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.
Industry-wide change as it happens: shifting habits, emerging abilities, social impact and the shape of the market.
On January 6th, 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang got his rockstar moment at last.
Former OpenAI researcher Will DePue says he has produced the first technical evidence that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Ant Group are using Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPUs despite US export controls. His forensic method reads characteristic chip signatures directly from published model weights. He estimates the hardware behind the five training runs cost more than half a billion dollars.
Today, we’re talking about the Jensen Huang scandal at Nvidia, which is developing so quickly that we had to do an emergency update of this intro minutes before publishing this episode.
I was certain, until the story of Jensen Huang's second affair hit, that Huang was bulletproof. After all, why wouldn't he be? He's placed himself indispensably at the center of the AI industry and famously had no succession plan at Nvidia. In fact, he's the only CEO Nvidia has ever had. L'état c'est moi.
As soon as Wednesday evening, Nvidia's board could decide to remove its founder and CEO of 33 years.
Security firm Claroc found more than 35,000 Grok-built apps open to anyone without login, including patient data and confidential SpaceXSI documents. The cause: "Anyone with the link" was preselected as the default access setting. SpaceXSI took only its own 24 employee apps offline. The rest remain accessible.
Anthropic is using AI to build more powerful AI. And it appears to be working remarkably well, with the company's models improving roughly twice as quickly as a year ago, with little indication of slowing down.
Nonprofit METR spent eleven weeks auditing Anthropic's internal research data and concluded that the pace of model development has roughly doubled, with about 80 percent of the speedup driven by AI-assisted research. Anthropic redacted the most informative evidence, though, which means the public has to rely on METR's judgment "much more than would be ideal."
On Tuesday night, Democrats made history as they took control of the House and the Senate, and a blue wave swept through traditionally red and swing states. In these and other campaigns, one theme kept coming up: holding AI companies accountable to the American people.
Data center developers are poised to face a more restrictive building environment after voters across the country voted in candidates who favor moratoriums and ballot measures that put more obstacles on their expansion, delivering a stinging blow to a central pillar of the AI industry.
Big Tech is pouring billions into AI infrastructure, but mounting debt, negative cash flow, and growing investor skepticism are raising questions about the sustainability of the AI spending boom.
AI models are solving more mathematical problems. A pattern is emerging in their successes that could help us predict which problems they’ll solve next.
Anthropic is hiring fewer and fewer junior staff in technical roles. The share of junior positions among new hires dropped from 27 to 9 percent since early 2025. By August 2026, AI agents across the company were already logging six times as many hours as humans.
Last week, Anthropic and OpenAI looked like they had the AI race to themselves, pulling ahead with increasingly powerful models that left their rivals in the dust. Google seemed hopelessly far behind, while Meta, despite spending billions to revive its floundering AI ambitions, had yet to establish itself as a serious contender.
The startup will sell some of its assets to Disney for $20 million.
OpenAI published more than 700 AI-generated manuscripts claiming solutions to open math problems. A math blog then collected over 100 responses from researchers, ranging from fascination with new ideas to existential fears and grief over a lost way of working. Fields Medalist Hugo Duminil-Copin wrote, "I am paralysed."
"Staggering." "Overwhelming." "Unprecedented." "Surreal." "Pure insanity." Those were among the descriptions more than three dozen mathematicians reached for in conversations with The Verge as they tried to make sense of the flood of mathematical results OpenAI abruptly dropped on the field this week.
The Association for Human Mathematics is calling for an OpenAI boycott after the company released more than 700 AI-generated math manuscripts at once. OpenAI had to retract three papers the next day over a sign error. Fields Medalist Terence Tao warns that AI's mass "harvesting" of open problems leaves entire branches of mathematics less fertile.
In “Does AI Assistance Enhance or Erode Expertise? Evidence from a Three-Month Field Experiment in Patent Drafting”, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, we describe a field experiment used to capture changes in both short-term productivity and longer-term skill building that occur as a result of AI
OpenAI is building out the pieces of an alternative to the traditional app store model, turning ChatGPT into a place where software can be discovered and used by people and AI agents alike.