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Notes -
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang caught having affair with Chinese spy.
There was some discussion of this in the Sunday thread, but I think this is a big deal worth a top-level post.
The woman, Alice Huang (no relation), is an executive at Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed. The official story from Nvidia, up until last week, was that this was a totally normal nothing-to-see-here business relationship with a client. Jensen himself now seems to admit this is not the case.
Jensen has been strongly opposed to chip export controls for some time. No doubt prosaic conserns about margins and market expansion were a major factor, but now we have to wonder how much corruption, blackmail, and CCP blackops might have played a role. There have been rumors of... irregularities regarding some Nvidia chip shipments to Asia. There is new reporting today that Nvidia itself intervened to squash a Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed.
I feel like the board has to fire him after this, but on the other hand it seems almost unthinkable. Imagine Apple firing Steve Jobs. There might be pressure from investors to keep him on. It will be interesting to see how the National Security apparatus responds to such a massive persistant vulnerability if it comes to that.
So, um.
Trump just admitted that he knew for the last year one of his top advisors was dating a Chinese spy, and that he doesn't regret his decision to neither ask Huang to dump Huang nor stop consulting him, and that he wants to continue using him as an advisor.
I can honestly believe that Trump is too inexperienced at this whole "national security" thing (or too demented, or a mixture of both) to realise that this is not how you're supposed to do things. But this seems like the sort of obvious NatSec breach that might actually get those 11-13 Republican Senators to vote to convict.
There’s a real chance that Jensen goes down as the worst traitor to America since the Rosenbergs. The narrative will be that Trump let it slide for ballroom money (plausible tbh).
Because a guy who is only half-American, who didn't grow up in America, had a Chinese girlfriend and may have told her his own company's private secrets although there is no evidence of it? The Manhattan Project was a government military project during wartime, the two are not remotely comparable.
Indeed they aren't; AI is much more powerful, important, and dangerous than mere nuclear weapons. Jensen has most likely sped up the timeline where we all die, but failing that he could very well be responsible for China getting a larger share of the light cone than it otherwise would have.
Future generations of Chinese might venerate Alice Huang as their Judith.
That's absurd. To the extent that AI is actually dangerous (it isn't, but if it were), that's only because it can utilize other technology to hurt people. It is therefore at most as dangerous as that other technology is, not more.
An AI can create its own new technologies, which makes it much more dangerous than any other single technology. Specially when the human race hasn't even hit some of the really dangerous stuff yet, such as mirror life.
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No, because he was selling export-restricted Blackwell chips to Singaporean and Malaysian shell companies controlled by CCP operatives.
The Rosenbergs exported the power to obliterate millions of innocent people in an instant. Huang exporting the power to break up America's attempted stranglehold on globally-relevant technology seems to me to be quite another matter. Especially since they're his own damn products.
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