February 11, 2025

VANCE SHOWS WHY AMERICA IS LEAVING EUROPE IN THE DUST ON AI. At Spectator World, Matthew Lynn writes:

They won’t have liked the message or the messenger. With characteristic bluntness, Vice President J.D. Vance tore into the European Union’s smothering regulation of artificial intelligence today.

Still, Europe’s leaders should listen. Vance happens to be absolutely right.

When President Macron convened an AI summit in Paris this week, he was probably hoping for the usual platitudes from world leaders about “transformative technologies” and “empowering change” — along with a few billion euros for some data hubs in France. Unfortunately, no one told Vance how these things are meant to work. In his speech he spoke his mind, and tore into his hosts.

“We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry,” he told the CEOs and heads of state in the hall. “We feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.”

Ouch. It probably made for uncomfortable listening for the EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and the other assembled dignitaries. They won’t have liked the veiled threat: that tariffs might be a consequence of over-regulating America’s tech giants. Nor will they have appreciated the criticism of Europe’s approach to the sector.

Related: “You can tell this speech is native to him and that it wasn’t written by committee. These are not ideas that he hasn’t wrestled with. That’s why it’s phenomenal, and why it’s so different than all the meaningless slop most politicians deliver.”

Earlier: How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms.

[Ross Douthat of the New York Times]: Just to zero in: When you say, “kill A.I.,” what does that mean? Because the Biden administration obviously would not say that it intends to kill A.I. It would say that it wants to make America the world leader in A.I. while regulating it in a way that prevents our enemies around the world from obtaining potentially world-altering technology.

That would be the narrative, right? So why is that wrong?

[Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen]: [Laughs.] What you just said would be great compared to what we actually got. So again, the precondition we got with crypto was to just flat out try to kill it. This whole debanking thing — they just debanked an entire generation of founders.

They debank their families. They really destroyed people’s lives. They just killed companies left, right and center, just debanking, destroying companies.

They did regulation through enforcement. They would never define what the rules were. They would just arbitrarily sue people when they didn’t think they could sue people and win, then they’d issue these things called Wells notices, which is basically a public announcement that the government is going to sue you in the future, which is basically a death sentence for a company, right?

So we saw this exercise of raw authoritarian administrative power levied against crypto. Basically we saw the beginnings of what we thought was going to be applied to A.I.

So A.I. needs to be very carefully controlled by the government or by adjuncts of the government to make sure that there’s no hate speech or misinformation, which is to say it has to be completely politically controlled. We were trying to keep our heads down, just trying to build start-ups. Then Ben and I went to Washington in May of 2024. We couldn’t meet with Biden because, as it turns out, at the time, nobody could meet with Biden.

We were able to meet with senior staff. So we met with very senior people in the White House, in the inner core.

We basically relayed our concerns about A.I., and their response to us was, “Yes, the national agenda on A.I. We will implement it in the Biden administration and in the second term. We are going to make sure that A.I. is going to be a function of two or three large companies. We will directly regulate and control those companies. There will be no start-ups. This whole thing where you guys think you can just start companies and write code and release code on the internet — those days are over. That’s not happening.”

We were shocked that it was even worse than we thought. We said, “Well, that seems really radical.” We said, “Honestly, we don’t understand how you’re going to control and ban open-source A.I., because it’s just math and code on the internet. How are you possibly going to control it?” And the response was, “We classified entire areas of physics during the Cold War. If we need to do that for math or A.I. going forward, we’ll do that, too.”

Douthat: But that is a national security argument. That is an argument about China, right?

Andreessen: Yeah, but national security is also the death of democracy. Maybe I’ll give the devil his due here. I believe, in their view, they really think they’re defending democracy. I mean, they’re trying to strangle it to death in the name of defending it, but I think they literally believe it when they say Trump is Hitler.

By the way, it appears Obama doesn’t believe Trump is Hitler anymore, because he was joking around with him at Jimmy Carter’s funeral.

A lot of these guys, the fire’s in the eyes. And look, it’s not even just the U.S. It’s the rise of UKIP. Brexit was an equally shocking, alarming thing. The rise of Nigel Farage. The German party AfD, it’s obviously the Nazi Party 2.0. And so this superheated rhetoric and actions between 2021 and 2024 just went completely bananas.

So we came in on May ’24, at the very height of that, and we said, “Oh, my God, they’re going to kill us. They’re going to kill our companies. They’re going to kill open source.” By the way if you kill open-source A.I., you also kill all academic research, so the universities are going to be completely cut out of the loop.

Douthat: I feel like we would have to do a separate show about the future and risks of A.I., but my perception is there is a large constituency not just in Washington, D.C., but in Silicon Valley as well that regards some form of A.I. as potentially dangerous to human civilization or U.S. national defense as nuclear weapons. And during the Cold War, we obviously did not allow random start-ups to manufacture nuclear weapons in the nuclear corridor in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Andreessen: Not only did we ban them from making nuclear weapons; we also banned them from making nuclear power, which we now regret. But anyway —

Douthat: No, absolutely. No, I’m by no means arguing that this theory is correct. I’m just saying my sense is that there is presumably some version of A.I. that you would wish to see regulated by the federal government, right?

Andreessen: It depends. This is a longer conversation we need to have. But I would just tell you the national security part was not the motivator here. And by the way, the national security stuff, those arguments are still going to play out. Those arguments aren’t over. That’s still going to play out.

The political dimension of it, overwhelmingly. I mean, it was just crystal clear. You can see it in the eyes. You can see it in the words. You can hear it in the words. You can see it in the behavior. We have a lot of Democratic friends of good standing who are major donors in both the

Biden campaign and even the Kamala Harris campaign. They came back with the same reports. It’s completely consistent, which is that social media was a catastrophic mistake for political reasons.

Because it is literally killing democracy and literally leading to the rearrival of Hitler. And A.I. is going to be even worse, and we need to take it right now. This is why I took you through the long preamble earlier, because at this point, we are no longer dealing with rational people. We’re no longer dealing with people we can deal with.

And that’s the day we walked out and stood in the parking lot of the West Wing and took one look at each other, and we’re like, “Yep, we’re for Trump.”

In contrast, as Lynn writes at the first link, “the EU has killed its AI industry stone dead. The AI Act created rules that were too stringent too quickly. It pushed costs so high that most entrepreneurs went elsewhere. Its only real impact has been that giants such as Apple are switching off AI functions in Europe.”

Unexpectedly! The late Steven Den Beste was writing about Europe’s high tech malaise almost a quarter of a century ago. “Where is Europe’s Intel? Where is Europe’s Microsoft? Where is their IBM? Their Dell? Their Applied Material?”

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll