@DukeStJournal

New newsletter: THE JENSEN HUANG FAQ: WINNERS, LOSERS, WORST CASE SCENARIOS My basic summary for people who aren't deep AI nerds: It’s sketchy for chief executives to have affairs with their major clients; sketchier still for them to have affairs with clients whose business is suspected of violating federal law; even sketchier for that paramour to also be a suspected secret agent of a foreign government; maximally sketchy if that foreign government is America’s top geopolitical adversary; and beyond all reckoning of sketchiness if the US government knew of these allegations and revelations and did approximately f*ck-all about it for months. The biggest losers: - Nvidia, obviously: Huang was the founder, rockstar mascot, and chief spokesperson, with 60 direct reports and no succession plan. The plane is entering turbulent air and the pilot just got thrown out the back window. - "Just sell to China, it's cool" loses its top spokesperson - Open-weight models lose a top advocate - Neoclouds and other less-capitalized AI players lose their bank, as Nvidia's circular financing likely pulls back with collapsing stock price The biggest winners - China hawks—ie, those who want to restrict chip sales to China—since their policy case gets a heavy serving of righteousness - Alternative chipmakers, including AMD, Google, Amazon, and smaller chipmakers, who might find more buyers in a world where Nvidia innovation slows down and the company loses its best salesperson. - Hyperscalers: If neoclouds struggle without the bank of Nvidia, established clouds like Microsoft and Google might gain at the expense of those upstarts - uhh, Anthropic? Dario was always on the other side of the China debate with Trump/Jensen and the company is among the least dependent on Nvidia tech The worst-case scenario: I mean, look ... If one of Nvidia’s largest overseas clients was an illegal backdoor to China, overseen by a spy with whom Jensen Huang was having an affair, and the US govt had information on all of the above and did nothing to arrest China's espionage/legal violations because they wanted to preserve an intimate state-business relationship? Many "if"s there, but sweet JESUS, that looks bad. derekthompson.org/p/this-is-…

If you’re philosophically opposed to AI chip export restrictions, I think you should be the most mad about this timeline. Like, I personally did not need the last 72 hours of news to make me doubt the wisdom of selling advanced chips thru to China. But anybody on the fence or in a politically vulnerable position is going to look at this and go: oh shit, these anti-restriction ppl are corrupt and insane! One of many problems with getting into bed with Trump is that he’s incredible at driving public opinion against everything he does, because everything he does is so sloppy and corrupt and terrible.

Imagine a historian in 2035 writing a political history of the 2020s, and he points out that every election, the out-of-power party won a cost-of-living election and then used their mandate to ignore or exacerbate affordability only to be destroyed in the next election, where voters again said “to be clear, I don’t want whatever bullshit you’re up to, I just want life to feel more affordable,” and then, once again, the winning politicians prioritized everything except affordability, and this story repeated itself over and over again. One of my strongest held political opinions right now is: Democrats should do everything they can to avoid that history being written.