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.

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 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.

Replaced by a CFO… this is what they always do. And that sign the slow death of the any company.

Replaced for like 10 minutes until the new CEO comes in. This isn't the time to announce the permanent next-20-years CEO.

He clearly made some very bad decisions or we wouldn't be having this discussion

There are so many people who could fill his position. Not such a big loss

> replaced by a ex-CFO.

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 is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US

Let's expect better of leadership than to be criminal.

Its about his push for China. No intention of posting the other interview.

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.

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.

I find this hard to believe. Covid made it clear the CCP is very much in charge and in control.

If they don't need NVIDIA then why are they attempting so hard to bypass export controls.

If they don't need NVIDIA then why is the now former CEO of NVIDIA trying so hard to allow exprt controls to be relaxed.

And it's because brute forcing only allows you to not fall behind, but you can't catch up to frontier models or surpass.

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

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's just myopia.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment

> 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?

Davidson Window...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davidson_window

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.

This. And this happened before, see the China Sovjet split

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.

Why wouldn’t they have done that by now then? Where is their ASML or TSMC? They’ve had decades to catch up already.

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.

> 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.

Has anybody argued against your second point? Feels like a straw man.

> If Nvidia was skirting the law, then they should held accountable for that.

in corporate america haha

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.

They and their shareholders are about to find out how much it matters.

Yep.[0]

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.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

They can be part of the "kill chain", yes.

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.

I should have made it clearer that I was only both-sidesing it when it comes to the donors, not to the recipient...

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.

You didn't say that, I was speculating in response to your comment.

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.

That is the unforgivable lapse in judgement.

"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?

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.

i understand infidelity, i don't understand who would care on the job. also, not french :)

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.

> 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.

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.

> Why?

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?

*Everything on a spectrum.

Was she working at Google at that time and reporting directly to Eric Schmidt?

For one, Schmidt left Google in 2011. Cultural acceptance of fucking subordinates has changed a lot since then.

Or because the current stock value is highly inflated and the bubble is starting to pop.

186 thousand million.

For worse.

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.....

Zuckerberg protected himself from this scenario by starting off with an Asian wife.

It worked for Sam.

> Huang wed an American woman in America

Please don't make the mistake of assuming that American culture is homogeneous: It's not.

Wait till you hear about what wives get up to at “board game night” in San Jose.

> 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.

Can you link me to the press release or anything where this is said? I want to share it with my friends!

So because he lied when he denied certain allegations, you don't believe his admissions of guilt? That seems like an odd logical jump.

> we know literally nothing

He "literally" wrote about how his actions hurt his family, I'm not sure why there's a second account parroting the exact same phrase.

> If he is actually a bi-furry with an understanding with his wife on 'affairs', do you think he'd say that?

Yes, and it would have helped. CEOs have "exciting" relationships all the time, and folks seem entirely willing to accept this.

These are entirely different stories:

"My wife and I have a non-traditional relationship and would prefer to keep the specifics private, but no harm was caused by my actions."

"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."

People don’t realise that execs don’t actually write these messages usually.

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.

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.