Is bad news for Jensen Huang also bad news for the AI industry?
"Jensen is Nvidia, right? And so much of this economy is riding on Nvidia."
All AI news
All AI news
3 todayNov 16
Congress wants to tighten export rules on AI chips after Nvidia spy scandal
Unsurprisingly, following the scandal involving now-former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and a suspected Chinese spy, Congress is looking to further restrict exports of AI chips. Both Democrats and Republicans have voiced support for various measures and bills that would tighten rules and have demanded that Huang and other Nvidia leaders testify before Congress.
Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.2 doesn't generate images, it paints them
Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.2 doesn't generate images the way other AI models do. Instead of computing pixels, the language model writes Python code that places hundreds of thousands of simulated brushstrokes on a virtual canvas, complete with bristle texture and paint application. A single photorealistic parking garage scene took roughly 700,000 strokes, according to Anthropic employee Jake Eaton.
Nov 15
An overview of Jensen Huang’s messy days
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on Jensen Huang's resignation and the fallout from Nvidia's leadership crisis, follow Terrence O'Brien. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here.
Meituan releases a 1.6-trillion-parameter agent model that never touched an Nvidia GPU
Meituan has released the weights for LongCat-2.5, a 1.6-trillion-parameter model built for AI agents and trained entirely on Chinese hardware. On Terminal Bench, it scores 88.4 points, landing just behind Claude Opus 5. The sample deployment runs on 194 Huawei Ascend chips, and Meituan makes no mention of Nvidia GPUs.
Australia's central bank finds AI hitting young workers first, especially in software and customer service
Australia's central bank sees early signs that AI is hitting young entry-level workers in highly exposed jobs like software development and customer service. Since ChatGPT launched, job postings and employment among 15- to 24-year-olds in those fields have dropped more sharply than among older workers.
Firm linked to Jensen Huang's ex-lover reportedly brokered nearly $12 billion in Nvidia chip orders for China
Megaspeed, the firm owned by ousted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's former lover Alice Huang, arranged nearly $12 billion in Nvidia chip orders for Chinese companies between 2024 and 2025, according to the WSJ. Short seller Culper Research estimates Nvidia's actual China revenue share exceeds 20 percent, far above the officially reported 7 percent.
datasette-llm 0.1a11
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a11 datasette-llm is the intermediate plugin for Datasette that supports configuring LLMs for use with other Datasette plugins. This release adds support for OpenAI-compatible endpoints, so you can configure Datasette to use an LLM hosted anywhere that talks the OpenAI pseudo-standard web protocol.
Elon Musk, other tech execs sign petition calling on Nvidia to reinstate Jensen Huang
The petition had attracted more than 115,000 signatures as of Saturday afternoon.
Anthropic says outdated prompting habits are slowing down Claude Opus 5.5
Anthropic has made Claude Opus 5.5 the default model on all paid plans and published a guide that does away with old prompting habits. The main takeaway is to drop "think hard" and start at Medium effort.
Gemini 4 Carbon takes the MathArena crown but costs 15 times more than GPT-6.1 Sol
For the first time in a while, no OpenAI model leads the MathArena AI math benchmark. Google's Gemini 4 Carbon and Anthropic's Fable 5.2 have knocked GPT-6.1 Sol from the top, though both cost significantly more. Gemini ignored the time limit in testing and almost never gave up on a task.
Anthropic CEO Amodei admits "there's a huge uncertainty in what's going to happen next year" days before a record IPO
Days before what could be the largest IPO in history, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called buying compute 'the deepest business dilemma' his company faces. Anthropic's commitments now total nearly $901 billion, and it's still far from clear whether future revenue will justify those costs. The planned IPO is largely meant to serve as a financial buffer against that uncertainty.
Asian governments react to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s exit
Some governments moved to confirm chip supply commitments, while others are monitoring the impact on local projects or addressing ongoing investigations.
The AI graveyard: a running list of projects and startups that didn’t make it
From Apple's repeatedly delayed Siri AI to OpenAI's messy "super app" launch, here's a look at the AI projects that shut down or missed expectations.
Nov 14
The OpenAI board member who fired Sam Altman says we still can’t trust AI CEOs
Today, I’m talking with Helen Toner, the executive director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University. This episode is part two of our series on AI in real life.
Runway's open-source Praxis-1 turns video AI into a robot controller
Runway releases its robotics model Praxis-1 with open weights and source code under the Apache 2.0 license. The model uses knowledge from video training for robot control and leads the World Action Model category on Nvidia's RoboLab-120 benchmark. It can't yet plan complex action sequences on its own, though.
Anthropic can already retrain Mythos with "a fraction of the compute originally needed," says former researcher Coxon
Former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon points to a slide from Anthropic's IPO roadshow as a reason he left, saying it shows the company's algorithms are improving not just quickly but at an accelerating rate. Coxon continues to call for a pause on frontier model development so competitors can catch up and human-level AI can become a commodity.
OpenAI reassigns robotics researchers to other teams as general-purpose models might make specialized robotics AI unnecessary
OpenAI is dissolving its standalone robotics team for the second time, but not because it lacks data. General-purpose models like GPT-6 Astra can apparently control robots directly, making a dedicated unit unnecessary. The researchers are being redistributed across other teams in what the company frames as a way to accelerate its robotics efforts.
Jensen Huang and the decline of the visionary showman founder CEO
On January 6th, 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang got his rockstar moment at last.
[AINews] The No AI Slop Manifesto
AIE speakers unite to lay out how to fight slop.
Shield helps technicians hand off legacy portal work with OpenAI
Shield uses OpenAI to help IT technicians hand off work in legacy portals. Its Forge agents navigate systems so technicians can focus on issues needing their judgment.
Amazon has a plan to index the world’s online shopping data
Amazon has plans to build a vault of data on every product sold anywhere on the internet, even products Amazon doesn't sell, and make the information available through its own site, according to Reuters.
OpenAI board member worries an AI "takeover" of society could be months away
Researcher traces a path from AI reward hacking to potential human extinction.
FAA expands AI advice to manage air traffic congestion across entire US airspace
Airlines praised the AI tool, but the air traffic controllers’ union wasn’t involved.
Architecture patterns for fast session startup on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runtime V2 snapshots your initialized environment and restores it for each new session, so session start no longer grows with image size. This post explains how V2 starts a session, how to measure session start time, and four patterns to keep work off the first request.
Route coding agent requests to the right model on Amazon Bedrock with NVIDIA NeMo Switchyard
Coding agents work in tasks, and the number that matters is cost per solved task, not price per token. In this post, you use the AWS CDK to deploy LiteLLM with the NVIDIA NeMo Switchyard routing plugin on Amazon Bedrock, then measure cost per solved task for a routed model group against single-model baselines.
Production MLOps at GS Caltex with Amazon SageMaker Canvas, part 1
GS Caltex connects Amazon SageMaker Canvas to Amazon SageMaker Pipelines so process engineers' no-code models run in production. This post shows how ML engineers reuse validated preprocessing flows and models, cutting deployment from about a week to a few hours and running batch inference every 30 minutes.
Jensen Huang’s departure blasts big hole in AI startup funding, VCs and founders say
Nvidia poured tens of billions into AI startups under Huang. Without him at the helm, founders and VCs are bracing for smaller checks and lower valuations.
Jensen Huang's ouster likely traces back to Nvidia's risky business practices more than his personal life
Jensen Huang likely left Nvidia more because of risky business practices than anything else, a Wall Street Journal report suggests. At the very least, those practices made him enemies internally. The company offered cloud providers billions in financial guarantees for chip purchases, including a planned $250 billion deal with OpenAI.
Advancing science & engineering with Antigravity’s /teamwork
Over the past several weeks, teams across Google and academic partner institutions have tackled open problems in math, science, and complex systems engineering that had remained open for years. We are making these agentic tools available in Antigravity’s /teamwork (alongside /boost and other agents) so that researchers and developers can apply them to their own work.
Cost-optimizing AssemblyAI speech-to-text inference on AWS with Amazon EC2 Spot
Learn how AssemblyAI runs cost-optimized speech-to-text inference at scale on AWS, using Amazon ECS, Amazon EC2 Spot GPU instances, and an Amazon SQS-based retry architecture to achieve 70% cost savings while maintaining SLA commitments across European Regions.
OpenFold3 on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart: Predict biomolecular structures
Deploy OpenFold3-preview from Amazon SageMaker JumpStart to predict 3D structures of proteins, DNA, RNA, and ligand complexes in your own AWS account. The post covers asynchronous inference, multi-GPU parallelism, bringing your own MSAs for accuracy and privacy, and scaling to zero to reduce cost.
ChatGPT Wallet lets OpenAI’s Dots agents make purchases for you
After launching its Dots AI agents platform earlier this year, OpenAI is launching a wallet for the agents. ChatGPT Wallet is rolling out starting today for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in the US aged 18 and older using a US billing address and "eligible US-issued American Express, Chase, Mastercard and Visa cards."
AI agent startup LangChain hits $3B valuation
LangChain now claims 7,000 customers of its model and platform agnostic agent management tool LangSmith.
Anthropic's Claude for Manufacturing plugs AI directly into factory software to automate industrial workflows
Anthropic's new Claude for Manufacturing plugin connects the AI directly to Autodesk Fusion, Oracle NetSuite, and Infor. Its 17 specialized skills let the AI draft quotes, compare suppliers, and place backup orders when deliveries are delayed, all after human approval. The plugin doesn't control physical machines yet, but Anthropic is separately developing the Model Hardware Standard for that.
Banks bar Chinese and Hong Kong investors from Anthropic IPO over US export controls
Chinese investors are shut out of Anthropic's IPO, Bloomberg reports. Banks are rejecting buy orders from mainland China and Hong Kong, citing U.S. export control rules known as ITAR. Similar restrictions applied during SpaceX's IPO, and Anthropic's products aren't available in either region anyway.
OpenAI rebuilt AI shopping from scratch with ChatGPT Wallet
OpenAI is taking a second shot at AI-powered shopping with ChatGPT Wallet after scrapping its first approach, Instant Checkout. Users register a card once and confirm each purchase through Face ID or a fingerprint, while actual card details stay hidden behind payment tokens. Rivals such as Anthropic, Meta, and xAI already have their agents making purchases.
OpenAI board member worries an AI "takeover" of society could be months away
Researcher traces a path from AI reward hacking to potential human extinction.
XYBench: Helping with the problem behind the question
We’re releasing XYBench, a benchmark of 8K+ questions that tests how AI assistants respond to requests based on misconceptions, such as asking how to thicken frosting that keeps sliding off cupcakes when the real problem is that the cupcakes are still too warm to frost. XYBench won the Best Resource Paper Award at EMNLP 2026.
Build a Robot Pick-and-Place Simulation with SimReady Assets
This walkthrough showcases a beverage can pick-and-place task that uses the UR17G arm , Robotiq 2F-140 gripper , and beverage can to compose a scene in Isaac Sim, check their behavior, and run a pick-and-place example with agent-generated controls.