Nvidia's board mulls showing Jensen Huang the door after a second affair is reported
From The Hinge · 9:50
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Welcome to The Hinge, a daily briefing on AI developments with macrostrategic significance.00:00:00 Nvidia's board mulls showing Jensen Huang the door after a second affair is reported00:01:21 Trump reportedly orders a chip-diversion crackdown for the third time; Lutnick stalls again00:02:37 Commerce is reportedly finalising a rule to bar Chinese firms' remote access to AI chips00:03:43 Sobering news from OpenAI: models are growing harder to monitor through their chains of thought00:04:46 Anthropic says its Mythos model moved Claude onto AMD chips in three days, not months00:05:51 Chinese AI labs buy some $500m of training data from American vendors, an investigation finds00:06:59 Alice Huang reportedly resurfaces in Beijing; China warns America against scandal-driven tech curbs00:07:56 Claude Fable 5.2 tops Agent Arena by what the arena calls an unprecedented margin00:09:03 Hawley, a Republican, joins progressive Democrats in backing a nationwide data-centre moratoriumNvidia's board mulls showing Jensen Huang the door after a second affair is reportedNvidia's board met on Wednesday to discuss whether to oust Jensen Huang as chief executive, after it was reported that he had had another extramarital relationship, this time with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice-president of health care, who reports to him. The board has been working with an outside firm to identify potential replacements, a person familiar with the situation said; some directors, according to people familiar with the matter, favour Colette Kress, the chief financial officer, as interim boss, though the full board has yet to decide. As this newsletter reported on Monday, the board had already opened an investigation into whether Mr Huang had been the target of a foreign intelligence effort. Nvidia's shares were down 6.3% in premarket trading on Thursday.Why it matters: Losing the founder who steered Nvidia to the centre of the AI boom would probably unsettle a firm that supplies many of the most advanced chips for hyperscalers, and the search for a successor suggests the board is no longer merely investigating.Trump reportedly orders a chip-diversion crackdown for the third time; Lutnick stalls againLast Thursday Donald Trump authorised a crackdown on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia's advanced AI chips to China, the third time this year he has approved such action. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has stalled once more, according to sources briefed on the discussions. At a Situation Room meeting that day Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, reportedly pressed Mr Lutnick on why Megaspeed, the company at the centre of the spy scandal, had not been put on a list of companies that pose national-security concerns; Commerce denies that the confrontation took place. Mr Lutnick, as we reported on Wednesday, had been sent a classified memo on the affair. Now two Democratic senators, Chris Coons and Elizabeth Warren, have asked him, among others, to preserve documents on Nvidia's chip exports to China.Why it matters: The account suggests that America's chip-export enforcement against China hinges less on what the president decides than on whether one department is willing to carry it out. Democrats seem set to probe the gap.Commerce is reportedly finalising a rule to bar Chinese firms' remote access to AI chipsThe Commerce Department is finalising a long-awaited rule to stop Chinese AI firms tapping advanced AI chips remotely through data centres in other countries, according to two people familiar with the process. The rule, which could be announced as soon as this month, would stretch existing chip controls to seven more countries, among them Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand; first, Commerce is consulting other agencies. Influential companies such as Nvidia have opposed such rules. Department staff, as reported here on Tuesday, had renewed their push for them.Why it matters: That Commerce wants the door shut suggests it sees remote access from third countries as a way round America's export controls. Closing it would probably squeeze the compute available to China's frontier labs.Sobering news from OpenAI: models are growing harder to monitor through their chains of thoughtResearchers at OpenAI have published research on how the monitorability of a model's chain of thought (CoT), the reasoning it verbalises, evolves over the course of training. They call their findings sobering: “as we scale toward more intelligent systems, models are becoming harder to monitor through their CoT.” Over training at OpenAI, they say, they have seen increases in CoT controllability, models' ability to control what they verbalise in their CoT; an earlier study warned that this could undermine CoT monitorability.Why it matters: That earlier study called reading a model's reasoning a promising tool for catching misbehaviour. If that window is clouding as models improve, labs will probably have to lean harder on other safeguards.Anthropic says its Mythos…
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