Trump V.P. pick J.D. Vance praised for supporting open source AI

Taking to his social network Truth Social, just days after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt by a gunman, former President Donald Trump today announced his pick for his running mate and vice presidential candidate for the 2024 U.S. presidential election: J.D. Vance.

A first-term Republican Senator from Ohio, Vance is perhaps best known as the author of the 2016 non-fiction memoir, Hilbilly Elegy, a sociocultural profile of the U.S.’s rural Appalachian mountains region named after a semi-derogatory slang term for the area.

He’s also a former venture capitalist who took investment from Silicon Valley mega venture capitalist, Gawker killer and influential contrarian Peter Thiel.

But amid views many (including me, a Democratic-voting writer) consider controversial, anti-democratic, and even threatening — such as his prior stated position on his Senate campaign website to “end abortion” — Vance is being praised by a number of members of the tech community for recent comments he made that would seem to support open source A.I.

Or at least, would seem to be against regulations of the emerging sector.

Specifically, Vance just last week testified during a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on the “The Need to Protect Americans’ Privacy and the AI Accelerant.”

As TechPolicy.Press reports, Vance stated:

“Very often CEOs, especially of larger technology companies that I think already have advantageous positions in AI will come and talk about the terrible safety dangers of this new technology and how Congress needs to jump up and regulate as quickly as possible. And I can’t help but worry that if we do something under duress from the current incumbents, it’s going to be to the advantage of those incumbents and not to the advantage of the American consumer.“

Several techies on X took this as a sign of Vance’s commitment to ensuring open source A.I. could develop without onerous regulations.

For example, Brian Chau, executive director of D.C.-based pro-open source nonprofit Alliance for the Future, posted one of the quotes from Vance’s testimony on X:

“if we do something under duress from the current [AI] incumbents, it’s going to be to the advantage of those incumbents and not to the advantage of the American consumer”

~@JDVance1 pic.twitter.com/8y1nNN8fVm

— Brian Chau (@psychosort) July 12, 2024

Self-described effective accelerationist Tetsuo posted a quote attributed to Vance but that we could not verify from the transcript, and may have been a summary of his remarks, stating “The solution is open source.”

Bindu Reddy, CEO of open source-based AI model provider Abacus AI, posted excitedly that she thought “Vance NAILS IT!” also adding that “the solution, of course, is open-source!”

Dan Barrett, founder of community curation startup Smashing, also went so far as to state on X that he might vote for Trump and Vance over Vance’s support for AI deregulation.

holy shit

not that I’ve ever been a single issue voter
and I’ve never voted for R for prez

but there’s a not insignificant chance the issue of open source AI outweighs all the others combined and I did not have it on my bingo card that any of the candidates would have a policy… pic.twitter.com/EUg35VvomX

— dan (@irl_danB) July 15, 2024

While still a small minority of the total voter base, the influential position of many techies posting on X may encourage others to see Vance in a new, more flattering light. And it is conceivable it could win him and his ticket the support of other companies dedicated to open source AI such as Meta Platforms. Yet the question remains if these views are shared by his boss, former President Trump, and other members of his team.