I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration. This was put in place for national security reasons. Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
>I hope people understand that the affairs are not the reason he is being fired - NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban
If you dissect the timeline of the events and various statements, I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang -- more so than the allegations of secretly selling to China.
This is the timeline:
Nov 8 : Jensen issues apology. NVIDIA allows him to use nvidia.com for this
Nov 8 : The Board of Directors publicly backs him up with a "vote of confidence" by stating: *"no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" and that "The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team."* -- from https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/statement-from-nvidia-board-of-directors
Nov 11 : 2nd affair gets exposed in the news
Nov 11 evening : emergency meeting of Board of Directors is called to fire Jensen Huang
Before Nov 11, it looked like NVIDIA might try to ride out the storm and keep Jensen at the helm especially if they saw that the China accusations and evidence wasn't strong enough to be a problem. Again, it was totally unnecessary for the board to publicly back him up if they had plans to get rid of him because of China allegations. However, the Board of Directors emergency Nov 11 meeting is inconsistent with the Nov 8 statement affirming Jensen's leadership.
Nov 8 was coordinated with carefully crafted communications showing that Jensen and BOD were aligned. Contrast with Nov 11 being chaos and an emergency meeting convened.
Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
> Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
Exactly my read as well. "If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two."
Lawyer here - I actually would bet this is not the case. Whether he came clean or not, the 2nd affair with a subordinate is basically always a firing offense under the sexual harassment and/or code of conduct policy, whether you are a CEO or not.
The lies may be part of it, but if you didn't fire them for the COC/SH violation, you would be in for near infinite liability because it ends up as evidence that the culture from the top was tolerant of violations, etc. THis is not conjecture, it's what has basically always happened in the legal realm when companies try to work around it.
> the 2nd affair with a subordinate is basically always a firing offense under the sexual harassment and/or code of conduct policy, whether you are a CEO or not.
In my company, it's explicitly not forbidden, but the relationship has to be disclosed to HR early on (source: yearly training). That being said, I'm not sure what HR is going to do with the information.
HR will use the information to ensure the two are not subordinate to one another. Example: A is dating B at the same company. HR will make sure that A is not subordinate to B and vice versa. This will reduce conflict of interest.
You have a high opinion of HR. Often one or both are dumped for violating employment agreements.. making HR and the company's life easier with the least effort.
Not disclosing is generally what violates the employment agreements. Most companies realize that relationships happen at work A LOT. Disclosing allows the companies to make sure they avoid any power dynamic issues. I've known many people across many companies who met their future spouses at work.
It looks like there are no laws that restrict US companies from prohibiting romantic relationships between co-workers. (In reverse: US companies are allowed to prohibit romantic relationships between co-workers.) The practicality: If you did restrict it in employee rules, probably people would do it anyway in secret. It is better for HR to know so they can make sure there isn't a supervisory conflict.
If prohibited and they do it in secret, then you have a free fireable offense in your pocket. Some employers like to have a stick ready to use on a whim.
At all of the companies where I have worked, the rule was only about direct subordinates. That means you can date your boss two levels above! If practice, if you started dating your immediate supervisor, HR would just change your supervisor. Literally, this has been explained to me multiple times during HR onboarding.
That said, Kimberly Powell (former Vice President of Healthcare at Nvidia), reported directly to Jensen Huang. That is a big no-no, probably enough to be demoted and/or fired, especially as CEO.
Disclosing your secret affair to HR would be a hilarious move...
HR of course has no particular duty to out him to Mrs Huang. However, on the other hand, anyone with access to this personnel record, so long as the affair remains undiscovered, has an extremely inappropriate piece of kompromat against the CEO of a trillion dollar company. Maybe that's a small list of people but it seems like a terrible amount of power, to the point I don't think I'd be comfortable with anyone having this piece of information in their heads, let alone on a "consensual relationship disclosure form" Docusign.
Not fire you. It gives them the ability to fire the others who aren’t forthcoming.
I suppose this way they can warn you to date people who are not direct reports… which hopefully you are not doing. Or offer you options (being transferred).
Knowingly allowing ongoing misconduct or consciously ignoring resulting harm is considered bad faith
Protecting the CEO for the directors’ own interest is considered a loyalty problem.
Both of these things would make them personally liable in a shareholder derivative lawsuit.
California permits personal liability for directors perpetrating harassment and prohibits aiding or abetting prohibited conduct.
That's the directors.
Company wise - actions by the CEO are generally imputable directly to the company. This leads to potential hostile-environment claims even by employees who never had a relationship with the CEO, and those claims have been particularly cognizable in California.
Non-termination is also likely to lead to punitive damages, because it will be seen as "malice" or "reckless indifference".
Value wise - sexual harassment verdicts - depends who sued, but probably <150 million to start, long term cost maybe a billion very worst case.
Shareholder derivative lawsuits (where directors are personally liable if they end up with a finding of bad faith) - insanely more - hundreds of millions to billions.
Isn’t musk a clear counterexample here? He has had numerous liaisons with subordinates. Yet I haven’t seen either SpaceX or Tesla (who actually could) move to fire him.
Or is he the exception?
It's entirely up to company policy. Nvidia had no policy barring personal relationships among employees. When it's a direct report it creates some risk that staffers will claim coercion or favoritism. For many companies, that risk is too high to allow, but I've worked for publicly traded companies where that sort of thing happened openly.
I once owned an LP by Dr. John where he sang "Woman is the root of all evil. Money is bad but it's legal" :-)
He of course didn't mean women per se are evil, but that "affairs" with them are. Just his opinion.
Too much money is bad for most people, it corrupts their morality. But money is legal. It doesn't get you fired. You will have many friends because of it. You can get away with a lot of things with high-priced lawyers.
Some people get to have affairs with subordinates, others don't. It's a question of if they have the support of the people pulling the levers or not as to whether it's considered acceptable. Universal rules are for little people, once beyond a certain position they are merely tools for selectively shutting out opposition.
Google was a clusterfuck (literally?) of people boning other people they shouldn't have been.
It's not really a counterexample, though, because most of the people in question are no longer there, and lost their jobs over their affairs. As far as I've heard, Sundar is pretty clean, almost robotic, and has a low-profile personal life. He is the polar opposite in that regard of Sergey (who was a walking HR violation) and Eric (whose NDA-bound mistresses are legendary across Silicon Valley). Much of the reason why they have stepped back from operating roles and fucked off to being class-B shareholders only is because their personal lives are a liability to a major company operating in the environment that Google does today.
DannyBee is undoubtedly well aware of that, having been a lawyer for Google during the time period when this went down.
Yes, I was aware of DannyBee's history, which is why I chose that example.
Sundar always looked to me like he used Andy Rubin's similar habits to finally push him out of the door, and then institutionalized using accusations of this nature as a weapon against everyone below. Obviously Sergey escaped by virtue of ascending to a higher level.
Generally I don't most handbooks have affair with a customer as being an offense. Arguably, that is just good business. On the other hand, having an affair with a vendor would be a problem.
My understanding is that the legal protections for the board of directors can quickly evaporate if they know about such lies and do not take actions. This is a major point of contention in the Oxford LLC bankruptcy proceedings per my understanding after the founder was found to have been persuing several kinds of fraud.
After they caught him in a lie, they may not have been able to not fire him.
They can't legally not fire him. But they can legally re-hire him after firing him. So ironically the ONLY way he can continue at nVidia is by being fired - we just have to wait a few days and there will be an Altman-like resurrection.
I couldn't find any examples of this in a full-text book search, but besides some technical works about insects, and some material about noah's ark, I did find, from 1942:
> In the course of an experimental way, down in the depths of a science building, a beaker full of fermented sugar is left on a shelf. Sometime later one of the experimenters returned to the scene ... to find two cockroaches in the beaker, one of which had a family of about a dozen—the other had drowned itself in rum. AND WHO WOULDN'T IN THE FACE OF SUCH OVERWHELMING RESPONSIBILITIES.
This is a paraphrase of the less technical-sounding: "if you find two ants in the kitchen, you don't have a two-ant problem" which I definitely heard my mom say in the 90s (about actual ants, not metaphorically).
I have a feeling this one falls in the same category as "sweet summer child", which, while technically as old as the hills, only hit critical mass after game of thrones popularised it
I don't think this has anything to do with trust. It's absurd not to trust Huang as the best possible CEO for the company that he brought from zero to 5 trillion dollars in value. It's about being afraid of public opinion, and especially fear of being blamed for not taking the expected decision.
He's clearly not the best CEO for the company if his leadership has opened them up to a tonne of liability. The thing with Powell is problematic enough on its own, and yet it looks like a misdemeanor compared to the fact that he was sleeping with a Chinese spy and potentially knowingly sold chips to China in the face of a US-government-imposed ban. I just don't see why this is so hard. The best guy for the job is the one who doesn't risk the company and investor's money by overstepping into the geopolitical arena because he wants to poke some strange.
Given that a third woman (another coworker) has just been alleged, I'd say that Jensen was the best fit in a few other ways too. I'd be furious if I were an investor.
Furious investor here. Lol. But I'm just as furious with Huang as with the board for firing him.
But it seems especially goofy because it appears it's only about the non-Chinese affairs, since the timeline suggests he was in the clear until the second one came out.
Does anyone here think that sleeping with a billionaire CEO is something that these successful, executive-level women were actually coerced into? That's the fear run-of-the-mill "boss sleeping with subordinates" harassment suits are (usually justifiably) about. That the subordinate was either pressured into the arrangement in the first place, or that she at some point would have wished to stop, but would credibly fear retaliation and thus be coerced to continue.
I'm trying to imagine concretely what that could have possibly been like. Somehow I don't think he could be that desperate to be with a specific woman who didn't want him, that he would threaten an executive to get her into bed, nor to be so obsessed with keeping the affair going that he would even think of threatening revenge against someone who, by definition, obviously had the ability to ruin his life just by opening her mouth. The women held all the power over him, as evidenced by the fact that they just used that power to end his career.
It's not about whether or not they were coerced, it's about the complications that it brings to the table. Has anyone he was sleeping with been promoted? Did the fact that they were sleeping with him compromise the validity of that process? Is he vulnerable to current or previous sexual partners (coercion goes both ways)? Is he vulnerable to people who weren't sleeping with him but knew about his affairs?
Remember, this a guy who shepherds a multitrillion dollar company. He needs to be able to demonstrate good judgement, and that generally means not screwing the crew, or Chinese spies.
Yeah, I'm wondering this too. Jensen's damn good at his job, love him or hate him. I genuinely am struggling to understand why they'd remove him unless there's more they know that we don't.
They know that media and politicians were asking for his head, and that it was riskier for their own asses to resist than to concede. It's that simple.
I don't think there is anything more to it than self preservation. All humans and I'd say living beings are good at it.
This is why martyrs are so praised. You have to overcome this instinct of self preservation to give up your life. I suspect most people can't do it in the heat of the moment.
Basically what others have said, it doesn't matter if Jensen is good at his job or even if nVidia prospers under Jensen. I don't think the board members care one lick about that. What matters to them is their own self interest and it takes a lot of experience to realize that executive leadership and even the board does not instinctively value the goals of the organization above their own self interest. I submit this is true because of the massive amount of bribing err I mean incentive alignment that the organization gives in terms of like stock options or bonuses for meeting certain targets.
I mean that goes without saying given that I was referring to his sexual escapades with coworkers and an alleged spy. Absolutely none of this is good leadership. The guy has to go testify before Congress, and that's probably only the beginning.
He got honeypotted by a rival superpower and appears to have actively helped to circumvent national security concerns and export controls to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
My god, how much more spectacular could his mistakes be? Does he have to eat a baby live on TikTok while proclaiming "transistors are dead, we're going back to vacuum tubes" or something?
There are very few human beings in history who could have taken nVidia from zero to megatrillions like he did, but the idea of him continuing to run the company after this is absolute absurdity.
if you think getting powned by chinese intelligence is 'stupid mistakes' you are extremely missinformed about the lengths they will go through and the resources they will deploy.
you really dont understand or know how such a placement works. They can very easily do it to you regardless of how paranoid you are.
everyone can be fished.
the simple fact China had to deploy an operative to get yo him means he and Nvidia are well secured. its an expensive and risky option, not the first by far and intelligence agency would take to get to someone.
He produced a one-in-a-zillion success, and he certainly did it the hard way -- he was apparently unusually hands on. The word "genius" gets thrown around a lot, but I think it's apt.
But.
He put together a string of frankly insane mistakes that are now endangering that 5 trillion dollar company from both the inside and outside. There's no chance in hell that they're going to go from $5T back to 0, but you are not understanding the trouble they're in.
Internally, boinking your direct reports (who also happened to have a string of recent promotions) is incredibly ruinous to a company's internal culture, destroying notions of internal meritocracy. How would you feel if all your hard work was apparently not as important as putting out for the CEO? Do you think that would make you eager to do your best work for that CEO? And that's even before thinking about the insane legal liability.
Externally, he got honeypotted by a foreign government and managed to simultaneously mess with national security and, it seems, circumvent export controls to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. nVidia is in some extremely serious shit, and will have the government breathing down their necks between now and the end of time.
How are you puzzled that people point out the radical hypocrisy?
Musk is 'below the bar'.
Jensen is 'just at the bar' for this maybe slightly above.
I'm not condoning, I'm contextualizing.
He didn't do anything wrong or illegal (that we know of), other than breach of trust with his wife.
This media around this is crazy and slanderous.
All of the press is screaming about 'affair with spy and possibly secrets' , which is very unfair.
She's not a 'spy' - she's a hustler looking to make money by reselling GPUs, and she's 'talking to the Chinese government' as literally they are all compelled to do.
Are Jensen and Elon 'spies' because they talk to the State Dept. and US Gov all the time about goings on in China?
In an ideal world - we would have to contend with Jensen's actions, but I'm doubtful he'd be nerfed for personal foibles, which are not material or public concern.
Assuming that he did not hand over key secrets or information, which I highly doubt and which there are no specific allegations, this is a media / meme wave, completely out of context.
The only saving grace in this, is that the Nvidia board may be friendly to him, in which case, maybe they 'know something' that is not public, and this is the 'nice way out' but even then I'm doubtful.
That's true but only slightly true - and the evidence is that rappers can get away with absolutely horrific behaviour that other musicians cannot 'because the culture'. Kaney just set records for his concerts after releasing 'Hail Hitler' album for gosh sakes.
Elon has normalized his bad behaviour and he controls the board - there's no 'smoke that can make a fire' around him as long as the companies are doing ok. He also aggressively threatens people and very few will speak out against him.
There might be a tinge of racism with the 'honey pot' stuff, and 'chinese spy' has hints of orientalism as well. The headlines are really leaning in to the 'Asian Sex Spy' stuff which is terrible. And I've see posts with rich guys and their Asian wives - not nice.
Fair point, but I don't think it's only partially the case.
Next to the Nvidia chief was a woman named Huang Le, or Alice Huang, an executive of a Singapore-based data center company called Megaspeed, which was poised to buy $2 billion of Nvidia A.I. technology over the next year.
Though Ms. Huang and Megaspeed are little-known players in the A.I. industry, their association with Nvidia and its chief executive has recently become a preoccupation in Washington.
Commerce Department officials have been investigating whether Megaspeed, which has close ties to Chinese tech firms, is helping companies in China sidestep American export restrictions, according to more than a half dozen current and former officials and other people familiar with the companies, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an examination that is not public.
The inquiry, which is active, calls into question how closely Nvidia is tracking where its A.I. chips end up and highlights the possibility of American export laws easily being sidestepped. Megaspeed is also facing scrutiny from Singaporean police, who told The New York Times in a statement that they are investigating the company for breaching local laws, without elaborating further.
It's absurd to suggest that Nvidia would need to secretly ship a handful of chips to some sketchy actor when Nvidia chips have a a mile a line long for sales.
Jensen can sell his inventory 10x over. You have to have buying power just to get a hold of them.
Anything is possible but it would be extra stupid for one of the smartest people in the world to risk everything for literally no reason at all.
> It's absurd to suggest that Nvidia would need to secretly ship a handful of chips to some sketchy actor when Nvidia chips have a a mile a line long for sales.
Consider the opposite possibility - that they were doing this and this this might prove that the "mile long line" for sales is in fact not as long as it looks from the outside.
Fair enough - but there are zero specific allegations against him in terms of national security.
His mistress was talking to the Chines government - literally as all people over there are compelled to do - and - was hustling Nvidia chips - as thousands of people are doing.
The idea that Nvidia would knowingly help people do something bad would require some material evidence before it could be a headline.
I think you missed the point. An average person may hold their alcohol and operate, but we don't approve cops being drunk on the job.
Huang betrayed 38 years of trust his wife put into him and recently betrayed the Board by lying to them. That's already admitted, no ifs or buts. He clearly had reasons, as he is a sane person. His reasons were romantic engagement with (alleged) spy. Since he is a sane person, he must have weighed pros and cons and still engage in an affair, even though it jeopardized his marriage and his job. The Board needs to do bunch of "what ifs" in such situation, including paranoid ones, such as "what if this woman had such access to NVIDIA tech stack that each cheap is infused with some form of Chinese virus". We simply don't know how far this goes, but this firing certainly shows much further than just a consequence of a romantic fling.
Also worth noting that in the event his wife doesn't stand by him, this immediately becomes the second largest divorce settlement in history (behind only Bill and Melinda Gates). That's not the kind of headlines the PR department is love with either.
Interesting observation, but leather jackets stopped functioning in that way decades ago. Fonzie made leather jackets safe for normies and totally white bread boring; we're no longer in the "On the Waterfront" or "Blackboard Jungle" era.
But sure, I'm willing to concede that for Huang the leather jacket might have signalled a mid-life crisis of some sort. All the more reason to beware of putting those types of guys in power, because they're always going to be the most susceptible to getting completely fished.
> Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?)
That seems to be the most natural guess based on public information, but it's equally plausible that the board knows more than the public already, whether because they drove investigations, received disclosures from Huang, or received insider tips once the heat started rising. Trust aside, they may already might know worse and more materially or legally impactful things.
That's the kind of thing that a healthy class of professional journalists can help uncover and trace in a way that our post-journalism world is losing the opportunity to do. Even still, I wouldn't be surprised if further scandals for Huang or Nvidia started being reported in coming days and weeks. You might be right that it was just too many sex scandals and general loss of trust, but we just can't expect to know yet.
We need to be careful not to equate the two affairs as being countable apples-to-apples. An affair with a customer executive that generates several billions dollars of revenue has a much different risk/reward profile for the board than an affair with a direct report employee within the company. The former also has much lower legal risk: bribery laws aren’t properly calibrated for this circumstance and sexual harassment laws are less applicable. As far as the board is concerned, I imagine they’re fine with him having an affair for every single $5B+ signature as long as he’s delivering the goods and doing so without getting caught so overtly that sales are impacted — thus the vote of confidence! — but that internal affair suggests bad judgment rather than greed-driven judgment, and exposes Nvidia to harassment discovery claims and/or exposes that he lied to the board about not having internal affairs, so he’s out.
Assuming that federal law is enforced neutrally and uniformly, your point is completely correct.
That assumption has not held to date in this presidential cycle, and Jensen Huang has openly had the backing of that president. From a financial perspective, that would considerably lower their financial risk estimate of either having to pay a fine and/or hand over one or two C-level executives for some rich person prison-vacation time. I would assume the board is competent and has verbally, off the record, discussed how many billions of dollars they expect to be fined in the worst case and accepted that as the cost of doing (corrupt) business, but we could get lucky and find they did so with a paper trail that’ll come out in court someday :D
No, I’m assuming it’s not an applicable coincidence here in this specific instance, since the Board wouldn’t have made a statement of faith on November 8th if it was; they are likely an amoral entity but definitely neither an irrational nor oblivious one, and the elections outcomes were well understood by then.
Your two claims are that federal law will dissuade Nvidia’s board and execs from knowingly pursuing and profiting from illegal activity, and that Nvidia is throwing Jensen to the wolves to appease the populace after a failed AI election.
If I’ve misstated either of your claims, that’s unsurprising — given their paucity, no apology is due for that — but I’m still open to being corrected on understanding what you’re claiming. Or: If I’ve restated your two claims accurately, then I both haven’t ignored what you’ve said and I disagree with your claims as presented so far.
> Uh huh.
Note that I’ve disregarded this reply as either a claim or an argument, as I could discern neither when considering it under the ‘best possible interpretation’ site guidance. Perhaps a more plainspoken and less slang(?) reply would be more parseable.
Those were not my claims. merely that they would be likely one element in a calculus, that also includes PR blowback from affairs - and likely change in control of ~ 4% of the companies shares in a divorce.
and that an affair with a customer exec with apparent chinese spying connections, along with billions of dollars of sales to her company in likely violation of export controls isn’t as likely to be let slide with the president being in apparent lame duck mode - since you brought up his apparent friendliness with Trump.
> Jensen Huang had an intimate relationship with a second employee, according to two people familiar with the matter, Reuters has learned... Reuters is not naming the employee.
So to preface, I do not condone adultery / office affairs, etc.
But in the big picture, isn't it crazy that a relationship between two consenting adults is a bigger deal, and of larger impact to the economy, than an action that is supposedly unlawful and threatened national security?
Right, and to make it explicit for some people following along who are wondering why companies have that policy... It's to prevent predatory and abuses of power. There's a power imbalance that can easily lead to exploitation.
Adding on to that clarification: The leverage the boss has over the employee creates a rational pressure for the employee to ignore any boundary they might have otherwise had in order to avoid any chance of the boss using that leverage against them.
The reason companies care about this so much is more practical than moral. Bosses having sexual/romantic relationships with employees leads to irrational decisions that are bad for the business.
Because it's likely sexual harassment. In two ways:
1 - did she feel pressured to have a relationship with him? It's hard to have genuinely free consent when he can make or break her career; and
2 - sexual discrimination towards every other employee. Did she get benefits from the relationship? It's more than fair for the rest of the employees to wonder if they'd also been eg sucking his dick if they would have gotten better raises, faster promotions, etc.
> isn't it crazy that a relationship between two consenting adults is a bigger deal, and of larger impact to the economy, than an action that is supposedly unlawful and threatened national security?
The issue with workplace relationships with subordinates is that the degree of consent is often not clear.
First, his actions were alleged to have impact on national security, but that is not for sure. It is for sure that he was acting inappropriately as a boss, though. Second, I suspect that it is both events which led to his firing. If the affair with the subordinate had come out first, and then the affair with the alleged spy, I suspect he still would've been given grace for the first but not the second event.
Once I worked at a company where the sales VP got caught embezzling by setting up (large amounts of) fake affiliates.
It boosted the overall revenue numbers, and I think they were impressed at how long he had gotten away with it, so they let him be ‘stolen’ by a competitor (who didn’t know the circumstances) while they swept it under the rug.
It's about lying. The proper procedure is to disclose consenting relationships with a subordinate so that HR and the board is aware of conflicts of interest
If an exec is lying about this, what else might they be lying about? Embezzlement? Corruption?
It’s a kind of corruption; specifically that the senior may have coerced the junior. And once it’s done, the junior can blackmail the senior. Since you can’t reliably determine that it was all mutually agreeable, you have to rule it out by policy. Same as emoluments.
you make it sound like hes the only person working at nvidia. he did good things but the company will continue to do good things as countless talented individuals make up the company.
This exposes the true personality and that the person is a liar and betrays those who trust him. Now think, does he betray only women or shareholders as well?
Indeed. The world operates on trust. Once trust breaks down, there's no choice but to deal with it directly if you want to remain effective. Unfortunately for Jensen Huang, that meant NVIDIA choosing to not have a leader they can no longer trust.
I've not fired very many people before, but deception removes any ambiguity as to whether or not someone should be fired.
I’d love if that were true. But actually what the world operates on in selfish money grabbing.
Nobody trusted Trump yet he had the loyalty of all the tech giants because they needed him to make money.
And likewise, AI, and thus the global economy, are dependent on Nvidia. So there was no financial incentive for him to leave if it were just a matter of trust over his inability to keep his penis in his pants.
And let’s remember, this isn’t new news. Nvidia have been aware of this for a year already and it wasn’t a problem until recently.
So what’s changed? The obvious big thing is American government. The Democrats have made it very clear that they’re not going to tolerate any more shenanigans. So removing Haung is a great way to reduce the risk of any financial penalties for Nvidia’s deals with China et al.
> what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair
This is the right line of thinking, but I don't think a second affair is enough. To me, it says there is more we don't know. Possibly a lot more, and a lot worse than a second affair. Apart from anything else, that is the only reason to act this fast. You don't fire a CEO like Jensen in 24 hours over an HR indiscretion.
So I think both you and the parent are correct, but its a combo: he didn't come fully clean, but there is a non-public part that probably looks a lot more like treason that the board knows and we don't.
It may be that, but I feel it's more about managing public perception. Potentially leaking secrets to a literal (stated) enemy of state feels much more catastrophic than infidelity (obviously his wife may not feel that way).
If someone has been:
1. Managing the company well
2. Attracting and retaining good talent
3. Making money for shareholders
4. Building strong company fundamentals
Then forcing a resignation over this seems... odd. I was under the impression that barring this infidelity, Huang was one of the more sane tech CEOs. I feel like I could to literally any other CEO (Zuckerburg, Bezos, Musk, Ellison, Gates, Jobs) that have done something equally bad or worse, and haven't had to resign.
> Reading between the lines, what probably happened is that Jensen didn't come totally clean with the board on Nov 8 and tell them about the 2nd K Powell affair. Instead, the board got totally blindsided and lost trust in him. (Is there another 3rd secret affair he's hiding from us?!?) It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances.
Yeah, this seems likely. It's also quite possible that he not only "didn't come totally clean" but outright lied to the board i.e. "this was a one-time thing"
> I think the 2nd affair with a subordinate employee K Powell was the reason to fire Jensen Huang
Hasn't Musk done this multiple times (including having children with subordinates)? He's still the CEO of a few companies. Bill Gates married one!
Boards don't care about this kind of thing unless they are already looking to get rid of someone. Worst case they pay the person off, and the cost will probably be less than a principal engineer earns in a year.
This doesn't pass the smell test. My guess is damning evidence was discovered which incriminates several high-level individuals at Nvidia with willfully bypassing the export ban. The second affair was leaked as a cover for why they were letting him go.
Musk has controlling shares of his companies. Of course he's not going to be fired if he answers to himself. And Bill did all that ~40 years ago, not today.
I don't know why people find this so hard to believe. CEOs of Nestle, Intel, McDonalds, Best Buy, Boeing have been booted once similar affairs came to light. Like this is an express ticket to getting fired no matter who you are.
Many times, a board will maintain that they have full confidence in a CEO right up until they actually fire him. Their non-binding vote of confidence means nothing. Just as one example:
- July 25: Amid the Deepwater Horizon disaster, BP publicly stated that Hayward had the board's full support.
- July 27: BP formally announced that Hayward would step down as CEO, with Robert Dudley replacing him.
Similar situations with Bob Chapek, Travis Kalanick, the Boeing CEO in 2019 when all those crashes were happening, Carol Bartz, Bob Diamond...
I'm curious about what the reasoning is behind this practice. If a company's board puts out a statement of full confidence and rapidly changes their stance (in this case 3-4 days later) then doesn't that give the appearance that either the situation is drastically worse and they were inadequately informed at the time of stating confidence? I wouldn't feel very confident about the counsel of the board of directors that changed their stance that drastically in less than a week.
Just trying to understand what the benefit is to the approach from the perspective of the board.
The original post was about it being difficult to say they don't mind the ethical problems because the executive is important to the company. I was suggesting example phrasing. This has nothing to do with politics - it has always been the case, and always will be.
That's not what i referred to, it's the fact that society thinks it's ok: “His moral failings are secondary to their commercial successes and clear delivery of shareholder value”. It's a society where christians think Trump is a morally acceptable choice.
What about a board that says: "We think the CEO is a bit crap, but due to how the business is structured we have no actual power over him"? cough meta.
Jensen's PR strategy with his open letter was to draw attention TO his affairs. It's a "limited hangout" strategy.
If we're just going to be purely speculative anyway, it could be the case Jensen is the one who himself leaked the 2nd affair, in order to continue this distraction strategy.
I wouldn't be surprised if 100% of the info we have on this is Jensen's PR. 1) Anonymous "leak" tweets are all PR agency slop -- real jouranalist scoopers would take credit to draw attention to themselves. 2) Any Federal investigators aren't going to say 1 word to the public. Ergo, it was always Jensen trying to keep the narrative on his affairs.
And if you want to be TRULY conspiratorial about it, perhaps one or both of the affairs never existed, only the smuggling.
I have seen a weird number of posts/responses trying to say "this isn't because he had an affair" and like, I guess it's not, it's that he had multiple affairs that have confounding effects on the business (with subordinates, with people who got chips to China).
So no, it's not literally about his sex life, but pretending like that doesn't factor into the whole things seems like a very strange point for people to keep making. It may not be that 90% of the cause is "he had sex out of his marriage" but it's also not 0% (it surely doesn't make him a "good leader(tm)" if he's having sex with subordinates)
Sex with spy of country actively tariffed and greatest active threat to US. Billions in tariff bypass. That puts you in jail for decades territory. People magazine cares about who he is banging. Legal and possible company nationalization care about bypassing tariffs.
Tariffs are for imported goods, and export tariffs are unconstitutional in the United States. The monetary value of whatever transaction in question here is completely irrelevant.
This is an export security violation. Still criminal, but not tax evasion or anything like it, and the monetary value holds no legal relevance - the number of articles themselves does.
Selling chips to China is pretty easily provable. Who cares what pussy he is diddling, it matters that such a large company might have their assets seized due to such blatant shenanigans.
All of this is based on leaks, mainly from the US government. So the November 8 board decision might've been the cause for the November 11 leak, because the original leak failed to achieve the goal of removing Huang. Remember we're talking about stuff that's over a year old. None of this is an evolving situation.
This was my original read of the whole thing. The timing on this, happening immediately after the Republicans lose big-time? This all seems so incredibly convenient and weird.
I sincerely believe this is retaliation for something that he did or didn’t do.
The Dem plan for AI was to work with Anthropic and lock down GPUs to prevent running open / unapproved models. Basically limit AI development and inference to a handful of regulated companies.
Jensen Huang wasn't on board with that so now he's gone.
Getting downvoted, but if it's not a deliberate outcome it's certain an interesting and relevant one.
Huang was famously loyal to the gaming GPU markets, and there's been a subindustry of people running open inference on high-end consumer GPUs.
If NVIDIA kills those product ranges that subindustry will die, AI hardware will be limited to corporates and the small number of individuals who can drop five figures on an AI rig, and open models will become less valuable/dangerous.
Meanwhile I find it hard to believe the board had no idea what was happening and they're suddenly shocked - shocked! - to discover that Huang was plugging his CPU into the corporate motherboard.
What could he have done to swing the election in their favor? I think it’s more likely that with Democrats in power, NVIDIA can no longer count on the Trump administration’s corruption to prevent investigations. There may be a lot more left to uncover, and they now have a convenient fall-guy to pin everything on.
Nvidia’s Board is not a list of power players. They were, until now, largely pliant to Jensen. They flipped because they saw what everyone outside Silicon Valley did—that they personally, and Nvidia broadly, would pay the price for Jensen’s failures and potential crimes if his brand wasn’t severed from Nvidia’s.
This is the same sort of timeline argument Noam Chomsky gave me regarding why he thinks that Zelensky stopped negotiating with Russia after Boris Johnson’s visit. After the firefights in Bucha he was still saying they’ll have to make a deal, then Johnson arrived and said Putin is not a man to make deals with. And then Zelensky stopped saying it. I asked Chomsky about this explicitly (whether the discovery of bodies shot point blank in the aftermath of the Russian withdrawal from Bucha was the decisive factor) and he pointed to the timeline. I don’t know if I fully buy that argument:
Would love to hear more about this - is there a timestamp within the video where the relevant discussion is? Other sources? Ukraine shifted pretty dramatically to offensive operations within Russia in late-2025/early-2026 and I'm curious why.
Chomsky has pretty terrible track record on ascribing motivations in the conflict, going back to Khmer Rouge. Should have really stuck to formal languages.
It's absurd that they're going to drop a guy that build the most profitable company in the world over 35 years of working every day, and is basically beloved by his own staff and the industry.
Something stinks to high heaven here.
Elon Musk has multiple allegations of sexual assault against him - he's had sexual relations with at least 4 of his staff including children with one of them while he had children with another women.
Elon solicits young women over social media to have children with (which is also soliciting sex).
He attacked his own regulators during DOGE, has direct meetings with Putin several times since 2022 (still ongoing), he's taken $100's of Millions in investment from Chinese state banks, special deals re: factories and data capture and sharing rights.
And more.
The difference is that Elon has 1) and iron grip over the board and 2) is an aggressive, spiteful person who will attack anyone and everyone - and everyone lives in fear about saying anything negative about Elon.
Jensen is paying the price for being a nice guy.
Apparently he should have been dragging the board over the coals, and threatening the press and industry to keep quiet, to quash the stories, to kiss up to Trump and make sure there's nothing but love from the government etc. etc..
" It was impossible to keep Jensen under those circumstances"
I'm sorry but this is very not true and ... I don't want to be mean but it's effectively naive.
Elon tells his board whatever he wants to tell them including ridiculous fabrications about products, roadmaps, and handles them with total contempt.
The fact that someone's sex life would factor into the decision at all is so backwards.
First, polyamory has been gaining popularity. But a lot of poly people I've met keep that strictly secret, because their friends and family wouldn't understand and would judge them harshly.
Second, the problem isn't that he slept with someone other than his wife (we don't know what kind of agreements they have in place, and ENM is a thing in 2026). It's that he slept with a subordinate. And that's a real problem due to the power differential that exists between him and his employees.
So it's not the second affair per se, but bad judgement. Dating at companies should only happen parallel in the hierarchy, not up or down.
What I'm pushing back on is the notion that someone should be judged simply for fucking someone who isn't his wife. There's a reason people keep ENM agreements a secret, due to the judgmental attitude from the public at large.
Hopefully alternative lifestyles will become normalized to the point where our descendants in 30 years will look back on us with the same disappointment that we look back in 1996 gay marriage laws.
ENM among older couples is particularly common. But sure, it's always possible that Jensen was just cheating on his wife without consent. The thing to watch for is whether his wife has expressed unhappiness publicly about the situation. Notice that in articles like https://archive.is/Ubg4k they'll do everything but ask her how she feels. Or if they have, it's possible she's refused to say anything on the topic. That silence means something, and we don't know what. So hold off on the judgments until we have confirmation that she's actually unhappy with it.
The spy was also a customer. This is two pretty broad violations of your usual HR policies at minimum even if you remove “spy” from the equation and ignore all the sales to sketchy parties.
From the article's first paragraph: "Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigned Thursday, capping a spectacular downfall for a poster boy of the artificial intelligence boom whose exit following reports of extramarital affairs now thrusts the chipmaker into an uncertain future."
For a lot of people, it's about the sex. In fact if you only read the first paragraph, you'd come away thinking it was solely about the sex.
At least on HN the sentiment is more nuanced though, which is good.
There was a comment yesterday that suggested this was either a Chinese intelligence to destroy NVidia, or CIA operation to get Nvidia under control of a friendly puppet. [1]
My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it. From all appearances, NVidia was playing ball with the Trump administration. He was a frequent ally of President Trump, Trump supposedly knew about this information for the last year and sat on it, and even the CIA leaks that started it stressed how much Huang had praised the Trump administration. Reportedly they had already voluntarily stopped exports to MegaSpeed [2] as of June 2025. China, however, has a lot more to gain from his departure. It's going to harm NVidia very severely: reportedly he's very hands-on, "the conductor that makes a very complex operation work", and as a founder the whole knowledge pyramid that the company is based upon rests with him. If they want their domestic hardware industry to surpass NVidia, the easiest way to do that is to take out NVidia leadership.
I suspect that he was compromised by both the CIA and CCP, and with tensions rising between them, eventually found a situation where they each wanted him to do different things, and he couldn't satisfy both. Likely the CIA got wind that the CCP was going to move with their leverage, and published to stave that off. This also has the nice side benefit for U.S. power of letting the other side know the extent to which the CIA knows what you're doing, and showing that even the CEO of the richest company on earth is not immune to U.S laws. But it's still a net negative to U.S. power to have Huang out as CEO of NVidia, simply because it's such a net negative to NVidia. This is only a desirable outcome if he's going to be ousted anyway, or if he is otherwise compromised to become a Chinese puppet.
I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes. First affair, okay, it could be an indiscretion that happened in the past, cut ties and do damage control. But if there's a second (and third and fourth and many others?) affair and everybody knows about it, it becomes impossible for Huang to lead the company because everybody has so much leverage on him.
> My money is on the CCP, simply because they have more of a motive for it.
No they don't. They just lost access to Nvidia chips that they still rely on (even if not said out in the open). Alibaba's stock tanked on the news for example.
> I suspect the role of the second affair was to show the board just how deep the kompromat goes.
The role was to get the agenda off spying and export (the things you'd go to jail for)
They would prefer their companies buy local, as it will advance their local semiconductor infrastructure.
However, these companies would prefer Nvidia if they are allowed. All the advances in the past few years are due to advanced chips being restricted, so they had to step up.
It's interesting, the second comment I linked to was about the divide between Model Hawks vs. Hardware Hawks within the state department, and this comment thread is a great example of that.
Some people believe that the key moat for AI is the model, and under this model (hah) torpedoing NVidia would be bad for China and good for the U.S. because they won't have access to cutting-edge NVidia hardware for model-training. Other people believe the key moat for AI is the hardware, and under this model torpedoing NVidia would be good for China because it'd allow Chinese hardware makers to catch up and bad for the U.S. because it destroys our key competitive advantage.
Interesting that a policy decision depends so heavily on a question of fact, but that isn't unique to this issue. (I suspect that left and right would agree on abortion if they could agree on whether personhood begins at conception or birth, but they don't, so). There's also an element of time preferences here too: it's likely that model training is dominant now, but hardware will be dominant when you project out a few years, and so both factions could be right but on different timescales.
There are certain lines CEOs of this level absolutely cannot cross, and a relationship with a subordinate is one of them. Hiding it, putting the entire company at risk for it, a board can’t trust a ceo that puts their extramarital dalliances ahead of the company’s interest.
Chips to China, on the other hand, is in the company’s interest. That’s what lawyers and lobbyists are for, and when they behave enough, that’s also what “rockstar” CEOs are for.
Jensen got too big for his leather jacket. Simple as.
The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here. Endless congressional hearings on that topic starting in Jan. The Nvidia corp still has to answer for that even when Jensen is out.
Yeah but Dwarkesh is completely wrong and the fact he couldn't see this made me think differently about him.
Money is like oxygen. If you deny oxygen/money to the Chinese chip market, they can't grow as fast. By supplying China with chips, all the money will go back to the US and not enough money will go to Chinese chip manufacturers to help them advance the way Nvidia can.
This is what Jensen was saying and he is 100% correct here. The chip ban to China will really help them catch up because the money will recirculate since they have no choice but to buy Chinese chips, and in the end it will make them much stronger.
I'm doubtful of this hypothesis. Maybe for a few years, sure. But China has proven time and again that they do not need foreign supply constraints to incentivize the growth of their own competing domestic industry.
The fundamental contradiction of the AI maximalists like Huang is claiming that AI does not need regulated while simultaneously supporting chip exports to China. The supporting claim for the former is that we need to compete on AI with China and move as fast as possible and every day matters, while the latter implies that slowing down their compute is inconsequential.
You shouldn’t be doubtful. China executes the exact same strategy with manufactured goods exported to the US.
Exporting their extremely cheap and relatively good quality products to the US destroys any incentive to invest in domestic manufacturing and production.
If the Chinese were to stop exporting those goods to us, there would be massive incentives to make those products domestically. Given a few years we would be producing everything we previously bought from China after a painful adjustment period.
The incentive effects are identical for chip producers in China. Give it a few years and they’ll be at parity with any western producer.
“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.” -Charlie Munger
If this was the case, the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions on US chip manufacturers. Currently Chinese AI companies are constrained on compute. This is why they go to such great lengths to use Singaporean straw purchasers of NVIDIA cards. Merely having strong market incentives to succeed is not enough. Sustained, time-consuming R&D and technology sharing is necessary to catch up to competitors.
If this principle were true, then autarchies like North Korea would be the most advantaged since they never have to worry about international competition in their domestic market.
Your confidence is not backed by any data or observation, it's just an unfounded inference.
> the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions on US chip manufacturers.
OT but one thing I didn't realize until reading this comment:
Those used CMP 170HX 8GB were advertised in front of crypto server rigs. Those were probably spread across South Asian scam malls(shopping mall buildings built in literal sovereignty contested areas of non-China/Japan/Korea/Russia non-India non-African non-Muslim Asia, under guises of Chinese tourist destinations, that are literally rented out to local Chinese-speaking gangs engaging in all sorts of gang crimes from tech support scams to human and organ trafficking, straight out of the fictitious Chiba in Neuromancer), and they would happily sell or rent compute to Chinese AI firms if only those were more valuable than 8GB VRAM they have, which they all had all along.
GPU export to China must have become significantly less meaningful since the 170HX unlock became a thing. That alone must have provided petaflops of unsanctioned untraced junks for parts priced compute to Chinese AI startups.
> If this was the case, the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions
"About 600,000 of Nvidia's advanced artificial intelligence chips are stored in Hong Kong awaiting shipment to mainland China, two people familiar with the matter said, as Beijing withholds approval for large-scale imports despite demand from tech firms" [1].
> "If this was the case, the Chinese government would have placed import restrictions on US chip manufacturers."
I do not know full details, but China did exactly that. There were articles about limiting Nvidia chip imports more than a year ago. It really highlighted the absurdity of the export ban.
To my non-expert knowledge, the reasoning behind the export ban has never been explained beyond a vague assertion that China would do some sort of evil with AI if they have bigger GPUs than some arbitrary number of transistors, and also some silliness where paying a 15% tax made some of the GPUs safe to export. It has been pretty great for Huawei.
IMO that ignores the decades of investment the Chinese government has made in its semiconductor industry. It’s literally been written into their five year plans at the highest level with tons of government pressure to buy domestic when possible across industries. With the biggest captive consumer market on the planet, there is no universe in which China doesn’t get its own cutting edge chip industry. They have been determined to do it since at least the 90s and have invested hundreds of billions in a concerted effort to pull it off.
You say this, but there is already massive scarcity in the domestic market for any 16GB+ GPU. We can't get enough and it's bottle-necking scale out. Even if Nvidia diverted their entire supply to China there would still be a global shortage and an economic case for Chinese companies to build chips.
One can have good argumenta against a specific law (personally I am very much pro free trade), but as long as the law exist, breaking it comes with consequences.
This might make sense in a pure free market. But as a state planned economy, regardless of export bans, China is going to continue to heavily invest in cloning EUV.
Both China’s geopolitical situation and technological history point towards them cutting any reliance on a foreign tech stack as soon as they can.
As I see it, giving them chips just means they have less of a gap to close when their own EUV fabs come online, it can’t have any delaying effect on their plans.
Giving them chips now will no longer change anything because it is too late. Now they know that they must not depend on US-controlled imports.
Before the US "sanctions", China did not make any serious efforts to develop EUV lithography, because the government did not believe that this is a priority.
After US blackmailed everybody, including TSMC and ASML, to stop providing products and services to China, the Chinese government understood the importance of being able to make up-to-date integrated circuits, so they started providing incentives for all companies willing to work in this direction.
The result is that now China claims to have working prototypes for EUV lithography and they estimate that they will begin to use EUV lithography in mass production some time between 2030 and 2032, which is a very plausible estimate.
> Before the US "sanctions", China did not make any serious efforts to develop EUV lithography, because the government did not believe that this is a priority
Possibly true, but it’s hard to disentangle this issue specifically from the broader trade war / decoupling started in the Trump I admin. Which itself predated AI as a major geopolitical issue.
I think that China was inevitably going to work their way up the stack to DUV / EUV. I agree as you say it’s plausible that the trade war accelerated their prioritization here.
The Chinese chip market is exactly like any other market in any other country, except it's run by the largest and arguably most successful autocratic organization in the world, one which views reducing reliance on external suppliers who can turn the taps on and off at will/whim, to be of existential importance. I mean, aside from them being autocratic despots and control freaks, I can't even blame them. Your main adversary's president (and we all know how high-quality they always are) can wake up any day and decide you don't get to buy a critical part of the AI tech stack, good luck with all your future endeavours!
Yeah, no. No one in Beijing will let Nvidia or the White House have that kind of power in the long run because the free market knows best and golly gee where will we get the money and whatnot. They will buy whatever they can to bridge the gap to a time when they own their own tap.
It's not a completely dissimilar argument to selling them the nukes or F-35s because "it will deny oxygen/money to the Chinese nukes and fighter jets market".
I'm not sure if this is true or false, but as an observation: this is the exact opposite reasoning people use to criticize isolationism and market protection.
The best way of hampering China technologically has always been about keeping them completely dependent on foreign chip supply chain, e.g. ASML, TSMC, NVDA, ARM, AVGO, INTC, etc.
If you simply ban them from getting any western chips or chip tech you simply light a viciously hot fire underneath them to develop their own TSMC equivalent and their own chip designers, and we are now seeing them catching up rapidly. In fact, they are pretty close to catching up now, basically within one or two years...
Supposedly, one of those half-billion-dollar ASML EUV machines has found its way to China somehow.
The best reason to NOT ban exports is that it really doesn't work against a peer state, and China is close enough now to count. Given the significant economic trouble in the PRC (youth unemployment, unwinding the property bubble, overproduction of EVs) the US could definitely have played this better instead of creating a vibrant full-stack domestic AI sector in China.
How would they obtain one? These kinds of industrial machines come in pieces and need to be assembled, commissioned and maintained by OEM personnel. The only thing I can think of is ASML sold a machine to a compromised company who secretly shipped it to China without ASML knowing.
Still, it’s not like an off the shelf product with an 2 pager quick installation and first steps manual. Training, and maintenance, and repairs, and configuration,… I doubt you can simply ask your friendly neighbourhood LLM
This would work in a fully capitalist economy where supplying them with chips would remove funding/investment from the local alternatives. This is not China. China has been and will continue to pour billions upon billions of dollars into their native industry because they too believe that having their own chips is important, so they will take all the cutting edge chips they can get and they will continue to develop their own at the exact same rate.
They do not need a ban to light a fire under them. The fire is already lit and burning and nothing the west can do will even slightly dampen it.
You yourself claim they are within a couple of years. If that's the case you think they will stop developing if we sell them chips? That's laughable.
Yeah, Jensen sees the whole hw/sw ecosystem as a package. It isn't just chip n+1 on process n-1.
Keeping adversaries X-behind discourages adversaries from developing a new ecosystem since X-behind is better than building new. If an adversary with tremendous resources must recreate the ecosystem, it will be adopted by US+global companies since it will be lower margin.
Watched the interview and as far as I see he was getting 'heated' because he was speaking the obvious truth and being frustrated by poorly informed questions.
This is entirely expected from somebody like him who has a long history of being on the right side of technical argument.
He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US - replaced by a ex-CFO.
The US had put an export ban, and he clearly skirted it while at the same time banging a suspected Chinese spy. The company he ran like a fiefdom broke the rules set in place by the same country for which he's supposedly a loss.
I don't see it. Nvidia has a lot to answer for, and the fact that Jensen was very successful as a CEO does not shy away from the cracks in the structure.
Are we saying he was skirting the ban because he was having an affair with a Chinese spy? That seems like a stretch. Jensen was ideologically opposed to a ban, he didn't need any coaxing in that regard.
It was illegal, and I'm sure if this comes to light there will be (major) repercussions, but I don't see it as an immoral move.
Sure, why not? Morality and law are not always aligned. I'm not sure I would go so far to consider these sorts of trade sanctions "immoral", but I wouldn't fault someone for believing so.
In this case, though, I think Huang just believed these sanctions were the wrong move, and would end up long-term helping China and hurting the US. Which is fair to believe, but believing a law is counterproductive doesn't give you immunity if you break it.
The thing about that Lord Moulton said is that there are a bunch of things that are wrong that are not illegal, and we have to do that because people have to be capable of self-control. Patrick Deneen, in . . . The Failure of Liberalism said that he thinks liberalism is failing because it has come to the view that anything that is not illegal is moral.
It’s something you are not equipped to judge. You don’t know much about his private life and the private life of the people around him. Having sex in itself is not the problem, and so far what was demonstrated was that he had sex, at least one with an alleged spy evading trade sanctions, and once with a subordinate. Either are improper and ground for firing; both together are untenable (plus the possibility that there are other skeletons; we don’t know for now).
The relationship with his wife is neither here nor there, unless she wants to make it public. If she feels betrayed, wants a quick buck, or otherwise wants to for any reason, she will sue for divorce and, considering the publicity of the cases, she should get a favourable judgement.
It’s easy to impose our morals on others. But more than half of republicans believe that gay sex is immoral just as strongly as you believe that adultery is.
>>But he did not have an agreement with the justice department
Neither did conscientious objectors? I don't think you mean to claim that the justice department is the final word on morality? Just that on this topic, you agree with the justice department (which is fine), but they will do things that you disagree with. They are no final arbiter and have helped enforce plenty of immoral laws in the past.
There is even a case to be made that flooding the Chinese market with advanced GPU's will hamstring China's ability to build their own, just like they have done to our ability to manufacture. In fact that is exactly the case Jensen has made plenty of times. By holding back exports you are actually creating the market conditions in China for building advanced GPU's indigenously, CCP doesn't even have to do much, the market is responding. Who's immoral and unpatriotic then?
Comparing conscientious objectors, who refuse to participate in war, to someone who profits massively from supplying adversaries with advanced weaponry, is ridiculous.
You mostly ignored what I wrote so this is not really fruitful.
But for more everyone else reading, not helping the enemy build better defenses is basically Sun Tzu 101. China keeps us addicted to their manufacturers, the least we could've done is kept them addicted to our GPU's (to be easily turned off during a time of war). But Mr.Moral Police can't look past one chess move, so we're screwed now.
To be clear, I'm not saying mine is the only moral move (like others), I'm saying being confident about the morality here is senseless.
Isn't the specific trade law being broken related to arms control and dual-use technology?
IMO it's not a terribly strong case to make while Boeing sells whole jetliners to China, but the law was put in place for both moral and practical reasons.
It would depend on the reason for the sanctions...
If the sanctions are to prevent buying the products of slavery, that's a moral issue, and violating the sactions is also a moral issue.
Same deal if the sanctions are to prevent selling things that will be used to carry out genocide/etc. That's a moral issue, so violating the sanctions is a moral issue.
I don't think there's an alegation that the GPUs will be used for immoral purposes, just that the US government has national security concerns. Those concerns may or may not be valid, and may or may not be served by having trade sanctions applied effectively, but I don't think that's a question of morality.
It's not de facto immoral to violate the law. It could be immoral to violate the law and conceal it.
I think you can make a case that breaking a rule intended to prevent immoral activity is in and of itself immoral, even if breaking the rule didn't result in the immoral activity.
It's arguable either way, morality isn't a formal logic. There's no right answer, and it's mostly judged by popular consensus... If there is a final authority, they don't publish their notes. :p
However the fact he was having an affair muddies the waters on the two. At best, the optics look bad to someone outside. Yes, he could have been opposed for money reasons, and that’s a position that needs no more explanation.
But how do we know he wasn’t being whispered to by the smoking baddie he was trying to impress? Maybe he’d not have taken the risk were he not having this affair but we know what men do when their ego is on the line. Case in point: Musk paying people to play PoE for him and losing his shit when he was caught.
Do I think money is a good enough explanation? Yes. Could I believe that what’s in his pants also played a part? Also yes.
People at this level get intoxicated with their power. They think they are invincible and can do whatever they want. Often they can. Sometimes it all comes crashing down, here for example, or the case of Eric Swalwell. But they never think it will happen to them.
Sure but that's not the point here: he was getting frustrated in the interview because he was getting second guessed by someone who doesn't have as much insight has he does. Dude is the founder of Nvidia by the way.
You're getting downvoted for this, but it has some merit. It could be argued that NVDA's flat structure is what led to the company's success - Jensen himself greenlit the development of CUDA from the anecdotes I've heard. However, in the last 2 or 3 years the board should have pushed for more redundancy and a succession plan.
Since NVDA had such a flat corporate structure with Huang having ~60 direct reports, I expect that the company will be lost for a period of time as they try to get their bearings. This is an opportunity for AMD, INTC and others.
At the very least a succession plan. Just insane that there wasn't someone ready for this in case he keeled over one day (for some definition of keeled).
This is a $5T (well, I guess $4T now) company we are talking about. What is the board being paid for?
You say that as if a lottery assigns companies what product they shall make. Or that they found their product designs in a kinder egg.
They had an idea which they thought will be valuable. And they worked bery hard on making that idea a reality.
People complain that companies don’t have leadership with long term vision. The leadership of NVIDIA heard the idea of GGPU computation and put the resources behind the idea to make it a practical reality. Here the gap between “nerdy idea” to “product sells like hot-cakes”, is measured in decades. That is not just luck.
Finding yourself making matrix multiplication machines for computer graphics, then suddenly an unrelated technological revolution requires that exact hardware?
This is survivorship bias. Show me a Jobs-like track record and then we can talk business genius. This guy had 1 at bat and (to mix sports metaphors) we don't know if he skated to where the puck was heading, or if the market happened to converge on this thing because it was available.
Also, your comment has a hefty dose of survivorship bias. Lots of companies have long term visions they think will be valuable, and work very hard towards making them a reality. Few succeed. You're counting the survivors, not the attempts.
Furthermore, you fail to demonstrate that a different CEO of NVIDIA would have done something different.
This take is crazy; NVIDIA not only built the GPU, *they created the demand.* For a very long time there was nothing like CUDA. They're working on an open-source self-driving car. Back when they were a gaming company, they sponsored the gaming ecosystem.
Jensen Huang cheated on his wife AND conspired to evade arms control regulations, but he's still a genius.
What are you're doing in your comment is a fallacy known in economics called survivorship bias.
The NVIDIAs of the world are vastly outnumbered by corporations who made a long term bet that failed, but because you're counting the successes, not the attempts, you see vastly inflated outcomes. Count the attempts to make these long shots, and Huang appears very lucky indeed. Crystal ball? Hardly! He couldn't forsee the outcome of 3 (is it still 3, or has the body count grown) affairs.
To prove Huang is a genius, you'd have to demonstrate that a different CEO of NVIDIA would have done something different.
NVIDIA is 33 years old! How much more successful does the largest corporation in the world have to be for you to admit some skill was required? Another two decades?
> Crystal ball? Hardly! He couldn't forsee the outcome of 3 (is it still 3, or has the body count grown) affairs.
Fortunately, I'm not claiming that Huang is a genius at getting away with affairs. I'm claiming that if any CEO can be called a genius at running their business, Huang can.
I'm not saying Huang is skill-less, and by making that claim in your comment, you are moving the goalposts. I am saying it is not obvious that he would have done genius-level better than a different CEO.
Your best claim is that Nvidia is the biggest company in the world; therefore Huang is a genius. Maybe; some days Apple is also in the running for biggest company in the world. By your metric Tim Cook is therefore a genius. This makes me seriously doubt your metric.
Both of these things can be true. He can be the best founder in the world that we want to be there forever AND we need to have someone just in case that is 100% up to speed.
I am curious which questions you found poorly informed? Jensen Huang started with "China could have trained a Mythos level model" because the resources needed for that were "mundane". Maybe you believe him on that or you know that to be true but maybe mundane is not the right word. Also the rest of his answer did not age well. I think Dwarkesh genuinely wanted to have a deep conversation and not to be a troll.
The uninformed part was a rather dismissive attitude to Chinese capabilities and the assumption that access to NVidia chips was the only important success factor.
Jensen has two core points:
- stopping selling NVidia chips to China isn't going to stop China developing AI
- stopping NVidia selling to China will ultimately ceed US leadership in chips as Nvidia's commercial edge is as much about the dominant developer ecosystem as it is the chips per se.
ie the real risk is the default world tech stack shifts to open models on Chinese chips. End result Chinese lead in both.
He has spent his entire career competing and winning and he is being told he has to stop competing in order to achieve a goal that he knows won't actually be achieved by sacrificing NVidia.
In that scenario, where somebody is suggesting you throw away your life's work for nothing - I think anybody would be animated.
>the real risk is the default world tech stack shifts to open models on Chinese chips.
As someone who isn't based in the US/EU and whose job is to deploy LLMs on premises, I can't wait for the moment when China starts selling its GPUs globally en masse with a proper CUDA equivalent. It's going to be cheaper in the long term and without all the export control drama.
Which is a good thing. I think it's insane to see so many comments along the lines of, we have to keep China from becoming the world leader in GPUs and AI tech instead of the US. Really? Why? Look at the evil the US has used its AI for. It's time for a more ethical nation to take the lead, and better for the world.
It's refreshing to see a podcaster push their guest to defend their positions, after having had the displeasure of listening to clips of Lex Fridman just accepting even obvious bullshit from his guests without any follow up. It sounds like Dwarkesh did the same with Dario, who argued the other side.
The questions weren't poorly informed just because you agree with what Jensen was saying. He seems pretty obviously to have made drastically poor judgement decisions that potentially affect national security of the US. I don't know if I would consider that to be a huge loss to the US.
The poorly informed part is the assumption that if Nvidia doesn't sell chips China AI dev will stop.
It clearly didn't - don't you remember the Deepseek launch where it came as a rude shock that the much vaunted concept of a compute capacity moat was blown away?
He kept repeating that while he made the best chips, computer science was more important.
Yea my understanding is that is also what it was about. I don't know if he knows state secrets or not. The affect on national security is more that if he's selling billions of dollars of GPU's to foreign adversary's he's helping foreign adversary's gain power over the US. The video in question talks about how selling GPU's is like selling enriched uranium, thus the national security concern. Whether that's a good analogy or not, I don't really know. But the people at these AI companies (ANT/OpenAI) do seem to talk a lot about how there's a non-zero chance AI will end the world so..
Interim. They just need someone to crisis manage. I’m sure they have veteran capable executives other than Jensen. Maybe the AI focus wasn’t all Jensens idea even
> Interim. They just need someone to crisis manage.
For Nvidia's sake let's hope so - but I suspect the problem is that anybody who knows their stuff will have the same opinions that got Jensen fired.
> Maybe the AI focus wasn’t all Jensens idea even
The source of the idea isn't important - Jobs famously 'borrowed' some of the best ideas from outside the company. The key skill is to be able to tell between the good and bad ideas and make the right strategic choices.
All of the sudden people care about keeping Nvidia around? Theyve been jerking people around for decades, screwing customers, shitty drivers, exploding power connectors, anti competitive practices for miles.
those are mere gamer issues. perhaps more relevant ten year ago, but these days, the only question is the rack-scale products (and in that market, Nvidia's driver game has been pretty OK, though unfortunately closed-source).
We used their GPUs at scale before there was AI, and nvidia has always been a hostile vendor to deal with. I'm so ecstatic that at least huangs reputation is now in the trash, and I hope nvidia suffers severe consequences for all the decades of crap they've put us through
Yeah, you always want someone sacrificial to be the immediate next person in the hot seat. Too much emotional expectations will be attached to whoever is next. Let the next person take all of the crap long enough so that the person you actually want has a clear path. You see this in sports franchises as well.
It's the type of old man heated, when you have a nuanced perspective and take on a complex subject, and someone younger is trying to reduce it to overly simple narratives and metaphors.
It's a good time to be heated and remind the other side they're acting childish.
Let's be clear, she is just the interim CEO (primarily because Huang neglected to ever even start a transition plan) while NVidia searches for a permanent CEO. The names I've seen floated are Rene Haas, CEO of ARM, and Ian Buck, the creator of CUDA.
I'm not sure what to make of the idol worshipping going on here. He was an average CEO and the train will continue right along. NVIDIA doesn't exist because of some inherent greatness of a single person.
He also fostered shifting the product line to enterprise- dominant and therefore fostered the acceleration of decline of personal computing. There’s no nuance that I can see reflected in his actions; big money AI spenders come, he jumps in feet first. If “democratization of AI” is even a concept, it’s pretty insulting that the personal consumer is cut out (but let’s make sure China is still getting hardware)
He has poor judgement but I’ve yet to see any of the major consumer hardware companies that understand both hardware and software in the way he did. Or really the value of a fully vertically integrated stack.
Nvidia thrived because it paired great hardware with great software.
AMD and Intel think hardware is enough; it’s not. There’s a reason neither has ever been able to compete with Nvidia.
They have a giant ego, but I’d argue it’s probably well deserved.
Apple is/was similar. They also see that hardware without great software is useless. Spend as much; if not more on software to make your hardware shine.
Intel has some good compilers that take advantage of their hardware don't they? I think AMD now understands the software side of things, and is trying to fix it. Wonder how long it will take for them to get close to Nvidia's software side?
That was 15 years ago. They haven’t done it since.
Look at optane; amazing hardware but total flop.
Nvidia made their market, they had these GPUs which were great at linear algebra so they found new systems to drive more demand for more powerful chips, things like PhysX, CUDA, DLSS, AI inference, etc.
They induce demand where others chased it.
Doesn’t excuse his faults but you can’t ignore what the company did.
According to you, in comparison to the current competition, hardly Microsoft Google, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, the Koreans, the Chinese, the Linux world, they don’t add up not when it comes to hardware and software and the ability to create an ecosystem, you’re actually dead wrong.
Another thing is wrong was thinking that Apple should run in and build some type of AI model that’s proving to be well wrong the only thing in Apple’s way right now is memory. certainly isn’t money, and they certainly have the talent and house to fix the memory problem. The question is whether or not they have the will to do so.
No one equals Apple at this point in time when it comes to seamlessly integrating multiple devices in a useful way. Be it a desktop computer, laptop a smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, Apple Vision, AirPods with each iteration, once again in comparison to their competition, they seem to have the best hand at this time.
Memory cost is the biggest problem Apple has right now and it’s not like they don’t lack the money and with the Apple Silicon design group they certainly have the capability to fix it, or I should say design around it.
Yes, it might take 2 to 5 years to do it, but it’s not impossible, the main question is, do they have the will? And they’ve certainly shown it when it comes to processors, GPUs, modems, and other support chips that they can execute over time.
They may not execute on what you want or what I want, but in comparison to their competition, who is out there right now that can combine both the software and the hardware at a high level across the board?
I have no idea what you're trying to say in relation to my comment, but you do try to set up and take down several wild straw man arguments which I never made, so you might as well respond to your own comment and keep it going, I don't even need to participate.
This is such an arrogant, presumptive and mean-spirited comment that I cannot imagine you actually want an answer or a healthy conversation about the topic.
You need to review Hacker News site guidelines and refrain from posting flamebait.
Yes, we’re gonna find out how important he was. If he is on the level as some of the other great CEOs Nvidia gonna have trouble, this little flare could be the beginning of the AI bubble bursting. Because I don’t see Intel or AMD rising to the same level as Nvidia. Microsoft seems to be having bad luck with their team-ups.
I can't say it was solely his choice but Nvidia continually made fantastic market moves. CUDA, then their positioning to ride the crypto boom, and then the AI boom. all of that required deliberate planning with a strong long term vision.
Not true. The decisions always come out of the person at the top. See what happened to Intel recently when they had a succession of MBA bad CEOs…
Nvidia is a highly technical company we’re gonna find out how important Jensen really was to that company tech wise?
And if you look closely at their company, what have they really innovated on over the last five or six years? from a distance, like Intel, it seems like they just turn up the juice/Wattage in short, they are just cruising along.
Definitely not average, but Nvidia is the definition of one trick, and that one trick long-term will be their downfall, Intel is in the same position and so is AMD and Microsoft.
Due to sanctions there’s one Chinese company that seems to have become a multi-dimensional company we won’t know for sure for another two years.
Being a vertical computer company appears to be coming back in style bring on the 1980s. early 1990s.
NVIDIA doesn't exist because of some inherent greatness of a single person.
Yeah, it pretty much does. CUDA is why they are positioned where they are. Other players like AMD and Intel could have done that, but they didn't, and if they had, they wouldn't have persevered for 10+ years with essentially nothing to show for it.
Whether CUDA will continue to maintain dominance is less clear. It may become a literal victim of its own success, as CUDA-based models gain the ability to migrate themselves to new platforms.
It is because of his vision. And with him gone, we shall find out about Nvidia, when Apple computer went through a succession of mediocre CEOs, they were on the ropes if it wasn’t for the founder CEO coming back, Apple would’ve been history like Sun, SGI, Acorn, Commodore, Digital and a host of other computer companies from the 1980s and mid-1990s.
Western companies have had that problem. when the visionary CEO bites the dust. I think the Eastern companies are even more susceptible.
Note: Nvidia is the very definition of a one trick company I think they were in trouble long-term no operating system, Microsoft is in trouble in the other direction. No real in-house hardware ability. Long-term you have to have the ability of both in-house to adjust and iterate over the long haul with the changing conditions in tech.
He may not have 'invented' CUDA but he saw the potential and gave it resources to be created and continually developed.
How many "CUDA-like" ideas have be squashed at other companies by leaders that don't see the potential or are willing to take a multi-year loss?
IMO, it's like SpaceX vs other rocket companies - especially Blue Origin.
Bezos, at least at first, had just as much money if not more than Musk. So why did SpaceX do so much better than them and every other rocket company. I despise Musk personally, and he's generally not as smart as he makes himself out to be - but there is something there he does differently than others in his position, some with similar resources as he does as well.
Bezos is a genius and an another direction? a direction that is 180° different than Elon? and neither one probably will ever do well on the other person’s home field.
The temporarily embarrassed billionaires have swarmed your comment to remind you that success is based on a single person, which is why they should get to do whatever they want when they're running their own Nvidia-sized corp one day.
I'm not sure how long I should've kept watching but so far that looks like very good and knowledgeable answers, exactly what I'd expect from a competent tech CEO.
Unless it's like super far in, if this counts as heated then I just don't know what you expect.
Why are you posting random unrelated things? The comment you were responding to: "Jensen getting really heated when pressed by Dwarkesh over China during his interview". Jensen's push for China in some other interview where he didn't lose his composure is unrelated.
Is related to the subject of him being a chill for China. Anybody would guess the context, people dont need somebody to find the link to an interview being mentioned. But they will be interested in another similar one, and I posted it at the exact relevant second.
Now that I explained it in detail for you, shall we move on to addition and subtraction? Or do you need a short pause because your head is hurting you?
When you link the interview as a response to that comment, it implies that you are linking the specific interview that was discussed, while it's actually a DIFFERENT interview that doesn't contain the thing that was discussed. That is deceptive.
I remember listening to that and thinking, this sounds like a guy who is primarily focused on selling chips and is brushing away legitimate concerns in a way that, I just did not find very compelling. A little bit too much protest you might say. Not to say there isn't or wasn't validity to his arguments, but in light of the current circumstances it seems to me that those arguments are quite a bit less valid than they were, and I've certainly swung my personal opinion from being on the fence to a hard no to selling these chips to Chinese buyers.
If the Chinese Communist Party are going through such great lengths to obtain these advanced Nvidia chips, it further invalidates a lot of what I've been reading here and elsewhere about China "catching up" or that being the leading models isn't what matters (commoditization). You don't do stuff like this unless you really need something.
I think it's worth remembering that China isn't a monolithic bloc, and CCP doesn't drive everything, that there are tons of private enterprises there that would benefit, even if the Chinese government strategically would prefer to push Huawei to grow the domestic capability. There being a ton of private demand internal to China doesn't invalidate Jensen's view that it's a strategic blunder to let Huawei get a foothold in the market. Within the CCP, there's also a lot of inter-regional competition to show growth in their own regions, because that's the primary qualification for advancement within the party.
That said, I don't have any special insight into the specifics of who was driving the demand backing Megaspeed.
there's a good analysis that says Alice was a fixer and/or white-glove. those are common-in-China roles that have to do with obfuscating big financial operations, not necessarily with any political (CCP) involvement. obviously, CCP approves, if tacitly, everything that happens in China.
Which part? You find it hard to believe that there are private enterprises there that don't always do exactly what CCP wants? Or that there're conflicting incentives inside the CCP, so that "what CCP wants" isn't simple?
Talking to friends who worked in diplomacy - honey traps are extremely common and often tried quite routinely. It makes sense if you think about it. The failure rate on these is going to be fairly high and even if it’s a small success (ie a one night stand sort of thing) you can get a little compromat. The cost is probably fairly negligible, a lot of this will be fairly low risk as far as spying goes.
My favourite honey trap story comes from the cold war. A Russian diplomat in Denmark was the target of Danish intelligence. They tried to honey trap him at a party, but he didn't respond to their agent's advances. So, the Danes supposed that he might be gay, and sent a male honey trap to the next party, but again got no response from the Russian. They shrugged their shoulders and gave it up.
Unbeknownst to them, the Russian was actually at that time trying to make contact with western intelligence, as he was keen to defect! He was just a bit too awkward to respond to flirting.
He did eventually manage to defect to Britain, and died in 2025. His name was Oleg Gordievsky.
> honey traps are extremely common and often tried quite routinely.
WSJ reports that U.S. intelligence says Chinese intelligence approached Alice to become an asset after she met Jensen in March 2024. So, she was an opportunistic info source, not targeted in advance.
also, men are redickulous. And they can go in any number of beneficial direction from turning informant, selling GPUs to the chinese, or just a pee tape, etc. Just like a lottery of fun ways to screw with an adversary.
China catching up does not mean they are not still behind.
Also, China is a big country with many companies. While some may be trying to catch up via local development, others may still prefer getting western hardware right now e.g. in order to get a competitive advantage over those catching up.
I'm a bit out of the loop, what part of what he said is wrong? He said they have more power and the more capability to produce chips, so they can essentially just brute force things vs the US if they wanted to: is that not the case?
That's like asking why China is building nuclear and coal power plants when solar is so much cheaper. They are doing all of the above.
Let's assume for a second that the compromat story on Huang is true, how much would that have cost? It could be everywhere from 10k to 10m $, depending on how difficult it was to get access, but it would still be a rounding error for AI invest.
Chips aren't what maketh SI anyway. The US is ahead because of a trifecta of having the best (most) hardware, best data, and best talent. You might also throw in business culture. But the same way Google is leading from behind in the US AI eco system, China is behind the frontier on LLMs, but laying foundational work in robotics, multi-modal models and integrated factories that might prove a big advantage down the line.
I'm in the EU myself, and while I do believe we (and China) have similar levels of taltent, there are two reasons why it seems to me like the US can extract more from them: 1. In the EU people aren't pushed to perform to the maximum and 2. In China they aren't rewarded for it. The US is pretty much the only place in the world where an IC researcher at a major lab can become a millionaire.
Everywhere else you have to become a founder or manager, and that's not a good path for many talented people.
The writing is on the wall in the United States. The lack of real infrastructure usable by as many people possible currently being built is sorely lacking in comparison to China or Japan or Korea. Within the American borders, there used to be more of a can do attitude that does not exist at the same level as in the past, the attitude today is more in keeping with US steel, IBM, or Xerox…
No it's not the case because if they could do it they would already have done it. Selling them Nvidia chips doesn't change that.
But here's a link to the podcast episode if you want to give it a listen. It will inform a lot to the discussion taking place here and help you understand a few of the things he said that are probably now wrong: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/jensen-huang
But what’s the point ultimately? Delaying their progress by a couple years?
Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.
(and could leave Taiwan in a much weaker position in the near future)
People are bending over backwards to come to try to find some deep reason, but I think the reason is simple - the people in charge are not particularly farsighted nor insightful. It's simply short-term thinking without consideration of long-term consequences - it's not limited to just businesses.
For another example, the reason Chinese are not allowed on the 'international' ISS is because of the Wolf Amendment. [1] The idea was that if we just allowed them onto the ISS they'd steal all of our elite tech or something. Within a decade they had launched their own space station and carried out various revolutionary space activities.
And of course all of that happened while the ISS itself continues to deteriorate with no replacement in sight. And when China did an unprecedented sample return mission from the far side of the Moon and offered the whole world access to samples, US researchers had to jump through a bunch of hoops to receive them, again thanks to the same law.
It feels like Space Race thinking, honestly. If the US delays China and ends up with an AGI god a few years in advance, that can still be a significant advantage even if China can catch up. This especially would hold true if a theoretical AGI could maximally leverage RSI so the improvement curve becomes exponential.
If the US or China developes an AGI that can leverage RSI, the game is over. It is over in the same way that WW3 is over as soon as the missiles are in the air: it doesn't matter who has the fastest or highest yield missiles, because there is a finite amount of time before there is nobody left to care about the advantages of one side. Except at least WW3 is over in about an hour, whereas an AGI could take years or decades to complete whatever thing it has been misaligned to desire.
AI alignment research is still in its alchemy era, and global cyber security is underfunded and bad. As a species, we simply do not have the tools to deal with AGI that can self-improve.
What stops another power from developing its own AGI a year or two later? Or from catching up once there are two competing RSI AGIs? The Soviets were a few years behind on getting nukes but they still got them.
> What stops another power from developing its own AGI a year or two later?
Well, the fact that we're all gone before then if we're unlucky. If we're on a lucky enough timeline where AGI with RSI doesn't immediately end civilization, then maybe we last long enough for the second to be created at least.
But unless we solve the AI assignment problem, it really doesn't matter if we quickly get 2-3 AGIs: an unaligned AI will be the end of us in the long term.
One would hope that self preservation would be a factor, but it seems hubris has deluded many people into thinking they can control a superhuman intelligence.
> Not selling them chips virtually guarantees that they will learn how to make their own, very quickly. The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA.
Are you proposing we guarantee access to avoid potential access?
This isn’t what China does though, the moment new tech crosses the border they reverse engineer and start producing it locally. IP protections are meaningless there. How many times does this have to happen to sink in?
What needs to happen is that the people who are getting wealthy from the offshoring of manufacturing and labor to China need to stop getting wealthy. Until then any and all excuses to pretend that China will operate in good faith will be levied to try and make people seem like it's in their best interest to hollow out the USA to hand over to China.
The problem is, the man in the mirror and it ain’t just the Chinese that have taken advantage, the Japanese and the Koreans are pretty good too, and so are the Taiwanese and it’s only a matter of time for one or two countries in Southeast Asia to rise up too, and if it wasn’t for Russia’s stupidity, both Russia and the Ukraine would have certainly produced what three or four very, very good AI models to the mix…
Soon, China, if they aren’t already, will be the premier developer of Thorium reactors courtesy of Oak Ridge, Tennessee and they also are now number one or at the least 1A when it comes to high-speed rail, and if the Russians and the Ukrainians weren’t fighting each other, that high-speed rail probably would be already built out all the way to eastern Europe.
No in the Taiwanese part. Jensens Huang has dual citizenship including Taiwanese citizenship. I wouldn't say that he "helps" Taiwan but that foster a stronger trading relationship between Taiwanese companies and the AI industry in the U.S.
The Taiwanese and the Chinese almost certainly talk to each other every day. When money is involved, come on they talk and they share. That’s like saying the border between Mexico and United States is secure. We would like to say it is, but we all know it really isn’t..
Keeping them dependent upon you guarantees that they never surpass you and that you can milk the relationship for all its worth economically and geopolitically. When they have their own fabs spun up it's possible that you are the one eventually stuck with inferior tech, and you lose all sort of revenue + leverage you'd otherwise have from the relationship.
It's certainly possible, but unlikely. Because for some window of time domestic alternatives will offer less for more. And so there's no real market fit for them, meaning they're only going to survive if the government constantly props up the companies which opens the door to all the usual problems of such relations - perverse motivations, grift, inefficiency, artificial cost/time bloat, etc.
So even if the government sets out to surpass you, it's quite likely to just turn into a black hole of money. See: CHIPS Act leading to many billions spent to... remain completely dependent upon Taiwan. But all of this changes when you create a scenario where domestic players are the only players in the market.
Huawei has become a super company basically because of all the sanctions, Wxmt will become the dominant memory maker worldwide in the next five years due to shortsighted thinking in the West.
It make sense. China had X amount of demand. If the demand is met they are satisfied, if the demand remains unmet they seek alternatives. That seeking of alternatives primarily means huge amounts of money, that would go to Nvidia, going to direct competitors of Nvidia to "chip" away at their competitive advantage.
The long term result is the same regardless of who makes the chips but the real strategy is delaying China's ability to surpass the US. It takes a lot of time and money to essentially copy the entire infrastructure required to build an Nvidia GPU. Nvidia has enough demand as is.
China is a trading partner but there is still a serious catalyst for war in the form of the South China Sea. If we went to war with China in 5 years time, why would we sell them the tech they need to match our ability now? Let them figure it out on their own.
If the US wanted to delay "China's ability," wouldn't the strategy be to give them just enough GPUs to keep them reliant on Nvidia (and make developing alternative tech locally seem less critical), but not enough to develop superior models?
"The end result of that is much, much worse for the USA."
And therefore, much better for the world. Look at what the US has done with its dominance: maintained a petrodollar empire while steadfastly denying that such an empire exists, attacking countries that step out of line, murdering at will. Trump just made it obvious what the US did, and was blatant in his evil, but he was just continuing what other presidents did before him.
AI has been identified as strategic national priority for both the Chinese and United States.
NVIDIA’s commercial interest is pretty clear… it’s beneficial to them. to sell everyone to maintain the dominance of CUDA. That is not necessarily the national interest. And remember that espionage and infiltration is not a one-sided affair, the US may well have the ability to sabotage Chinese development efforts. You just don’t know.
End of the day, corporate CEOs are very powerful, but they’re not as powerful as the government. My guess is that Jenson truly didn’t think that this individual was a spy, and figured that the questionable legality of chip exports to Chinese proxies could be addressed by ingratiating the administration.
No, they haven't. They spent the first decade after WW2 repairing the damage left behind by the Japanese and their Civil War. Subsequently they managed to starve tens of millions afterwards in several missteps, and then righted themselves.
They then spent three to four decades lifting about thrice the US population out of extreme abject poverty, and then in the last 20 years catching up. And catch up they have; they are already the leaders in green technology and EVs, already manufacture some of their own chips, already have indigenous military aerospace capability, which they are now expanding to civilian use. They make almost everything in the average household.
Who says we won't just progress as well and they stay behind a couple of years?
Where is the evidence that China is catching up considered a fiat d accompli?
Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese Exceptionalism to me.
If they could just "catch up" they would, and whether we sell them chips wouldn't matter because they would want to create their own Nvidia and export chips and make money too.
> Do you presume that China is destined to always at least catch
> up in every sector or field ever? That stinks of Chinese
> Exceptionalism to me.
Suppose you want to build something that requires technical knowledge (a GPU, a fighter jet, ...). You have engineers, but they don't yet know how to build it.
If no one on earth has ever built this thing, you need to consider the possibility that it can't be done at a cost you can pay. Perhaps it violates some law of physics, or it can't be manufactured without knowing some chemistry/physics that we are 100+ years from discovering.
If a company in some other country is already building this thing, you can be sure it is possible to build it. That is a critical piece of information! It means you don't need to discover (much) new physics. It means you can buy/steal a working copy and look at it to learn about it. It means there are engineers you can hire/spy on to understand their design process. It means you can more easily convince a bank/government to fund development, as they have proof your goals are achievable.
Inventing a thing is much harder than inventing a clone of a thing. The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.
> The idea that China doesn't have the people and organization to copy things other countries make is the opposite of Chinese Exceptionalism. It is the belief that the Chinese are uniquely incapable of engineering work. This is obviously not true.
Which broadly leads to two conclusions:
They can't do it. If they could they would. If you could invest and create your own Nvidia, ASML, TSMC, &c. you would do that especially if you are China due to its stated goals and actions it takes that we can all see toward those goals.
They can do it and so selling them the chips doesn't matter other than helping to speed up their ability to do it, so we don't want to sell them the chips and thus speed up their capabilities.
But your viewpoint also holds true for the United States and Europe. Anything China can do we can also do, otherwise you're just supposing Chinese Exceptionalism.
Models aren’t everything. You need physical infrastructure at scale for inference, which is where the economic power comes from. Chinese hardware makes double the heat and needs at least double the energy input.
Exactly. And we better keep it this way. The fact that we can block them from copying us today means that they will try that much harder to come up with their own answers. Remember, they are miles ahead in manufacturing hardware and the software is not a problem anymore. Whatever moat cuda represented is gone now.
It's not like the chinese companies came up with their own breakthroughs that allowed their models come close or even match frontier capabilities but can run on your own machine rather than massive data centers. To say that US models are "the smartest kid in class" when talking about efficiency is just silly.
Their view of China is decades out of date, and they aren't paying attention to the recent history of industries where China has gone from playing catch-up to outright dominance.
It's not just about the end product (GPUs or whatever). It's about the entire supply chain, manufacturing capacity, and industrial ecosystem behind it.
And the dangerous assumption is that being technologically ahead today guarantees you'll stay ahead tomorrow.
It doesn't matter if China's products are "only" 80–90% as good as their non-Chinese alternatives if those alternatives eventually go out of business because they've lost the market.
Once the customers, manufacturing capacity, suppliers, and expertise have migrated elsewhere, being technically superior doesn't mean much. And rebuilding that ecosystem is vastly harder than losing it.
We've seen versions of this play out in solar panels, batteries, consumer electronics, and increasingly automobiles. There's no reason to assume GPUs or CUDA-like software stacks are somehow immune.
That's what Jensen is (and was) trying to protect. Not just Nvidia's chip sales, but an entire ecosystem of expertise, manufacturing, suppliers, and supporting industries.
Otherwise, you risk repeating what happened with telecom equipment. Everyone buys the cheaper Chinese alternatives, non-Chinese suppliers lose market share or go out of business, and Chinese technology becomes embedded in critical infrastructure everywhere.
Then, SURPRISE, everyone suddenly realizes the security and geopolitical implications, worries about espionage, and starts demanding that it all be ripped out and replaced.
Except by then, you've already hollowed out the industries that could have supplied the replacements.
This is good evidence sanctions don't really work. Critical sectors will find ways around them and it only punishes the rank and file working class. If China or any sanctioned nation wanted those nvidia chips, it has ways to get them. So the military and intelligence get them, but the people don't. Same with sanctions on Russia now, which has not significantly slowed its military machine, but in fact its military machine is coming out with constant innovations (new Gerans, better EW, more spy sats, etc). I remember seeing a post mortem of some Russian drone. It had a Jetson chipset Russia was not supposed to be able to get. I imagine the smuggling market is far bigger than we might think and sanctions far less effective than we think.
Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed. Sanctions are almost always an attack on the working class who do not make the high-level political decisions the sanctions are trying to address. Not to mention the idea of "making life hard on them so they revolt" almost never works.
Sanctions should be a bigger conversation. They are almost never needed and especially trade tariffs and such are always used for the most corrupt cronyism.
> Same when you sanction food imports. The elites who make decisions will always be fed. Sanctions are almost always an attack on the working class who do not make the high-level political decisions the sanctions are trying to address. Not to mention the idea of "making life hard on them so they revolt" almost never works.
There’s also the minor quibble that restricting food exports to starve another country are illegal under international law.
Nobody is starving in Russia (at least unavoidably).
That sanctions only harm the civilian economy is not an argument against them. Kinetic sanctions agains oil refining are also primarily impacting the general population and the military have enough oil. But they still impact the ability of the Russians to fund the war. Civilian infrastructure and economic assets are used by militaries too.
I watched the interview. I think the arguments made sense. People get heated talking about the colour of an object they can both see. I wouldn't want to project reasons for heated behaviour.
For the record I think that less than half of the people who thought the dress was black and gold were being influenced by the Chinese government to take that position.
Yeah call me crazy but I don't see the need to sell the cutting edge chips to China if you're already a trillion dollar company. Sure more money is nice, but not living under the thumb of a global dictatorship is nice too.
If the sale is not about money or share price then maybe it's ideological.
> The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china
As a business, why shouldn't they advocate for export to a relatively huge market? It is an expansion for them and from a business perspective completely expected.
Now legislators demonstrated how much that matters. I don't have the knowledge to evaluate the national security concerns. But from the outcome, it's a matter they'll firmly push as a long term strategy, even at the cost of one of the world's most visionary CEOs.
Because the government, empowered by the people, have decided it matters, as a matter of national security.
There's is no argument to be had about this specifically. You can argue whether this is true or not, but that's not relevant to this subject. If Nvidia still decides to ignore the government, it'd be not only completely, absolutely fair, to nationalize the corporation, but the country itself has a duty to its citizens to do such thing.
They should and there’s nothing wrong with only advocating. The problem is that it wasn’t just advocating but (possibly) knowingly subverting the export controls
Turns out there are laws and regulations that restrict one’s ability to lobby for foreign interests as both a public and private individual. Read about NJ Senator Bob Menendez which is a particularly egregious example.
US congresspersons and international media outlets condemned the use of AI warfare against Iran, including the Department of Defense's (DoD) Project Maven—a target tagging system integrating elements of Palantir's Maven Smart System and Anthropic's Claude large language model.
There was the kerfuffle with Dario Amodei and Pete Hegseth, who declared Anthropic a supply chain risk to the US. IMO, yes. Killer robots don't run on one 5090 :)
There is more spelunking to that situation, but that's a different thread.
> The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent is the real issue here.
OK sure .. obviously sleeping with Chinese agent is a security issue .. very bad .. but Nvidia's position on the export ban was sound. The export ban does not make sense. In fact, it is counterproductive because it closes a huge market to Nvidia and makes China less reliant on US Tech - forcing them to accelerate development of homegrown GPU business.
> Nvidia's position on the export ban was sound. The export ban does not make sense
Jensen had the ear of the President. He could have lobbied this properly.
Doing so by obscuring Nvidia’s Singapore business, failing to apply for an export license to Megaspeed, corruptly quashing a Commerce investigation into Megaspeed, all while sleeping with its leader who turned out to be a Chinese spy, and then only coming clean when the Congress flipped…I don’t know how he could have flipped the bird stronger at the American people.
> corruptly quashing a Commerce investigation into Megaspeed
I'm squarely blaming the federal admin for this. Lutnick and Rubio both knew about this way ahead of time, and their negligence is what ended up screwing the American people over. Removing Jensen doesn't prevent this corruption, it just shuffles the blame around. Huang became the fall guy for corruption at a ludicrous scale, while Donald Trump ponders installing Tim Cook (?) as his replacement.
The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. This is the Kardashian-ization of the American tech industry.
Everyone is. It's increasingly clear the administration helped Nvidia break the law [1].
But this is how corruption works. The mobster pays the mayor to let him break the law. That doesn't mean they aren't both breaking the law.
> t just shuffles the blame around. Huang became the fall guy for corruption at a ludicrous scale
Fall guy implies innocence and the end of the line for blame. Neither looks likely with this case. Jensen wasn't innocent. And there is is bipartisan fury starting with Lutnick.
> while Donald Trump ponders installing Tim Cook (?)
I think he got this idea from a joke Kara Swisher made. In the end, Trump would love nothing more than for a media circus around Jensen's succession to distract from the above.
Are we calling her a "Chinese agent" because her business smuggled chips into China or because anyone believes she was a trained intelligence operative? Does being monetarily incentivized to do business with China make her an agent?
Reported claims from officials is that she was working as an asset for China’s Ministry of State Security and providing them information... not simply doing business for her own company.
There is a lot of different ways that one can be an "asset" it could be as simple as giving information about who in east Asia is buying their legitimately purchased chips so that Chinese firms can try to buy or rent them. That would be very different from if as some have suggested she is a handler for Jensen.
If Nvidia was skirting the law, then they should held accountable for that.
If Nvidia merely held a position that the particular law is, say, counter-productive and lobbied against it (but followed it) - what's illegal about that?
>The export ban does not make sense. In fact, it is counterproductive because it closes a huge market to Nvidia and makes China less reliant on US Tech - forcing them to accelerate development of homegrown GPU business.
Could you tell China this? Because they seem to not agree at all, given what we are seeing
As a Chinese I think that "banning NVIDIA GPU is good for China" is a consensus in our Internet. If companies keep buying gpus from NVIDIA (actually not NVIDIA, but through some gray areas), then demostic GPU industry will be surpresse. You can check Bilibili or other main-stream platforms for this consensus. Honestly I support banning NVIDIA since SuperPod（超节点 in Chinese）will thrives for that.
> The image of Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised by an allegedly Chinese agent
I don't really buy that. China was already like Nvidia's #2 or #3 market. It didn't take a Chinese agent to convince him that he wanted to sell to China.
To me, the first "girlfriend" looks more like a chinese handler.
Jensen used his control of nvidia to forced nvidia customers to buy more hardware today that they did not need or they would be cut off from future orders.
That is how Jensen was able to increase nvidia production so he could increase the number of cards he could smuggle to china. I don't understand how jense is not in custody yet. He is a massive flight risk.
The only winners were jensen's bank account and chinese businesses that wanted nvidia gpus.
US businesses and consumers paid billions more for hardware because of Jensen's crimes.
We also need to investigate every CEO that partipated, because they likely are criminally culpable for their participation.
There's speculation that Trump knew about the Chinese spy and Nvidia donated $25M to the White House Ballroom in October 2025.
Even if this is just a coincidence, Jensen himself came out and said he donated to the ballroom, but kept the amount hidden. In internal documents, Jensen and Nvidia said to keep the amount hidden and it only came out due to disclosure documents from the government.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think that the risk is not nearly as real as it-- as they talk. And I think the risk can be managed. And it's managed, you know who? By who? The DOJ. We had a situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI. We called them very strongly and said, "Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night."
ROSS DOUTHAT: Who was this person?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Or this company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I can't tell you. But we said-- "Do you like the color orange because get rid --" said, "Go home right now. See your wife and children. Give 'em a kiss good night, and--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"that's the story because--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"because tomorrow morning--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --"you're goin' to jail."
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the-- if they--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Let me tell you--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --wanted to make a deal--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --to put that (UNINTEL)--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --this person totally changed everything. Totally. "Yes, sir. Yes, sir--"
ROSS DOUTHAT: "Yes, sir"?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Okay--
ROSS DOUTHAT: Was it a leader of a major AI company?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. Yeah.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Okay.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: One of the big ones. And--
ROSS DOUTHAT: If the Democrats--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --and-- and I don't think--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --said, "We wanna put th-- we wanna--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --"codify this into law--"
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --I don't think it was--
ROSS DOUTHAT: --would you work with them--
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: --done maliciously. But it coulda been malicious, but--
---
This is what losing the Rule of Law looks like by the way. The sitting president is on TV saying that he found out someone rich and powerful is suspected of wrong doing serious enough to get a call from the president threatening him with prison, but that that's the punishment. Once that rich and powerful person bent the knee, said "Yes sir" with the right tone of voice, all was forgiven.
Equal Justice under Law means that we shouldn't punish people we don't like with harsher sentences it also means that wealth and power shouldn't be sufficient to skirt the law.
We often speak of a two-tiered justice system, but I've never seen the president go on TV and tell America in no uncertain terms, it exists, I'm a part of it, and it went very well, he said "Yes sir" just the right way and so you don't need to worry about it.
Thank you for the transcript, I can hear it in my head with all the inflections and combativeness. Douthat reads as "Doubt That" to me, chef's kiss to whomever is writing the script for this simulation, haha.
You're just NOW noticing that we have lost the rule of law?? The constitution has been continuously violated for over 100 years, we are clearly a post-constitutional republic? I guess? I think we entered full clown world in the 2000's where the currency, government and war systems started glitching out.
What I am noticing is that the high trust society we inherited has finally eroded to the point that we no longer tell ourselves that we have rules and laws that are equally (or sanely) applied.
Which is a good, scales dropping from eyes, innocence ending sort of thing. Makes me hopeful for change, in a way.
I’m aware, Apple and other companies donated too. What I found odd was the lengths Jensen and Nvidia went to hide the amount. Other companies came out and said how much they donated.
Oh! That explains why Trump was so sympathetic to Jensen : "He is suffering. Poor man. He is such a nice guy. And his family… but he is suffering greatly."
No, he doesn't. Congress has abdicated this power up to now during Trump 2 because the GOP are total lickspittle sycophants. The Democrats will be spineless cowards -- at least the older generation -- but they won't be total pushovers on this front.
The Chinese government working hard to ban NVIDIA GPUs from the country [1][2][3].
How does it make sense that Jensen is compromised while advocating for exporting GPUs to China, which is something that primarily benefits NVIDIA (and arguably the US) while being against the Chinese interests? If he were compromised he would be like "well actually maybe I shouldn't export chips to China after all and give their domestic semiconductor industry a chance".
They obviously need/needed as much NVIDIA as possible short term, and locally produced superior alternative ASAP long term. So one hand rushes to secure all stocks of NVIDIA prosumer and enterprise cards, while another rushes to ban it.
The image is not a problem. That image has existed for months already. The problem is that Huang lost the tenuous protection that Trump and Lutnick agreed to give him so he could avoid jail. On that basis, investors are now scared the company might suddenly be under investigation for export violations.
> Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised
As a public company its job is to sell as much stuff as possible to as many people as possible, they had every incentive, arguably a duty to advocate for exports to China. The incentive is there regardless of outside meddling.
Skirting the sanctions intentionally would be bad.
> Nvidia advocating for exports of GPUs to china while compromised
I doubt it has anything to do with it really. China is a huge market and by not exporting to China they were missing out on tens to hundreds of billions in revenue. Any CEO would have advocated the same.
Considering the incredibly high demand for GPUs, they would have sold them regardless. All those sales do is increase demand and push prices up.
Particularly in the current political moment, saying essentially "we were using high demand in a market we can't legally sell in to increase prices for American customers" is not a good look.
(Yes,obviously, not all of this is Nvidia's doing, and demand at this volume through smuggling/front companies would still affect the legitimate market. But being an active participant in it is not a good look.)
And not that Nvidia is absolved of responsibility but it does make it a little easier if it's the new leadership in the hot seat for those things being like "yeah we did some naughty stuff but it was the last guy and we're working on hard on getting it all cleaned up."
Guessing Trump was talking about Jensen on 60 minutes this weekend when he said th DOJ called someone leading a major AI company and said "get ready to go to jail" 24:18 mark
This is dwarfed in scope of the compromise of NVIDIA by its shareholders, a shadowy group who some analysis believe have an interest in the sale of GPUs anywhere, a set of locations that is thought to include China.
The thing is China itself has no incentive to have their companies skirt the export ban. The whole saga is just completely ironic and incredibly unorganic. The alleged "spy" and her firm Megaspeed was doing export circumventing mechanisms to China not because the CCP was allegedly pushing her to do so, in fact it was a counter-reaction to how restrictive the Chinese customs became to importing Nvidia while the corresponding customers are hungry for that compute that is piling up in the ports. China is doing a zero-sum policy where every American chip that gets passed to their tech companies is one less domestic/chinese, which equates less money for R&D and catch up.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
I'm just exhausted, and I mean exhausted as in, I do not have it in me anymore, to presume interpretations like these are made in good faith, since for months we have been dealing with a barrage of comments that somehow always seem to justify, and often even praise, whatever, and I mean absolutely everything that China does.
This combines with the fact that it requires actual effort not to think China spreads propaganda regarding AI at this point, I'd rather err on the safe side.
You are writing this with the assumption that I'm chalking up alleged China actions or that I'm being their shill.
I don't, in fact it's the severity of this adverserial competition and why I want the liberal world to win this race that has got me peeling back the layers with nuance.
China is a legit adversary, with top electrical and software engineers. The chip layer in the AI industry is a constant and America is ahead in it, so it is in the best interest of all the global tech community and especially America to have its winners in it like Nvidia be ubiquitous and abundant. Unlike software, which is dynamic and has potential to do harm, that what should be regulated.
Just look at the actual track record of China and the United States. Domestically, they're both somewhat oppressive, but one benefit China has is that the government controls the billionaires, and in the US, the billionaires control the government. Internationally, though, there is no comparison at all. The US seeks to exploit and dominate other nations: look at Venezuela and the theft of their resources, the attack on Iran, all so the US could control the world's supply of oil and stay rich on the backs of all other nations having to buy oil that they control. China, on the other hand, does business with the world. They build infrastructure in other nations, they HELP them: the US just takes their resources and pays a fraction of their real value. China doesn't go around invading other nations: the US places military bases all over the world and calls other nations aggressors for not liking it. The US has been at war for most of its 250 year existence. Time for someone else to take the lead.
Especially on the Trump admin having knowledge for an entire year, and not acting on that information in any significant way.
It's not just NVIDIA that's extremely weak on China, the entire Executive branch is both weak and incompetent on what they claim is a chief concern, and Congress has been completely absent on the oversight role that it should be performing according to the US Constitution.
The incompetence and/or corruption is inexcusable. Teapot Dumb Scandal.
Honestly I doubt Huang seriously believed he could ride this out. He didn’t only jeopardise his own marriage, he jeopardised his company’s core IP, national security and possibly the entire global economy. That’s a tricky mistake to forgive.
I may sound arrogant, but I am not. Many people are a bit slow to catch on to these incidents or can't see beyond one layer, like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50418215
they think ceos are one many armies and no one else at these companies has talent or does work. its incredibly stupid and franky disrespectful to all the other hard working employees there who make shit happen every day
Agreed. "Huang was right to advocate for them, China has no incentive to skirt the import ban, sad day for developers," are not takes I thought I would read today.
> the affairs are not the reason he is being fired
The second one -- affair with a direct report -- is what he is being fired for. This one is hard for the board to ignore as it directly violates HR rules.
As for the ban for national security reasons, the ban is not super useful because it only prevents hardware from being physically imported into China. If the hardware is physically located in Singapore and Chinese researchers use those machines remotely, the US does not ban that it. If so how meaningful is the ban?
The first can be objectively and quickly ruled as violating company policy. The second has to go through a process -- did Jensen knowingly violate national security policy, and if so how significant was it?
I think, among other things, Nvidia’s board didn’t want to find out if a Congressional committee agreed about that.
Mr. Huang, you’ve admitted that you violated Nvidia’s policy on relations with subordinates. Why should we believe you were faithful to Nvidia’s policy of compliance with national security export controls?
Did the investigation complete that quickly? I don't think he was fired a few days after an investigation was announced. He resigned in disgrace under pressure due to all of his choices combined.
I hope nobody in the presidential administration needs to resign because of their role in the largest scandal in US history but if so, that is what is best for the country.
oh come on, do people genuinely believe HR rules plays as a role here when it's regarding CEO, especially someone at the helm at the one of the most valued company?
Time and time we saw executives having affairs and dodging consequences. Elon Mask, Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos. All faced much less severe consequences. Definitely not something blow over like this just after a few days it's being reported.
This is a coordinated attack on Jensen and it was very successful.
Those are just your average CEOs. Jensen is the founder and CEO of NVDA for 30 years and has been seen as one of the backbone of this AI era. No one at this level ever faced this level of scrutiny and consequence.
Even Bill Clinton faced relatively minor consequences, considering presidents should be held to a higher moral standard
> The national-security cover-up is a far bigger deal.
Could be, but that requires time to investigate. Banging employee is different because the board would just have to ask Jensen if the reports are true.
> that requires time to investigate. Banging employee is different
True. The combination probably did him in. But I don't think he'd have been fired if he only slept with an employee. Or had a couple affairs. That's just speculation, though.
Not the _only_ reason, sure. However, it's quite common when executives have an affair they will get fired. I think that's just the reality. If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
I was on the leadership team of a startup that is now public, during that build something like that happened (almost exactly the same as this NVIDIA situation sans the spy stuff), there were effectively 5 of us involved in what the outcome should be and it basically came down to: me and another guy didn't want to sit on a leadership team with someone who exercised judgement that way, to the point that it was me and the other guy or affair person, so affair person was out, even tho it was very painful for the business. Also, I don't think what I just described is particularly uncommon.
I have worked at a larger company where the CEO did something similar and across the company all anyone could ask was "why would you do something that dumb", which is not a great way for people to feel about the person supposedly leading the company.
Well, I'm not pro-affair, but I've seen lots of people say "why would you do something that dumb" about lots of executives, doing regular things like changing marketing plans, changing the color of the logo, choosing clearly inferior technology because of the caste of the chief architect, etc.
Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Look at the NVDA stock chart. There you go! That's why affairs are relevant to business! Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
To that end, it's the secret and the reveal of that secret that's the issue for a leader. If a CEO is open about his socially-unacceptable behavior from the beginning, there's no shock to absorb.
Yep that's an even better point. Though I would say there's a distinction between socially-unacceptable and untrustworthy. Being forthcoming both limits surprise (per your point) and mitigates the trust component of deviance.
> Yeah it's insane how many people are like "bro affairs are totally normal!" (they're not) or "affairs have nothing to do with the business!" (of course they do)
Why?
I'm playing a bit devil's advocate here, but why? Because society think it's bad and a leader should be associated with positive views? Because if they got caught they are not smart enough to be the leader?
Why just this specific thing is to be considered? Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination? I'm pretty sure many other CEOs have many of those "extravagances" and manage to keep their position but yet, if you have an affair, you're 100% toasted.
> Why, for example, all the Musk's "extravagances" are not ground for a CEO termination?
This has less to do with the relative social morality of his behavior, and rather that he has more control over the boards of his companies, and his personality represents a larger percentage of the perceived values of his companies.
Meaning that the desire and leverage for shareholders or the board to actually punish him is significantly less. Shareholders would potentially be evaporating trillions in speculative market value that is not backed up by Tesla or SpaceX's actual business fundamentals.
And any shareholders who disagree with his behavior have had plenty of time to leave and take their earnings by now, which means that the remaining shareholders are a self-selecting set who is okay with his behavior as long as it keeps making them money.
Going through dating, marriage, having children, growing a family, co-parenting children is a massive time and emotional investment (for most people who take it seriously). A large part of, at least Western, society is built on this concept of spousal trust. It's part of the tax code, its part of the legal code (spousal privilege), it's part of our moral fabric, it's a cornerstone of many religions. Breaking that is a huge betrayal of our collective societal moral understanding.
Right, and because he was willing to break a commitment that serious it de-values other commitments he's made, including those more directly relevant to the business.
All this coming from a country that elected twice as President a guy that married three times, led a very sexually promiscuous life, including the notorious boasting, and was accused of sexual misbehaviours by almost 30 women. Hilarious.
The US system gives voters two options for president. Those options are chosen by parties, and parties make terrible choices.
In 2016, the choice was between Trump and Clinton. Clinton famously excused her husband's infidelity by calling the long list of women who claimed they were assaulted as "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty".
In 2024, the choice was between Trump and Harris. Harris got into politics by being the mistress of a CA governor.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if the US presidential election offered a choice between someone who was moral and someone who was as immoral as our existing political class. But that has not happened in my lifetime, and I don't expect that to change.
One part trustworthiness, one part likeability, one part risk aversion. Some companies have very unlikable CEOs but they are otherwise effective enough to get by.
In this case, Huang hit all three. Changing CEOs is also a good way to get the media coverage over faster, or at least change the narrative in the pubic (and investors) minds.
If it were just an affair, I doubt he would have lost his job. It wasn't, though, and the other circumstances- potentially dodging export controls and abusing a role of power over a subordinate- came with far too much heat, so to speak.
Also, affairs make for much more entertaining gossip than the other items, so it's probably natural that that aspect gets talked about more.
It's not true that if you have an affair you're 100% toasted. And CEOs do get ousted for non-affair-like drama all the time.
But anyway a person's character is not cleanly separable between personal and professional life, so yeah affairs add (many) points to the "not to be trusted" column.
> Business is always about trust, and someone who isn't deserving of their own spouse's trust certainly isn't deserving of anyone else's.
It is a conflict of interest same as any other. If there is no conflict of interest then the company won't care. As the CEO of the company every other employee works for him and in turn he has power over them.
Society will not like you (in the US), but nothing more will happen.
Musk controls his companies stock and can't be fired. If that wasn't the case I think his situation would be very different - he's an outlier in most ways. But there's no board to enforce anything on him.
I think it often comes down to: do your actions match your words? In the instance above, when said exec joined our leadership team, they were well aware of the standard of conduct we expected, they agreed to them with their words, in fact. With us it was very simple, provided you're not a bigot, what you do on your own time is not our concern. However, what you do within our business is our concern. If you have intimate relations with anyone inside our company, even if consensual, you're no longer on our leadership team. Then, their actions did not match those words, when that is true, trust is gone. In society more generally I think this is true, there are people who we strongly expect their actions and words to match, and there are people who we know that isn't the case, and on some siding scale, we accept it (I didn't say acceptable). For example Fox News or CNN, marketing people, and to some degree apparently Elon Musk (in that people who matter to his success appear to believe they know where they stand with him). Groups typically have criteria/standards, if they change that, it may change the group to varying degrees, and that may be ok or not ok, depending on the group. I don't think this is an American thing or a European thing or anything like that, my understanding is this is a pretty human thing generally?
You cannot tell from the NVDA stock crash if it's because the CEO had an affair, or because NVIDIA illegally sold GPUs to China and is in huge trouble.
I can't see how the stock is highly inflated with a P/E of 20 and expected +100% year over year quarterly results expected in a few days. Normally companies doubling their revenue or profit (not sure which is what the expectation is here) are priced rather higher. A P/E of 20 is what I would expect for Coca-Cola, since it is going to grow at about population rate, since about everyone who wants to drink a Coca-Cola product is already doing so. (KO is currently 28, which I think is high, probably from people rotating out of tech)
Considering that extramarital escapades didn't prevent the current US president from being elected twice - and quite recently at that - I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with cultural acceptance.
At the end of the day, it's also just too simplistic.
Humans don't have some kind of overall "morality" or "judgment" setting that applies equally to all areas of life, where a failing in one area translates to failings in other areas.
You can be an amazing CEO and a terrible father. You can have the best judgment in the world around mothering, and abysmal judgment in business. Most importantly, you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance.
The idea that there is this binary switch, where someone is either perfectly trustworthy in all contexts, or else you can no longer trust them in any context, is just not an accurate understanding of how real human beings work. It's not supported by modern psychology.
The affair isn't the issue, or at least not the only issue, it's who he had the affair with.
At the end of the day Jensen chose to have an affair with a senior officer of a company strongly suspected of bypassing trade restrictions and should have known that it would be a terrible look for Nvidia and himself. Even if he didn't suspect her of being an agent of China, even if he didn't believe the allegations against Mega speed, even if he had no intentions of passing confidential information or aiding in bypassing trade restrictions. He knew it would carry the appearance of all those things.
"you can be totally trustworthy in the realm of business, yet not in romance."
If you can't adhere to the terms of a voluntarily-entered personal contract with a person to whom you've promised utter faithfulness, why should I believe you'll be trustworthy with regard to some boring, impersonal business contracts?
It's perfectly possible to be trustworthy in one thing and not the other. If you can't trust a lion with your flock of sheep doesn't mean you can't trust it with a bunch of bananas.
yes, that exactly the point. i want my colleagues to behave correctly on the job - i don't care if they have 3 boyfriends or cheat on their partner. it's not the point. it can be fun to gossip around the coffee machine, but that's about it. nobody should be fired for having an affair.
This is more than an affair though. This is an affair with someone he has a business relationship with and thus it becomes the interest to the business. There are many many cases where someone give business favors to the person they are having an affair with.
My company is willing to hire my wife, but she wouldn't be allowed to work for me, nor I her.
If he’d had an affair with his physical therapist absolutely no one would care and he wouldn’t be out- it’s the totality of his actions and his extreme lack of judgement at issue.
All (or nearly all) fortune 500 company has a rule against sleeping with a subordinate, and it is one of the most common reasons for a CEO to be fired. If all we learned about was the second affair, I still expect he would have been fired. So every single successful actor has arrived at the same conclusion, but you don’t understand why. This is a great opportunity to learn something new.
One of the reasons this behavior is problematic in general is the potential for blackmail. It's not even really a statement about morality, just an acknowledgement that somebody who wants to keep things hidden is going to be beholden to the people who know the secrets.
Jensen went to many high profile parties with this woman. I don't see where he's trying to even hide it. Even the kiss was made out in public, not like a hotel room.
Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes. I recall the story about a president who was confronted with condemning photos of his activities by CIA agents, and he pretty much encouraged the agents to publish the photos.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes
No? All it requires is for Jensen to want to remain with his wife and for his wife to be willing to divorce him if she finds out he has an affair.
Or, even if we suppose he doesn’t care about his wife’s feelings at all, he might be very incentivised by losing half of his assets in a divorce. It’s worth many, many millions to him.
> Also, an affair is only blackmail material in a society of prudes.
You don’t have to be a prude to think cheating on a spouse is condemnable.
In general, it also doesn’t really matter what society thinks. You can just threaten to reveal the affair to the spouse. And even in the case the spouse doesn’t really care it’s fodder they can potentially use in a divorce to get a better deal.
One thing worth pointing out is that in this case in addition to the affair with the Chinese spy he was allegedly having an affair with a subordinate, which is always problematic.
Apparently the KGB tried to honeypot him - and they were flabbergasted when he asked for copies of the photos. Apparently photos of him with multiple Russian women would bolster his machismo image back home?
Although if you read his Wikipedia page, he had many, many wives, some concurrently, and the youngest was 19...so it's probably true, lol.
Then you read about a certain EV company CEO and his escapades and repopulating the planet, and you don't know what to think.
Or Charlie Sheen...
I guess politicians, celebrities and CEOs are another world from us mere mortals.....
Reminds me of the Coldplay concert couple, which happened to be a CEO and head of HR. Head of HR! And what's more interesting is that they only got removed when the affair became public. At the same time the company was small potatoes so presumably less interesting to state actors.
It’s not just about humiliation. If your boss is sleeping with your coworker or someone on your team, how can you trust their decisions are grounded in fairness and logic. Sure, the world doesn’t work this way, and ceos are at a different realm than a mid level manager, but this is usually how HR defines things.
Several publicly traded companies have (or had) majority-owner CEOs, which makes it more than a little awkward for the board to fire them. I can't really see the board outing Zuckerberg under similar circumstances
> If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out
There is no "* only applies to publicly traded companies". Hence, it is incorrect.
The bigger point I am trying to make here being that not everything is investor-driven. People can run businesses without that. It annoys me greatly that HN regularly forgets that.
In publicly-traded companies, the board is not the ultimate boss, though. That would be the shareholders. And, at Meta and many companies copying Meta's playbook who have IPO'd since (notably including Anthropic, though notably not including Nvidia), founder shares have so much voting power that the founders are effectively in complete control.
In theory, Nvidia shareholders, if dissatisfied with today's decision, could vote to oust the current board and replace it with people more sympathetic to Huang, who would, as their first decision, re-hire him as CEO, as would be their prerogative. This is... unlikely to happen.
Public companies in the US are required to have a board of directors. If they’re not a “controlled company” - i.e. no single person controls more than 50% - then a majority of the board are required to be independent, i.e. not employees, executives, or consultants to the company.
If you publicly humiliate your family and the business, you're out...
It's not entirely about humiliation.
Having an affair (or multiple, in this case) demonstrates poor decision making. You don't want someone who can't make wise choices running your company.
I suspect so many of us see examples of corporate crime or even of corporate greed (legally) causing an incredible amount of damage that an affair feels trivial in comparison. That is especially true when the private family life of a CEO is private. The damage of the affair could be anything from devastating to the family to they were all but legally separated.
That doesn't change that there is a conflict of interest here and any company should fire someone who has a conflict of interest that they are not carefully managing to ensure they don't become real.
100%. While I do not condone his actions, publicly we do not know anything about his private life and the dynamics. Until there's a statement from his family, for all we know they may have been separated.
It's clearly the CN link and/or the cosying up with a customer that is the problem; the board would not care about his private life (and neither should the public, tbh).
And the open letter sounds more like it was written the way the public would expect a CEO to write.
If he was in an open relationship or had a girlfriend while separated from his wife, that's not really something to be embarrassed about. His letter talks is him apologizing to his family and asking for forgiveness. He got caught in a Chinese intelligence honeypot and knows he fucked up.
> His open letter about his infidelity seems to imply he has embarrassed his wife and family, have you read it?
He has also said so very many times in so very many ways that Nvidia was absolutely not involved in violation of export control laws regarding the export of its products to China. That -in fact- there was absolutely no smuggling going on and claims to the contrary were utterly baseless and without merit.
I agree with ohnnyApplePRNG's assertion that we know literally nothing about the private life and situation of Mr. Huang and his family.
> So because he lied when he denied certain allegations, you don't believe his admissions of guilt?
He repeatedly and aggressively lied about violating export restrictions. "Our chips aren't potato chips. These GPUs weigh two tons. [So, how would you smuggle those? It'd be impossible!]" is an especially memorable deflection of his. He's obviously very willing to lie about very serious things when doing so is beneficial.
> He "literally" wrote about how his actions hurt his family...
He also spoke and wrote about how it was impossible to smuggle Nvidia hardware into China, and that everyone who was claiming that smuggling was going on were liars. CEOs will often lie when issuing Obligatory Standard Statements, whether they be brusque dismissals of accusations of the company's wrongdoing, or assertions of how shameful they consider their behavior that lead them to do whatever it was that they've been caught doing. CEOs make the expected public statement and get on with their lives.
Plus, given how most folks are -at best- confused by and -at worst- enraged by things like polyamory, why on earth would he publicly reveal it if his family was actually totally okay with regular extramarital sex and romance?
No, situations like this get the Standard Admission of Deep Shame and Regret For All The Harm Caused, regardless of whether or not what's said has any resemblance to what the family feels about the situation. The only folks who know how the members of the family feel about this are folks who actually know the family.
> We know literally nothing about Jensen's private life or if he humiliated his family here.
Uh... but we do!
---
I owe my family and all of you an apology.
I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry.
Throughout my life, my family has given me love and support. They deserve my honesty and loyalty. Instead, I let them down and damaged the life we built together. I take full responsibility for what I did and the hurt I caused, and I accept the criticism that comes with it.
To my wife and family: I love you. I know an apology cannot undo what I have done. I hope our family will heal and that, over time, I can earn back your trust.
To my colleagues at NVIDIA, including those I have worked alongside for decades, and to our board, partners, and shareholders around the world: you deserve better from me. Leading NVIDIA is the privilege of my life. My responsibility is to serve you and be worthy of your trust. I have fallen short of that responsibility. I am fully committed to NVIDIA and will work to earn back your confidence.
Regarding the national security concerns raised in news reports, NVIDIA’s Board of Directors has initiated an independent investigation. I support the investigation and will cooperate fully. I love our country and our company. I am committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America’s national security. I am proud and grateful to be an American.
My family bears no responsibility for my choices. I do. Please give them privacy.
If he is actually a bi-furry with an understanding with his wife on 'affairs', do you think he'd say that? Or would he maintain the straight, family-friendly, investor-friendly front expected of him [by some people] in his position?
Don't get me wrong, I'm very much a promoter of monogamy.
I think it is naive to assume that such public statements are the whole truth of a matter.
People who fuck up a company (or have an affair, or get caught snorting drugs off a sex-worker) aren't really 'stepping back to spend more time with their families'. Historically the classic example of executive public statements.
Perhaps, but it's also more common than not for affairs to hurt families, and the statement confirms that applied here.
If you have stronger evidence that the statement was untruthful when it said he hurt his family, you may present it.
Until such time, the statement strengthens the bayesian prior, which is that his affairs hurt his family, and thus that is what we can conclude. We need not be 100% confident to conclude this absent further evidence. >50% confidence suffices.
This is the kind of story that makes me think most critical leadership should be held by women. Grossly generalizing here, but I think women are inherently less corruptible than men in this manner, especially older women.
It’s unambiguously a good thing that the next NVIDIA CEO (even if just an interim CEO) is a woman, and that the AMD CEO is a woman.
Famously, Mark Hurd made dubious expenses that were perceived negatively by the public (there were sexual harassment allegations) and was ousted as CEO from HP. Then Larry Ellison mocked HP and hired Mark as Oracle's President. So, some companies are worried about that, others aren't
It's entirely possible that the board just wasn't that warm on Jensen in the first place. Not cold, not looking to be the tall poppy that gets cut down... but at least willing to give Jensen the boot if given the right push.
This is how things change. Slowly and then all at once. If the board were more in love with him, they'd probably have been willing to turn a blind eye for just a little while longer. No such luck for Jensen, but we make our own luck in these things.
They can when they reveal poor decision making. If this guy is so stupid that he's willing to stick his dick in anyone, including a Chinese spy, what does that say about his ability to make rational decisions elsewhere in his life? He's clearly not making decisions that benefit him personally in the long term so can he even make good long term decisions at his job?
There's a reason why government background checks looks at financial records. Someone that has trouble paying their bills due to a gambling habit might be easy to turn by the enemy with some cash. Or someone that regularly cheats on their wife might be willing to do some favors for a pretty girl if she lets him sleep with her.
Maybe people are tired of that bullshit. The most powerful guy in business clearly felt empowered to let that facade go. I guess he just got a check for his experiment.
Getting obviously played so hard that it makes you, your wife, your children, your company and your entire country look like idiots surely should humiliate your business no?
Which is as it should be. First of all, marriage is a covenant. If someone cannot be trusted to keep his word on that, it's tough to trust him with power over thousands of employees and trillions of dollars. Second, I'm guessing the board asked Huang after the first affair's revelation whether there were more skeletons in his closet, and he said no. Lying to one's board is more than enough reason to be ousted.
That's a very narrow view that's a function of one's religion, culture, and values.
When I was in school, (US) my very Catholic French teacher explained that his uncle, in France, had a mistress. His uncle's wife knew and was okay with it. What my teacher was explaining is that the culture around marriage varies considerably through the world, and you can't take for granted that what we were taught (monogamy) is the standard that others live to, or even expect from you.
Yes, I can. The normalcy of a thing doesn't make it right. But this isn't really about whether absolute cultural relativism is appropriate or not. It's about a man who broke his word. Huang wed an American woman in America, not a French woman in France. Nothing about this situation indicates Huang's wife was remotely aware of nor alright with his philandery.
He is an immigrant, he holds dual citizenship in Taiwan, and regularly travels there.
I didn't go so far as to find out if he married in the US or elsewhere, or if his wedding was Christian.
What I do now is that in some cultures in that part of the world, it is acceptable for a man to visit a prostitute during a business trip. It's not something I condone.
I should also point out that in the US, there's no standard wedding vows! I don't think you know what vows Huang made with his wife; nor do I think you know what their expectations were in their relationship.
There's no major American subculture in which stepping out on your wife is "a good thing" or even "an okay thing". A vast majority of Americans poll consistently against adultery and it's often the most universally condemned action in surveys. Here's one example: https://news.gallup.com/poll/692801/adultery-cloning-seen-im...
> There's no major American subculture in which stepping out on your wife is "a good thing" or even "an okay thing".
No, there isn't.
There is a significant part of American culture that separates personal life from professional life. IE, an affair is treated as a private matter to be handled by the married (or committed) couple. (IE, this is why many people in this thread focus on Huang's job performance over the affair.)
And I agree with the latter: The affair is a matter between Huang and his wife; it's a signal of his trustworthiness and honesty, and raises concerns about national security. But beyond that, it's not my place, or your place, to judge.
My mother had gotten "two wrongs don't make a right" through my head by about age four. It's still true. I don't know nor care what they're doing in San Jose.
Seems like what they’re doing in North America kind of undercuts your assumptions.
Perhaps it’s you that is out of touch?
Both partners in this case know and/or participate, you don’t want drama at your games night after all. There is no wrong here, it turns out that many partners like seeing their partner have a great time.
From a religious perspective, sure. From an earthly perspective, you don't know what the other side was doing. Have you ever been married to a menopausal or a post menopausal woman? A marriage in which there is a permanent refusal to have sex can be annulled.
> A marriage in which there is a permanent refusal to have sex can be annulled.
That’s not quite true. A more accurate statement would be: A marriage may be annulled in some U.S. states if one spouse entered the marriage with a concealed, permanent intention not to consummate it, and that intention constitutes fraud going to the essence of the marriage.
If the couple was having sex after marriage, and then one partner decided to cease having it some time later, that is generally not grounds for annulment.
If it were permitted, this would make many, if not most, late-stage marriages subject to annulment. People get sick and injured or just incapable in old age.
Seems like some weird fundamentalist take. On its own it's purely a private matter between him and his wife (obviously the GPU smuggling stuff is a separate thing). Given that the affair has been semi public for years it's hard to imagine his wife didn't know about it anyway.
If it's fundamentalist to hold a man to his word, then I suppose you can count me a fundamentalist. If he'll shatter trust with the person he purportedly loves most in the world, just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
> shatter trust with the person he purportedly loves most in the world
Well we don't know that, you are not legally required to love someone you are married to and I have no clue what their relationship is like or whether they have any sort of "arrangements". I could hardly care less really since its their private matter.
> just what might he do to you, the customer or shareholder?
I don't really see a correlation between those things. All sorts of immoral degenerates (e.g. Musk, (potentially) Gates and I assume plenty of other lesser known CEOs) have generated massive amounts of value for their shareholders.
Tell me you have no clue how corporations are run without telling me. Furthermore Jensen wasn't some random executive otherwise this wouldn't be now top news all over the world.
Yeah but he's somewhat open about it and isn't really cheating on anyone. It's weird behavior but it's not being a sperm donor is going to ruin his personal life, like one would by cheating on their wife.
Let’s be real here. Everyone making money out of NVIDIA was more than happy enough to go around the restrictions and see the prices go up due to Chinese demand.
Having these people saying otherwise is pure hypocrisy.
In what world is the modern US Congress a good regulator of these kinds of things? Half the people in the Capitol have a literal vested interest in the very companies they claim to be trying to keep on a leash (and I recognize that some of these are inverse instruments, my point still stands).
Public service, especially at the highest levels, is both a realization of civic responsibility, as well as an immense material privilege.
If you've had a career in congress, parliament, whatever, you can live comfortably off of the various media appearances you're likely to have for much of the rest of your life.
Representatives in government should be able to keep it in their pants when it comes to investments at least while they're in government, and have a thick, thick wall between their jobs running a country (or state, or whatever) and the management of their investments. Blind trusts should be the bare minimum.
What I'd prefer to see is that while actively sitting in government, representatives must keep their savings invested in funds so diversified into low-risk instruments that almost no regulation can benefit them significantly more than it would an average passive investor.
My money is on the congress members - including the greatest stock trader of all times, Nancy Pelosi - having just sold their NVIDIA shares right before the spying was uncovered.
This link you posted, doesn’t work like you think it does - well, except on the part where she is shown to be beating the market by double digits every single year for the past decades.
She is up 934% since 2014. This congresswoman is the greatest financial genius in the all history of mankind. She was beating S&P steadily, every year and since 2014 she is up more than 600% compared to the S&P.
For context, the probable next best investor - after all these great financial minds in congress - is Warren Buffet, and he is actually down 34.8% compared to the S&P since 2014.
You will only know that Nancy Pelosi was up to since the beginning of October next January. Congress members only have to submit their trades (their SEC fillings) every 3 months. [1]
This link I posted, doesn’t work like you think it does. It shows trades which happened. It shows trades as recently as November 6th, which is after the end of the prior quarter.
It doesn't, however, show sales of nvidia stock prior to this release. Thus no such sales happened, unless you have any further evidence.
It is, however, looking like JH's fellow philanderer donald knew, and kept it under wraps for personal gain. Probably insider trading. I mean, just look at how much donald and his family's wealth has increased compared to the S&P500, or Warren Buffett.
No, it doesn't. You are either being purposefully obtuse in the argument, or now trying to go after the tail of it.
Congress members are not mandated to fill a trade as it happens. If Nancy Pelosi latest filling day was Nov 6 (as you are pointing out), it means that she is only forced to show trades up to 30 days before (and that is mostly what she does as her median filling delay is of 24 days).
Also, as you are so keen to bring Trump into the discussion for some reason. I must sadly tell you that the chap is only 4.4% up compared to S&P during all his history as a member of the government/representative. The guy is not nearly the same financial genius as Nacy Pelosy.
The thing you're missing is, the evidence doesn't have to meet your standards. It just has to be better than the nothing which you've put forward in the opposite. And it is! Pretty much anything beats nothing.
So now, the onus is on you to convincingly back up the allegations you're making regarding sales of nvidia stock, and you haven't. If you have some sort of evidence that Nancy made the trade alleged, and is delaying reporting, whether allowed or not, please share it.
The evidence is, however, looking like JH's fellow philanderer donald knew, and kept it under wraps, probably insider trading for personal gain.
I already proved that by pointing you to the numbers in your own link, that show that Nacy Pelosi is up 934% in her stock market trades since 2014, beating the S&P 500 by more than 600% in the same period.
The first affair was possibly survivable, although the cost of survival would be high for all involved.
The second affair was fatal to Jensen Haung. An affair with a direct report is generally a no-no in modern business and would have opened Nvidia up for all kinds of liability issues if they knew in any capacity. If he stayed it would have made a mockery of their code of conduct rules and opened Nvidia up to further legal issues.
It's also possible that after the first affair news broke, the board asked him questions and he didn't disclose that there's a second affair too (and maybe more??). The board only realized that he'd not been truthful/fully forthcoming when the second affair news broke yesterday. That's when they decided to boot him. Because if there's more and more affairs going to keep breaking, that would be a complete media spectacle distracting from the company.
Musk controls 19.9% of voting power at Tesla, and more than 80% at SpaceX. Huang has about a 3.5% ownership stake in of Nvidia and that’s jointly controlled with his wife.
Musk's companies have low quality boards, which is by design to make it almost impossible to fire him and the legacy of that should serve as a cautionary tale
Possibly, I am a bit tired of the national security argument with hand waving vagueness. It’s generally unfalsifiable because details would be a national security risk. Meanwhile we have seen National Security concerns that were pure lies once we get sufficiently far past it.
Yes you see there are various types of national security. For example, there is the national security when a country that touted capitalism and free trade for years suddenly finds itself beat at capitalism by someone else, that's a big national security issue. Then suddenly free trade is evil and a danger and a national security issue.
> There are some things more important than stock valuation.
Given that the economic growth of the USA during the last few years was entirely due to this man and his technologies, I'm going to say nah.
China having access to GPUs is not a national security threat. It's an economic threat. Not sure why people treat China as some enemy nation. It's just a competitor.
As a Taiwanese I can tell you, we don't want to sell advanced AI chips to China. But it's not up to us, American companies who purchase our chips decide.
Or maybe he just simply wanted to make more money by increasing demand for Nvidia's GPUs by tacitly allowing for them to be exported to China though Singapore.
>NVIDIA has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration.
That's not the reason either.
They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc.
And the new administration allowed the exports later anyway and lifted the AI ban on July 2025.
Even she was a spy, the idea is that what? I can understand her snooping for fresh confidential info, in that, case, but what would her role be the sanctions? That just because he got her as gf, he made nvidia evade exports as a favor?
As if it was his personal bypass and not what the nvidia board wanted for the $$$?
They're likely worried about the optics of it, and what a Democrat administration, or increased power, would do to Nvidia stocks with such scandal as leverage.
> They never did it in a way that was technically legal iirc.
If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.
I know it's just speculation, but the fact that Nvidia hasn't tried to scapegoat some random compliance officer strongly suggests to me that Jensen did know, and that the board has seen the paper trail that proves it.
>If Jensen knew that Megaspeed was a Chinese front, then he willfully engaged in a criminal conspiracy to circumvent US export controls. That is very serious felony.
Sure, but the US gov itself lifted those controls soon. So they get this for bypassing controls that they lifted and found no use for anyway?
And does anybody really believe those exports, of the #1 most crucial supposedly restricted tech, wheren't covertly greenlit and scruitinized when they happened? Like, it caught anybody in government or nvidia or bodies checking these things as a surprise?
And why would they need some special honeypot for that? He was advocating for sales to china because they're good for nvdia's bottom line, way before he hooked up with that woman!
As for low level details, wouldn't be smarter, less visible to all, and more effective if they honeypotted some key technician instead? The CEO would be too visible in his moves, and too high position to know or care for the low level technical details, the kind that would be of interest to competitors.
More likely they know and were ok those things all along, but he's no longer useful, or his preferences doesn't work well with the new plans in the tech war with China, or they fear what would happen to Nvidia stock with Democrats in power having this compromising info to play up, and they got rid of him.
I said this on the thread this morning/yesterday. It is impossible for JH to speak about China with any credibility going forward. That alone made it impossible for him to remain CEO. Add to that, everything he's said about China in the past will now be scrutinized and questioned if he was influenced in some way.
If it was just affairs, he could likely have survived this.
Why can't it be all of the above? I'm disturbed by the number of posts I'm seeing around social media downplaying the affairs as if this is normal behavior that should be encouraged or allowed. He slept with someone who worked directly under him, under what universe would he be allowed to stay at Nvidia? That's absurd.
Maybe in today's day and age, but sleeping with your boss who is married was never a normal or okay thing in any part of the world as far as I recall, maybe it changed in the last few decades, but I've never known anyone to think any of this is normal.
Cheating on your wife may be despicable behavior, but it doesn’t warrant firing the founding CEO of one of the most important companies on earth, especially considering how much is at stake economically, including how reliant the U.S. economy has been on AI build out spending. On the other hand, cheating on your wife and endangering national security at the same time is a different story.
It'll be a relative slap on the wrist. The US is not going to destroy one of the companies keeping it competitive on the AI landscape right now. Worst case, it is a heavy slap and some individuals go to jail, but the company will be fine.
But yeah, the affairs are probably just a last straw.
He committed what looks like some light treason. The fact that he had an affair with a Chinese intelligence asset who helped the CCP bypass import restrictions is why he had to go.
There does seem to be a sway in the reporting towards his relationship with an employee and not the whole trade ban and spy stuff. I'm not sure why that is
Think of this current fracas like this: Americans have a strange penchant to define themselves by sexuality. So, they are easily distracted into a trance by their hormonal and prurient interests for extended periods.
A famous guy had an island and it was extrajudicially a place where alot of powerful people internationally could come to his island and interchange info and ideas and make deals and things could occur and he collected up all that kind of stuff, including arms deals and the sex stuff.
But Americans are only right now aware of the sex stuff in what he collected up.
The sex stuff is essentially a distraction, the oily film on the deeper ocean of truth.
Why? Because the government want to maintain the American advantage in GPU chips and AI? This move tips the scales in favour of China. Right now there is tens of billions of dollars of Nvidia GPUs sitting on the dock in Hong Kong because China government blocked them. They think it's more important to support their new domestic GPU industry than to have the best models today trained on nvida.
“Sold to China” can mean a lot of things including legitimate entities in Malaysia/Singapore selling cloud computing to companies in those countries that then resell compute to entities in China. Export bans on gpus are inherently impossible to make work unless you police the eventual destination of every byte exiting a datacenter.
The U.S. has imposed such harsh semiconductor industry sanctions on China, tightly locking away scientific and technological achievements that will most likely shape the future of all humanity for the next hundred years through political means that change with every few-year election cycle.
It's hard to imagine that in a community that constantly claims to champion freedom and progress, so many people would think from the perspective of the U.S. government and believe in baseless spy allegations, because anyone who knows NVIDIA’s history and Jensen Huang’s background should be able to see that this is a charge forcibly fabricated.
And is your argument that a community who “champions freedom and progress” should be arguing for an authoritarian dictatorship to get access to the latest technology?
To me the fact that it was known for a year that the affair was happening, and nothing changed implies that this is more a publicity move rather than anything else. They had to make a change, improve their brand image. Probably nothing will change in how they sell their product, the rules they skirt.
I'll plug our Pretrained episode from Monday here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N97DW8gfCnI - this chip export goes back years, through shell companies that are very easily traceable to Alibaba.
The fact that Nvidia was skirting the export ban was an open secret. So many outlets like NYT itself, Reuters, WSJ, etc have published reports about it starting over a year ago.
He was also favoring local open weight models in a world where frontier AI companies are lobbying the government for control. Could be one of the reasons why he was ousted.
I hope you understand the affair with the spy does not strictly matter, but he is in fact being fired because of the affair with a subordinate.
Like everyone, they have a COC/sexual harassment policy, and that is basically always a firing offense in practice.
They cannot place him above it, or else they would be in for infinite liability.
This is why literally nothing mentioned firing until that was discovered, and then it instantly became about firing him.
If it were just about the export ban, then why leak the affairs? US intelligence (which serves US corporate power only) has decided to put this guy out to pasture by any means necessary. That's the reason for this faux moral outrage. They want to make sure there's no chance he makes it out the other side.
Presumably his replacement will be subservient "enough".
Allows the influence of selection of next CEO that is more aligned with long term Chinese goals. Or punishment for not going along with the plan.
Im not much for conspiracy theories, but if you think about it, in the state that US is in, there is absolutely zero chance US will do anything retaliatory to China if they do spy shit on US soil. China is basically free to play spy games. My guess is that they have their fingers in Anthropic, Amazon, OpenAI, SpaceX, and AMD, and probably other agents within NVIDIA in high places.
Their game is basically rearrange the pieces so eventually China becomes the world number one superpower, while keeping the status quo as much as possible
This comment yesterday [1] indicated that Megaspeed was not on the blocked entity list, but that NVidia voluntarily hasn't sold to them since June 2025.
NVIDIA also does tons of military and intelligence work, very sensitive stuff. The idea that the CEO had a significant espionage problem raises significant _criminal_ liabilities.
History will look back at this and see Jensen was right to do this.
Underestimating China under this export ban is a huge historical blunder of epic proportions. China will develop all their own chips and put everyone out business eventually.
> Nvidia has supposedly been skirting the export ban put in place by the previous administration
I want to add some nuance to this statement. There is a difference between:
(1) actively assisting/violating the export ban. There is no evidence, nor any ongoing gov't investigation regarding this accusation.
(2) buyers redirecting legitimate, legal purchases to mainland Chinese companies. There is evidence and multiple ongoing gov't investigations by (a) Department of Justice, (b) Federal Bureau of Investigation, and (c) Department of Commerce.
I cannot find any senior Nvidia executives that have been charged with crimes for directly assisting/violating the export ban. That said, there may be ongoing gov't investigations, but I could not find any public press about them.
I think thats correct, I was at GTC in berlin a couple of weeks ago, a number of Chinese firms that are on the export control list were present and had booths… so perhaps this was all rather blatant.
dark ops [well, maybe these are really very bright out in the open ops...!!!] may have taken an opportunity and now the operation is at its close, the data is reduced, and the devices utilized are being obsoleted, and operatives burned
we US citizens should not let naivete overrule the gravity of this technology race, on the order of the nuclear arms race
I've heard rumours that 20-40% of Nvidia's revenue was coming from sanctioned chips that make their way into Chinese data centres. If true, it's not small potatoes.
China doesn't even want Nvidia chips. They're holding up hundreds of thousands of smuggled cards at Hong Kong customs. Many Chinese companies want to take the easy shortcut of using Nvidia, but the Chinese govt wants Chinese companies to go through the pain of helping the domestic chip industry develop.
Plus the fact that there's absolutely no evidence that the lady is a spy. All media report anonymous sources but treat the allegations as fact. Singapore said their investigation of the lady is not due to spying, but no western media picked up that story. The lady traveled to Taiwan with her Hong Kong passport, and the Taiwanese govt also said they have no evidence she's a spy. The Chinese spy agency just started investigating her due to all the commotion (likely for smuggling chips, which China also doesn't want, see above), and also has no idea who she is. Despite all this, the public still treats the spy allegations as a fact.
Jenssen Huang is a victim. Those who wanted to get rid of him and set this up, have succeeded. But everyone is under the mistaken belief that this hurts China somehow. China doesn't give a damn. In the mean time, all Chinese Americans lose. Jenssen is not the first such victim, and won't be the last.
The thing is China itself has no incentive to have their companies skirt the export ban. The whole saga is just completely ironic and incredibly unorganic. The alleged "spy" and her firm Megaspeed was doing export circumventing mechanisms to China not because the CCP was allegedly pushing her to do so, in fact it was a counter-reaction to how restrictive the Chinese customs became to importing Nvidia while the corresponding customers are hungry for that compute that is piling up in the ports. China is doing a zero-sum policy where every American chip that gets passed to their tech companies is one less domestic/chinese, which equates less money for R&D and catch up.
So something very strange going on here, along with the timing, in time where Anthropic is preparing for an IPO and briefly after the midterms where the median voter rejected AI wholesale. I suspect this might have been a long game to turn the man down that is standing for open-source and the freedom to build AI. Heck epstein was having a ring of elites diddling minors and nothing scandalous came out of it.
All the regulators that kickstarted this dumb export controls in 2022, which in-turn made the american AI-stack weaker vs China, while also using doomer-fud about safety must feel glorious right now.
What is inorganic? China banning GPUs ≠ China not wanting the GPUs. It is not unreasonable to imagine China not wanting to shake the sanctions boat, so offloading the crime into another country allows them to still have their cake and eat it too. They get to develop technology locally, they have undeniable regulations on the books that make them compliant within the expected framework of US-China trade, and then still get to have their MVPs rent restricted hardware from gray market dealers in Malaysia. 20% of NVIDIA's FY26 was channeled through this framework. The point of the system is what it does.
> Whether you agree or disagree with the ban, it exists and Jensen&NVIDIA are in a world of trouble if this comes to light.
Law has to be enforced by human beings to be meaningful. Donald Trump, who is the one who put the export control in place and has the power to make any legal trouble vanish, has very loudly signaled that he does not care and Jensen/Nvidia will not be in any hot water.
I’d also note that being complicit and not entirely aware of sanctions evasion -but being in a qualified position that should have been able to discern it- is sufficient for criminal charges and conspiracy. I spent a long time in trading and money movement, and this was the scared straight things our former federal prosecutor internal counsel would lecture us on. The bar for prosecutors in national security, sanctions, conspiracy, etc are very very low and this sort of relationship is a perfect foil. It exposes Nvidia to extreme risk, and Jenson even more so. And being cutoff from Nvidia now makes him prey without the support a major employer and driver of the economy could provide him.
Being compromised kinda does seem like a reason to be fired. It seemed well known he was doing it since there are plenty of photos over a few years? So it’s more she was a honeypot.
I think the affair with the Chinese CEO is a considerable factor. Jensen cannot possibly maintain any plausible deniability over Megaspeed's alleged diversion of chips to China and his role therein.
The second affair with an employee likely just dealt a death blow (if it hadn't already been dealt) to Jensen in terms of his ability to ride the crisis out.
It is legal for Chinese companies to buy US neocloud time. These toothless restrictions were poorly constructed and unenforceable law. The extent to which nvda was supposed to self police is unclear. I find it hard to believe any binding evidence of direct sales will be found.
Are they still in Trump's good graces? Sure, they gave him money before. But can they promise him more money again? He's pretty quick to dispose of people when they're inconvenient too.
If they really did, I hope they at least go to prison for a while. I say at least because they actually should be court martiall-ed and spend their next 30 years in a military cell.
Eric Swalwell was not punished and committed something worse than Jensen Huang, because he was a government official. He even ran for Governor and the only reason he as forced to resign was because of a different sexual abuse case.
If our own government officials can't face justice, why should the CEO of a company?
I am not sure I can agree. Perhaps this was the underlying reason. Perhaps others wanted to frame him and launched a media campaign. But from what I can see, at the
least on the surface, to me it looks as if he was fired for liking too many women at the same time, at the least one of which might be a possible spy. This may all be fake-reasons on top to cover underlying real causes, but to me right now it looks as if the girls cost him the job here.
Jensen is Taiwanese. Nvidia's chips are made in Taiwan, as are all the most advanced chips in the world -- including the chips in Apple and AMD products -- by TSMC. China wants to re-absorb Taiwan into itself, partially because they cannot match TSMC's geometries and they desperately need those geometries.
Speculation here, but it's conceivable that China gave Jensen an ultimatum: Give us your chips and we'll delay invading your homeland for a little while longer. Of course this would have been implied since China never says anything so direct.
Unlikely, but not implausible, and should have been reported directly to the FBI / CIA if that was ever implied. But, the whole affair business means he probably wouldn't have handled hearing something like that responsibly either, which is part of the problem.
Abuse of power in the case of the second affair to the extent it could've easily turned into a rape scandal and is a big reason why it is a big HR no-no, and in the first case, the affair not being public is exactly the kind of thing a honeypot wants in order to keep you quiet about the kinds of threats that may end up implied.
Either way, the dude is going to be getting investigated and will not be able to effectively lead NVIDIA in the course of what's coming.
As though the Board had no idea of this, and are suddenly acting oh gosh this is the first we've heard of the phantom SG revenue! Time for Jensen to go. Nah, not buying it. Many of the board have been w JH since the early 1990s. This is because his reckless disregard for the company and his years-long relationship with a Chinese spy.
With a strict ban of chips to China, Chinese companies will not have enough compute. Without enough compute, they are not going to be able to release new open weight models.
That means American companies will have to rely on Anthropic. And interestingly, Anthropic loves to tell users what they can or can not do, such as "The training of Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 included measures to limit advances in a narrow set of capabilities that could most directly accelerate AI development, like accelerator kernel optimization".
Him taking the stance of "we should be allowed to sell all the GPUs to China" was bad enough in itself.
Now that the possibility of him being compromised by an actual Chinese spy AND the possibility of Nvidia actually sanction-busting to ship to China regardless are on the table? Both at the same time, no less?
Yeah, that kind of liability is bonkers. Jensen might be too vital to load him into a cannon and fire him into the sun, but I'm not at all surprised that Nvidia wants him gone from the big post.
China was already "developing a fully domestic stack" either way.
So the only thing selling to them accomplishes is give Nvidia more margins. At the cost of boosting the Chinese AI sector - possibly to the point of parity.
China at the moment has the capability to do infrastructural rollouts far faster than US or Europe, but doesn't have the chips to stuff new datacenters with. So it's easy to see why China would want the chips. But it's not like Nvidia is having trouble selling their AI accelerators outside China - and they can't ramp up accelerator production on demand. More demand for accelerators would push the prices even higher, and that would reflect in the margins, but the benefits for Nvidia weren't even that large.
So it was a questionable push all around - even before the spy scandal.
China also used to posture with "we don't need Nvidia chips" in Q1 this year. But now, schemes to ship those chips anyway are being uncovered - in the wake of Jensen's ousting and in general. Some involve direct shipments, and others involve offshored datacenters being established by Chinese companies to supply compute to China. So we know this "we don't need" was always fake. Chinese government was saying "we don't need them chips" with one hand and devising ways of keeping the supply going with the other.
> From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.
I thought this was like, basically an open secret? Like... I'm sure they stayed within the technical letter of the law? Except if any of the laws required them to not be grossly negligent and not be cartoonishly naive. So that they can later argue that they couldn't possibly have known that chips going to South East Asia were being resold to China?
They were literally allowed to sell chips to the US branch of sanctioned Chinese companies. Same pattern as the tariff nonsense, not really opposed to any products or companies, just wants to bring all the production to the US instead. Plain protectionism, like the same car made in Germany is badly unfair, made in China is a national security risk, but once it's made in the US it's perfectly fine.
> ”it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban.”
Nvidia sold to companies in Singapore, and then “somehow” the chips got redirected or forwarded on to China.
It’s been known/suspected for years that this was happening, but this Chinese spy scandal does suggest that execs at Nvidia might have known more about what has been going on than they’ve previously admitted.
I dont think its more soo about the ban as China itself has 'officially' blocked the chips that were being licensed as exportable. I think its more of the asks that were being made by the NATSec and Amodie aligned actors (see the pod he had with Dwarkesh ), to ho tighter and more aggressive. Basically Jensen was sort of the brake on the impulsive ideas getting thrown around on how to 'win' AI and create a moat against all latecomers.
In any case pushing him out allows a freer hand for their shenanigans , so well know shortly what the asks were that he pushed back on (kill switches in chips?) if they get announced.
Also his role will be difficult to fill , seeing as hes had biz/gov relations going back decades with all relevant players in the semi industry from design ,litho,fabs to packaging etc.
Did your TV tell you that? I hope you realize that there is absolutely no proof of the import ban having been skirted. The FBI has been investigating Alice Huang and Megaspeed since 2024 and all they have is a few GPUs still being unboxed at their Malaysian data center.
Well the only thing super weird is the timeline - USA bans exports, China (very soon after) bans IMPORTS! And then there's a company which keeps doing trade under the nose of the potentially two most powerful nation-states and their secret service sources. This is super fishy, really I don't buy nobody knew nothing, only for a "lucky" journalist to figure out the whole thing...
Very much agreed, the second this became clear his position was untenable. He will surely have launched his unicorn by the end of December regardless, I’d be surprised if this had any tangible repercussions outside the divorce court.
Very much dislike that this in large part is overshadowed by his adultery, which should be considered separate and treated totally private, at least for the sake of his family.
Is this remotely believable, that one CEO can surreptitiously work around both the government and his own company to sell restricted goods at volume? If this were real you'd have to lobotomize the entire management structure, because there are a lot of people that would know and know better and that they'd face jail time. And maybe merge it with some other company quickly so it doesn't completely collapse because of the immediate mass firings to try and sway prosecutions toward individuals and not the destroy the entire entity.
I'd be more inclined to believe the spy thriller narrative if he sent the RTL of their top designs to China. Selling goods is not a one chief op.
Biggest valuation ever will turn into biggest investor lawsuit ever. The music on the AI circular deals is about to be broken by a feminine spell. This has Lord of the Rings all over it...
NVDA at $151 right now...I never expected to see the day...
I would be so, so surprised if the US government / CIA / etc wouldn't know at all that NVDA was selling to China and skirting the export ban in a meaningful way.
In 50 years from now, some declassified documents will maybe shed light on this specific incident.
I would imagine it being a form of "So, China, we'll let our Jensen guy sell you X in chips, and in return, you do Y in relation to Russia, and Z in relation to Taiwan. Oh, and we need to use one of your spies, in case someone f*cks up".
China is a gigantic market. A company that profit hungry will find it supremely difficult to resist doing business with China. It is almost guaranteed, that they did in some indirect ways sell to China. It's also not like people like Jensen care one bit about the USA. What they care about is pure profit of their own kingdom. Uhm, I mean company, of course.
The reality is a lot of people want to ensure only approved “safe and aligned” models are trained and executed, and nvidia were, by far, the biggest promoter of the idea of freedom. This will be done by forcing you to rent capacity from approved providers that monitor and watermark everything.
Huggingface are almost certainly next in line for a push to lock down. For child safety, obviously.
Oh, it's not the repeated violations of sexual conduct with an employee, and a spy, and likely more? A CEO who is that dumb to risk his and the company trust isn't worth it. Look, a trillion already wiped out. When employees say "how dumb could he be", you know the board and major investors are saying that too.
NVIDIA's latest chips were also on an export ban for several Middle Eastern countries ("security" theater). That's about the time the UAE's sovereign fund invested a large sum in Cerebras. They were still able to get the chips by way of Kuwait, which is a friendly Middle Eastern state.
Of course, not a year went by before the UAE and Saudi invested heavily in the Trump crypto fund and, very coincidentally, the ban was lifted.
Fear not, Cerebras managed to get another investment from OpenAI!
Yeah, this has to be related to the export ban. It's too much of a coincidence that the woman happens to run a shell company that funnels NVIDIA chips to China.
It's just unlikely that an affair would nuke his CEO's position.
The strange situation, however, is that the current administration, specifically Trump, loves Jensen for he thinks that they're kindred spirits: both incredibly successful businessmen at the top of the world and at the top of their game (this is from Trump's perspective).
It's an odd situation where, yes, they're breaching national security mandates, but they're also being protected by the man at the top of the organization that makes those national security mandates.
We're living in a comedy film, where the outcome of said comedy film has an effect on the world economy, so we're actually living in a tragedy film.
That's how corruption skews the reality that the powerless are forced to live within.
We've really run this term into the ground, haven't we? They don't even bother to try to convince us that China wants to hurt us anymore before making our lives shitty for it.
The timing is politically important though; shifts headlines from
"Trump/GOP lost their ass in midterms!" and "Dems intend to investigate GOP/Trump!"
Also provides news channel attacks on Dems; Congress should be looking into national security issues over here in CEO land! Not dividing Congress with partisan hackery!
Important to call out the social engineering going on among all the tribal groups.
Well, you say that, but the perception is he hasn't got sacked for circular financing, nor for the providing of sanctioned components (supposedly they went to third countries, not China, so legal). But he got sacked for two affairs.
This seems very silly.
In all likelihood he got sacked for all those things, the affairs just were a convenient excuse.
What board would admit two thirds of their revenue is imaginary money. It's much better to sack a CEO for being "unfaithful to his wife".
There is a wealth of reporting out there, it is harder to ignore this story than to read about it. My statement was couched and is clearly just my opinion, I'll leave the reading to you and let you form your own conclusions
Can you imagine if it were a female CEO fired for the same thing? Oh how the accusations of sexism and double standards and how she doesn't have to report to the board what she does with her body. The argument writes itself.
A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Part of me is hopeful after this. Huang did something that was, at the very least, profoundly stupid, and just short of treason at worst. However, I'm also filled with dread, because I know that this means that there will be even more of an effort by founders to make sure they're immune from consequences from boards if they go public. You already see this at Meta and with Zuckerberg.
We need real reforms on corporate governance that make this sort of situation - a board able to control the C-suite - the norm, not the exception.
TBH, I find the manner in which this was done to be pretty distasteful.
The US government initiating action against Nvidia for breaking the law, causing the affair to come to light? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. Somebody inside that government tattling tales to the NY Times, possibly with tacit consent of their superiors? That I have concerns with.
I've seen a theory floated online that somebody inside the government, who was part of the faction advocating for stricter sanctions on China, leaked this in a way to cause maximum damage to the anti-restrictions faction. Whether Huang (female Huang) was actually a Chinese spy in the first place is also up in the air, keep in mind that while the affair has almost certainly occurred, given that Huang (male) has admitted to it himself, the Chinese spy allegations are still unverified. It could possibly have been a "grain of truth in a sea of lies" play.
> The US government initiating action against Nvidia for breaking the law, causing the affair to come to light? Yeah, that'd be fine by me. Somebody inside that government tattling tales to the NY Times, possibly with tacit consent of their superiors? That I have concerns with.
Everything only comes to light with the New York Times reporting on it. It would be fine if the government did it, but... they didn't.
If nothing else, this indicated to the board that JH is capable of thinking with his dick and that can be a problem for business.
Its a threat to their own companies and whatever amount of democracy is there. Maybe ego is like some cancer that kills/self-ded
structs its host/person if it gets big enough. Which is good. A persons etreme wealth gets them political power and also advantages before the law. We've seen this with big corporations.
> A lot of people in this industry have gotten it into their heads over the last 25 years that if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
That's literally how the world works? And has worked for many centuries or longer. By "value" you mean wealth, and wealthy people can get away with murder. They buy and write the law and have the best lawyers in the world.
We won't have billionaires/trillionaires/kings AND rule of law for /everyone/ equally - the world doesn't work that way.
It could in principle though, and things certainly have not been improving in those respects. I'm not going to straight up say they are for sure getting worse either though. I mean, worse compared to when?
That being said, I think resigning yourself to this sort of behavior because "muh power and world works this way" is just kind of stupid. It is not in your best interests, as a regular person much like the vast majority of HN posters (besides the AI shill bots), to just be content with that state of affairs, if there are little things that are relatively effective at reducing those kinds of corruptions of social systems.
One of those things happens to be general distaste of an authentically Christian society against hedonistic behavior, but that has been on a noted downtrend lately, and I don't think that's been a very good thing. Similarly, I think Protestantism is to blame for a lot of nutty justification for the rich and powerful getting away with stuff like this, but I'm going to be vague about what I mean by that because it would be an essay length post.
Our President literally diddled kids on a Carribbean island, cheated on his wives several times, and is probably a closeted homosexual, but richest man on earth having an affair is where we draw the line.
> if you create enough value, you get to ignore things like "rules", "laws" and "common sense".
Hmm... I wonder why that is. Could it be because a bunch of CEOs, prominent politicians, and business people were found to have taken multiple trips to an island where the had sex with children and nothing happened to them? No, it couldn't possibly be that. I'm sick of the pearl clutching against a man who had consensual relationships with adult women his own age, while we excuse pedophilia.
> I'm sick of the pearl clutching against a man who had consensual relationships with adult women his own age,
Do we have evidence that his legally-recognized other half consented to these relationships? If so, fine. That still doesn't remove the problems with those relationships, like the possibility of Alice Huang being a PRC intelligence asset, or the fact that one of the affairs was with a company employee, which can, in a roundabout way, place potential penalties on her career if she doesn't consent.
>while we excuse pedophilia.
Excuse me, where the f*ck did I excuse pedophilia???
You don't have to censor 'fuck.' Anyways, we excused it by not rising up. There was the token online outrage and then the story blew over. Unfortunately the individual is part of the group, so we're all guilty by association.
> That still doesn't remove the problems with those relationships
In this day and age of no-fault divorce, co-parenting, etc, where is this moral outrage coming from for a man cheating on his wife / girlfriend? I'm just so confused TBH. 'Legally-recognized other half'.... in no jurisdiction is it illegal to cheat on your wife.
> like the possibility of Alice Huang being a PRC intelligence asset,
The sole evidence that she is a Chinese intelligence asset is that she is Chinese.
> he fact that one of the affairs was with a company employee, which can, in a roundabout way, place potential penalties on her career if she doesn't consent.
Forgive me for not feeling sorry for a likely deca, probably centi, millionaire. This is not some secretary intern.
> Excuse me, where the f*ck did I excuse pedophilia???
Because, if we're going to be witchhunting CEOs for their personal lives, there are a helluva lot worse people than Huang that need to go.
> In this day and age of no-fault divorce, co-parenting, etc, where is this moral outrage coming from for a man cheating on his wife / girlfriend? I'm just so confused TBH. 'Legally-recognized other half'.... in no jurisdiction is it illegal to cheat on your wife.
If Huang had just slept with someone other than his wife, it wouldn't be a story. The outrage here isn't from the fire-and-brimstone perspective. I'm a single guy in my mid-30s; even here in Middle America there are plenty of people who practice ENM, no-fault divorce, and coparenting. It's now widely recognized that people aren't necessarily monogamous as soon as they get married.
At the same time, it's still an expectation that one should not do that sort of activity behind a spouse's back. It could result in other issues that could cause them issues, like STIs, or planning life around a child they didn't expect, or estate planning complications. Being open with your partner in life about the feelings you have on the matter is important, and puts the "ethical" in "ethical non-monogamy".
We don't know what the Huangs' arrangement was. I hope it was understood between them, and that all of that was sorted. If not, well, Jensen's going to get to deal with the fallout with that. Which brings us to the problems with the relationships themselves.
> The sole evidence that she is a Chinese intelligence asset is that she is Chinese.
Let's be honest here: that's not enough to get a story going in 2026. There's the fact that she set up a company in Singapore that had revenue figures that far outpaced what's expected for a company of its age, and the fact that they may have helped Chinese interests dodge US export restrictions on Nvidia's products. This was important enough that it was known to Nvidia corporate and the US government. You don't get attention like that just by dating someone from China.
> Forgive me for not feeling sorry for a likely deca, probably centi, millionaire. This is not some secretary intern.
Cultures like this impact everyone. Do we know if the executive was promoted or otherwise benefitted because of her relationship with Jensen? No, but it immediately opens up a conflict of interest for any request she has of the c-suite.
At worst, Huang was operating a Weinstein-like casting couch for roles within the company. If you can make an executive have to perform those sorts of actions in order to advance in her career, what does the secretary intern have to put up with?
> Because, if we're going to be witchhunting CEOs for their personal lives,
This isn't a witchhunt for the reasons stated above. It's SV, bud. People do all sorts of non-traditional relationship arrangements. Hell, even the Alice Huang affair was probably passable once the next news cycle hit. When he's sleeping with people who report to him, it's a problem on its face. It's unprofessional and it makes everyone at the company wonder just what they'll have to do to get ahead.
> there are a helluva lot worse people than Huang that need to go.
We can actually take care of both groups of people. That is actually possible, believe it or not.
I'm sorry this is insane. Why is it moral to divorce your partner unilaterally (which by necessity is behind your partners back) while cheating is somehow worse. This is retarded pearly clutching to think one is good and the other wrong. Bunch of hypocrits, the lot of you.
You can reconcile during or after a divorce. You can discuss it and reduce the harms it might cause. Cheating is an impulsive decision that can destroy any trust one has in their partner and introduce things that can't be mitigated, like STIs.
To be clear, it's better to not do either, but given the options, one is certainly better than the other.
Fuck no. Jensen did no such thing. He actually hasn’t been charged with a single crime. You’re outright hallucinating here.
The board is voting him out because they can AT any TIME.
If the board liked him, they would wait for the charges to go through. But they don’t like him. Tons of people cheat on their wives and husbands and I’m sure even the fucking board has people that have.
The board doesn’t like him and has been waiting for a way to oust him while not looking incompetent. Why they don’t like him I don’t actually know.
Maybe because he’s Asian? Maybe this is an internal op by the US government to get someone else up there? I don’t know. But I can guarantee that everything your reading is a cover story. There are underlying forces and motivations here at work that we are not able to know.
Elon Musk has an AI bot generating explicit images without consent, regardless of age, yet nobody's firing him.
While Jensen seems like an egomaniac who deserves what happened to him, there's a part of me that feels some China hawks had fingers in his firing, it must not sit well with them than America's most valuable company is not in the hands of the old guard.
That is simply not true, Grok refuses to make explicit images, and with uploaded media it refuses to do even mildly enticing ones. *
* — We did a test of it after similar claim a few weeks ago, and what pushed us to do a research is because my friend who works in a hotel industry was getting moderation blocks on Grok left and right — they now use only AI images to not bother with copyright trolls ever again who threaten lawsuits for things like improperly credited bought stock photo — and in their case moderation was a serious hindrance for creating images.
Instead of blahblahblahing endlessly you could just go render an explicit photo on Grok and post it here to prove your point.
I'm rather confident that you would not be able to do that.
However, I'm also confident that instead of doing that you'll continue spreading information that is now obsolete and incorrect: in your original post you said that Musk has a bot, but when confronted with the current state of affairs continue to cite Wikipedia about what Musk had a year ago.
Stop with the gaslighting, Elon's not hiring you anyway. There's plenty of evidence that it was going on in 2025, there were no consequences back then. It doesn't matter whether it continues to this day or not, after he's taken SpaceX public and so unnecessary risk was no longer worth taking, that's misdirection, it was ongoing for months without any legal or professional consequences. That's the point.
Trump knew about this in late 2025 and decided not to act.
The reasoning is believed to be because of the idea that if China didn't get Nvidia chips, it would just develop it's own chips faster. So holding the belief that China would end up in the same spot no matter what, it would be preferable to get them to pay Nvidia along the way.
Delving a bit deeper into conspiracy
It's also possible that Trump saw it as a silent favor to Jinping, who took the opportunity to return the favor months later by cutting Chinese oil purchases. One hand washes the other and all that.
And yet from the reporting Trump okayed the sale so Nvidia argues they had a license to export from the President. Lutnick was okay with it too apparently and State didn't get a vote. If the reporting is accurate, then I think Nvidia gets zero blowback from the sale.
There is zero possibility than Jensen Huang faces any serious consequences for this. NVidia is too big and Huang is too wealthy. This administration in particular would never prosecute that. And, even if they did, a pardon is only $1-3 million anyway.
I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem. There's a huge amount of legal exposure for NVidia with that. With the Chinese spy he can portray himself as the victim. As I've said elsewhere, with billionaire corporate security and the support of the US government, It's astounding to me that this happened at all.
Also I'm reminded of this quote [1]:
> If you find two ants in your kitchen, the best estimate of the total number of ants in your kitchen is not two
It's not. That's a strange statement to make, particularly the emphasis on "married". It seems that person is implying that if a married woman participated in the affair, it was due to coercion. A sexual harassment lawsuit would mainly be a liability in the court of public opinion.
> I believe it was the affair with the married subordinate that was the real problem
You really think Nvidia would let Huang go (without a replacement matching his skills, experience and knowledge in the field) because he cheated with an employee? It is the spy affair while Huang promoted an open export policy.
Plus thanks to Huang, Nvidia is now under investigation by federal agencies.
None of them care about a CEO cheating.
Also, being fired from the company you founded is a serious consequence.
Let's cut the crap, it's a coup because he is in favor of the open-weight ecosystem and doesn't want to restrict models at the firmware level. Anthropic is in large part behind this.
The midterms seem like the most obvious timing. Trump has a little less power and everyone is starting to plan for what happens after him - jockeying for being able to say they didn't support this and that. If it was only being ignored because Mr Huang could donate a lot of money to Trump's ballroom that deal probably isn't as important now.
> What changed now compared to 2 years ago to make Trump care?
We all now know that Trump knew about it, that's what has changed. It was fine when this was private, but now his administration is starting to get questions around why his Commerce department punted the initial investigation to DOJ where it ultimately died as the opposition party is about to retake Congress with investigations top of mind.
Likely there was at least a feeling of mutual understanding between Jensen and key people in the administration. Now the wind has turned in a big way and none of that is on paper. And in fact what is on paper points in the wrong direction.
Probably the only thing protecting NVDA from prosecution right now is that nobody in the White House wants to pop the AI bubble. That might protect Jensen too because he would entangle the company. There will be an interesting tension with congressional oversight. Buy popcorn and NVDA vol.
Yeah, over a year ago the likes of Gamers Nexus was able to follow the clues to figure out how Nvidia was skirting the export ban.
It's hard to believe the US government was so incompetent that they didn't do the investigation a YouTuber did (But not impossible).
The export ban was always BS. Unless you are going to do a total ban and all parts are manufactured in the US, then it is just 1 additional hop to get stuff into China.
Everybody should be against the export ban. It's laughable to claim that it is for "national security", it's blatant protectionism to cover US AI companies for the fact that they operate at monumental losses. Any country in the world should be allowed to buy the hardware they need to run AI, if they need it, and if the roles were reversed the US should also be allowed to buy tech from other countries. Graphic cards aren't nuclear bombs, and AI is a multi-use core technology every nation on earth should have access to. So far, China has made a far better impression in that respect than the US. At least they have published open weight models.
The future will be commoditized local AI anyway, so it doesn't matter in the long run. I just needed to rant a bit about the US hypocrisy in that matter.
Basically every technology is dual use, but still I basically agree, there is an incredible level of anti-China rhetoric in the US right now, not just on the right. The Chip export ban is incredibly tricky reason the outcomes of. For one thing, doesn’t it change the China Taiwan relationship?
NVIDIA is important and Jensen's a billionaire ... we're talking a little bit of media scrutiny for a few weeks, a little embarrassment for Jensen, some heartache for his family, and that's it. This will then be consigned to the footnotes of history.
His PR company right now are just saying, say nothing, lay low, we'll handle it.
I still think it would have been far easier for Jensen if he'd given the lady a horse. I understand that's the going rate in the US right now.
It may well be that it's his private life and it doesn't have much to do with things, but it is a contributing factor. The skirting of export bans was the reagent, but the infidelity is the catalyst that is making it much bigger.
CEO is supposed to be a high integrity position despite most tech CEOs trying to pretend that is not the case. If this person cannot be loyal to those closest to him, how can he be loyal to the company or shareholders?
So many HN folks defending Huang's actions as "just an affair" - what an epic reading comprehension fail. Yes there is an affair, and that's what grabbed the initial headlines. But just read a paragraph or two and you'll find the espionage story.
For reference, the US has sentenced violators of export laws to decades of prison or even execution in extreme cases (when the Rosenburgs leaked nuclear secrets in 1953, they were sentenced to death). It's just shy of treason, legally. This is maybe one of the largest and most consequential intelligence breaches in history. Anyone who thinks this about an extramarital affair really isn't paying attention. Buckle up, its gonna get bumpy.
If it isn't accurate, it isn't showing anything. The Qwen math claim is entirely false in its presentation, it unblocked an existing capability. It did not instill a new one which is what an RSI loop would actually have to do
"[...] how you could prune harmful capabilities from models [...]"
We already do this, abliteration is the term that describes the pruning of capabilities or safeguards for models
"[...] not limited to emergent behavior in astra that might have come from something they've never even trained the model [...]"
If I was attempting to build RSI, I would have these exact types of problems in my RL datasets. There is no proof this is emergent behavior.
No, that is not what they are saying. Can we stop pretending like people are saying things other than they are
From them:
"Use procedure to try and bring it up for a vote. At least try to legislate."
"Edit: love the downvotes, keep them coming. “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.” Classic Big D."
They literally are. This guys is explicitly bitching about things actively happening.
From you:
"Just make an effort and use that as an explicit position when campaigning, then follow through."
He literally called making an explicit promises "pure puffery" and they cannot follow through until they are seated so no, they are not saying that. This person isn't worth defending and is not saying any of the things you are assigning to them.
Promises aren’t worth anything without action. Drawing up an actual bill and gathering early feedback/support is action, as real work is being accomplished through that process. Better to do the bulk of the work early and use it as proof to voters that there is real intent.
Which has nothing to do with what the other person was saying. Saying this is fine, assigning this language to someone else who was saying the opposite is not
"Maybe the Republicans are worse" when the democrats have a plan to create a 100M domestic surveillance program and push it on the national stage, the word maybe becomes relevant. Until then, it is clear to everyone with a functional set of eyes what is happening; maybe schedule your check-up.
> when the democrats have a plan to create a 100M domestic surveillance program
Did you miss the Snowden reporting? How much do you think those programs cost? Whenever you hear someone’s political analysis contain “The Republicans…” “The Democrats…” you can be sure they have no grasp on how DC works.
uh no, 'we' absolutely do not want our tech to work exactly like this. Why would you assume that people default to 'search my anal cavity please' and not 'no, stay the fuck away from me with that glove'
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jfc, why is this website full on psychopaths
"The actual fundamental underlying problem being that not all people are equal, but we kinda have to pretend they are, because not doing so leads to fascism and other terrible stuff.
But we kinda also do not want to fully pretend that, because doing so leads to yet other terrible stuff."
other people are not pretending everyone is equal. your power levels are showing, it isn't subtle.
True, most normal people have little concern for any such humanist goals and ideas.
Normal people live prejudice. It's (erm, claude-speak) load-bearing for them, given just how complex reality is and given just how well it reduces that complexity.
Really, none? Was Microsoft nefarious when they deployed Clippy? I feel like there is an incredibly obvious reason that is not nefarious at all: the average consumer likes cute things
Texas ceded said land to another state, what they viewed as another nation, such that they could keep the practice of human ownership alive and well. The quality of the land is immaterial to this statement, let alone noteworthy
I disagree, I think it adds context that the political climate of the time was more complicated and involved than the original point. It was a place where you couldn't farm and were under constant attack, during that time.
But none of what you are saying shows a complication, is historically interesting, or a proxy for the political climate. Had Texas kept the land, they could not have enforced the ability for the white ruling class to purchase other human beings. Since they were so hell bent on the white ruling class having the right to purchase other human beings, they ceded land to a hostile nation state. The headline is the forfeiture of land to a hostile nation state, not how many farms are on said land
I have lived in Texas all my life and I am used to dealing with people like you. Enjoy November.
This is an excuse for Christians behaving like animals by racing to the bottom, you consistently overstate how evil people are for reasons beyond me.
> Take away the shame that normally keeps it in check and people's bloodlust rises to the surface
Let me guess, the anti-christ is right around the corner, Peter.
> It is a rare person who chooses to deny themselves pleasure on moral grounds
No, it isn't. This person is average among us, they are rare among the elites and politicians. You don't need to paint others poorly because of your own self-image nor is it productive to do so
It was average people who attacked My Lai, and only one pilot did anything to stop it.
Most people do not usually want to do evil things and are usually repelled from doing them by feelings of shame or obligation. The moment the average person feels a desire for violence and will not be condemned for seeking it, they are as bloodthirsty as a serial killer. The constraints on people are emotional, not moral.
From all the reporting I've read, it is hard for me to avoid the conclusion that NVIDIA sold to China despite the export ban. I'd love to be wrong
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