In his social network Truth Social, just days after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, President Donald Trump announced his election today for his running mate and vice-presidential candidate for the 2024 US presidential election: JD Vance.
Vance, a first-term Republican senator from Ohio, is maybe best referred to as the writer of the 2016 memoir, a sociocultural profile of the agricultural Appalachian region of the United States, named after a semi-pejorative colloquial expression for the world.
He can be a former enterprise capitalist who received investment from a serious Silicon Valley enterprise capital firm. Murderer and influential lateral thinker Peter Thiel.
But amid views that many (including me, a Democratic-voting author) consider controversial, undemocraticand even threatening – as his position previously stated on his Senate campaign website, “End abortion” — Vance is being praised by plenty of members of the tech community for his recent comments that look like a support for open-source AI
Or at the very least it seems to violate the regulations of the emerging sector.
Specifically, Vance testified just last week during a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on “The Need to Protect the Privacy of Americans and AI Accelerators.”
As TechPolicy.Press reportsVance explained:
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Several techies on X interpreted this as an indication of Vance's commitment to making sure that open-source AI may be developed without burdensome regulations.
For example, Brian Chau, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit open source organization Alliance for the long runposted one in all the quotes from Vance's statement on X:
Self-described effective accelerationist Tetsuo posted a quote attributed to Vance, which we were unable to confirm from the transcript, and which could also be a summary of his remarks, stating “The solution is open source.”
Bindu Reddy, CEO of open-source AI model provider Abacus AI, excitedly posted that she thought, “Vance HAS GOT IT!” and added that “the answer is after all open source!”
Dan Barrett, founding father of Community curation startup Smashingeven went thus far as to state on X that he might vote for Trump and Vance because Vance supports AI deregulation.
While they still represent a small minority of the general voting base, the influential position of many techies posting on X could encourage others to see Vance in a brand new, more flattering light. And it could conceivably win him and his platform the support of other firms committed to open-source AI, reminiscent of Meta Platforms. But the query stays whether his boss, former President Trump, and other members of his team share those views.
