Whoever wins the U.S. presidential election, AI stands to gain

I've already voted early in the 2024 U.S. presidential election — one of some 60 million+ Americans to do so — and in my case, for Vice President/Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and her Vice Presidential candidate running mate, Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

I'm not going to spend your time or mine explaining my choice, nor criticizing their opponents, but I encourage anyone who is eligible to vote according to their conscience.

After all, this is not a politics focused newsletter. But it is all about AI, and politics do of course impact it and other technologies.

Fortunately, for those who are excited about AI's potential, I'm pleased to report that no matter who comes out ahead in the final vote tally after election day on Tuesday, November 5, AI stands to gain.

For starters, the U.S. government is already leveraging some of the most advanced AI models in the world in various departments.

OpenAI's models have been incorporated into Microsoft's Azure Government cloud services, which are utilized by various U.S. government agencies, including the DoD. In September 2024, Azure OpenAI Service received approval for DoD Impact Level 4 (IL4) and Impact Level 5 (IL5) Provisional Authorization , enabling defense agencies to leverage advanced AI capabilities securely.

In August 2024, OpenAI and rival Anthropic signed agreements with the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute to conduct research, testing, and evaluation of AI models. This collaboration grants the institute access to OpenAI's models before and after public release, facilitating rigorous safety assessments.

In May 2024, California announced plans to deploy generative AI tools to enhance state services , including reducing traffic congestion, improving road safety, and providing tax guidance. The state partnered with tech companies to develop and test AI applications over six months, focusing on low-risk areas to improve public services.

And just a few days ago, The Verge reported that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated his company is “working with the public sector to adopt Llama" — Meta's family of open-source AI models — "across the US government."

Back in July 2024, shortly after Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump was reported to have selected Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance as his Vice Presidential nominee/running mate, we at VentureBeat noted that many in the AI community, particularly open source AI, praised Vance's prior testimony on the need for a robust and open AI ecosystem to prevent monopolistic behavior.

Harris and Walz's campaign website touts Harris's success as Vice President for Joseph Biden working with their Administration to pass "the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the American Rescue Plan" which has netted "more than $900 billion of investments in manufacturing and related sector" and adding more than "700,000 manufacturing jobs."

The CHIPS Act in particular has been seen by the tech industry and its lobbyists as a big win, enabling computing hardware previously manufactured abroad to be manufactured at competitive rates domestically in Arizona (which TSMC just did ). (Oddly, despite this success, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Trump alley, recently called for its repeal ).

Moreover, the Harris-Walz campaign site calls for "building new data centers for AI," something that already aligns closely with the current projects and plans of cloud leaders such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, which are investing in nuclear power to meet the high-energy demands of training AI frontier models.

So even though individual creators and other companies such as The New York Times are currently locked in class action copyright infringement lawsuits against AI model providers and backers such as Microsoft for training on their data without express consent or compensation, the U.S. government, and those who seek to lead it for the next four years, seem to be broadly supportive of the AI industry and further public investment in it.

For those working in the sector and seeking to use its tools and products, that should be welcome news, no matter who ultimately resides in The White House next.

Thanks for reading, subscribing, sharing, commenting, writing in, and this week — voting!

— Carl Franzen

Read More