As you may have heard, Jensen Huang has stepped down as CEO of NVidia (the most valuable company in the world) due to allegations he was sleeping with a Chinese spy.

The truth of this is irrelevant, but as best I can tell (and I sure could be wrong) Jensen wasn’t sleeping with the Chinese woman in question, but was cheating with someone at NVidia. And, again, as best I can tell, the Chinese woman isn’t a spy, just a woman using her charm on someone who could make a big difference to her. I’m not going to dissect the details, because I don’t care and it doesn’t matter.

A scandal like this doesn’t happen if people in power don’t want it to. Look at all the pedophiles protected by both Biden and Trump, or all the corruption which is never prosecuted.

When a member of the elite is taken down it is either allowed, or made to happen. This appears to be in the second category, the FBI is going after Huang HARD.

Huang’s one of the better billionaires. (This is like saying “he’s a very handsome housefly.”) He was willing to pay the billionaire tax if it passed. But more to the point he has been a champion of Open Source, opposed restrictions on what AI can do (Anthropic has made it so that you can’t do biological research or AI research or a number of other things with Claude), and has resisted the trade war with China on chips, rightfully pointing out that it means ceding the chip market. Huawei’s Ascend chips are expected to be produced at a volume of 10 million a year by 2028, from there it will go up fast.

This made Jensen an outlier: a very powerful CEO who opposed the tech-bro consensus on AI and the brewing cold war with China.

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The simplest truth of capitalism is that you get more of what you pay for. Money sends the message and resources required to do things. In most cases your power is tiny, one of millions, but this isn’t like that because the numbers and the need (to keep the blog and Ian running) are relatively small.

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I suspect that Anthropic pushed hard for this. They have a big war chest, will get a big influx of sucker money for their IPO, and are aware that open source AI is eventually going to eat their lunch because it costs less and doesn’t have all the restrictions they’re putting on their AI. So Anthropic wants regulation to create a moat: everyone to agree on AI controls and any AI that doesn’t have them to be made illegal because “super dangerous, might destroy humanity.” (Huang also pushed back on this saying there was zero chance that AI would end the world any time soon.)

Huang stood in their way, and Ahthropic has convinced the intelligence/law-enforcement crowd that AI is super duper dangerous, and that Chinese AI is a Trojan Horse.

If the intel/law-enforcement mob wants you taken out, you will be taken out. Huang was on the wrong side of a current elite panic, and he paid the price.

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