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.