the current incumbents, it’s going to be to the advantage of those incumbents and not the advantage of the American consumer,” Vance said last week in a U.S. Senate hearing on “The Need to Protect Americans’ Privacy and the AI Accelerant.”
“JD Vance is pro-OSS [open source] AI,” Verdon tweeted. “We are so unfathomably back.”
Other self-titled techno-optimists highlighted Vance’s ties to venture capital, Thiel, and Andreessen, saying the “Gray Tribe [is] in control.” Gray Tribe is a reference to a term originating from Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex blog, which points to a group that is neither red (Republican) or Blue (Democrat), but a libertarian, tech savvy alternative.
Techno-optimists also pointed to a Vance tweet from March, in which he said: “There are undoubtedly risks related to AI. One of the biggest: A partisan group of crazy people use AI to infect every part of the information economy with left wing bias. Gemini can’t produce accurate history. ChatGPT promotes genocidal concepts. The solution is open source.”
This crowd’s enthusiasm about the Republican nominees follows the GOP revealing its new platform, in which it states that it “will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.” The new platform also says that “Republicans will end Democrats’ unlawful and unAmerican Crypto crackdown,” and “defend the right to mine Bitcoin, and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their Digital Assets.”
AI maxers coming out in support of Vance and Trump more than they already have is not surprising given their libertarian bent, but the debate about closed versus open AI development doesn’t map neatly to the blue/red dichotomy of American politics. It’s true that Biden’s Executive Order on AI calls for a bunch of regulations. Demanding that “developers of the most powerful AI systems share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government,” sounds like a well-intentioned policy meant to serve the average person who might become subject to these systems, but it’s hard to predict every consequence of such a policy because all this tech is new and moving incredibly fast, and it’s entirely fair to be skeptical of the government’s ability to understand and regulate it.
At the same time, the same people have celebrated FTC chair Lina Khan, a Biden appointee, for saying open-source software and open-weight AI models can “open up the market, create a level playing field for upstarts, and drive innovation.” Some of the loudest critics of AI and AI researchers also support open models, because it allows them to better research AI, understand how it might cause harm, and prevent it.
As you might be able to tell by the fact that AI-generated content and tools are rapidly encroaching on every aspect of your life, there is no serious political effort in this country to impede the development of AI, and Vance and Trump are not uniquely qualified to support the development of AI. They are simply the Republican nominees, and people at the head of AI companies and venture capital firms are excited about them because historically Republican administrations make them pay less taxes and do whatever they want.
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