Nvidia’s challenge of replacing an irreplaceable CEO exposes the danger of highly concentrated power

Nvidia’s challenge of replacing an irreplaceable CEO exposes the danger of highly concentrated power

Reuters reports: Ousted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ​had an intimate relationship with a second employee, according to two people ‌familiar with the matter, Reuters has learned. The revelation follows two other extramarital affairs that led to his resignation Thursday. The two women are Alice Huang, who US intelligence suspects of being ​a Chinese spy, and Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health ​care. [Continue reading…] Investor’s Business Daily reports: Chief Executive Jensen Huang’s sudden departure sent Nvidia stock plunging as…

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White House weighs Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s ouster amid Nvidia export concerns, sources say

White House weighs Commerce Secretary Lutnick’s ouster amid Nvidia export concerns, sources say

Reuters reports: Senior White House officials are discussing whether Commerce ​Secretary Howard Lutnick should be pushed out amid a spy scandal surrounding Nvidia’s now-former CEO Jensen Huang, two people familiar with the situation said on ‌Thursday. A growing number of lawmakers criticized Lutnick for the administration’s refusal to add dozens of Chinese companies to a key US trade blacklist, and over whether the government was properly overseeing Nvidia’s exports to China. Criticism of Lutnick’s actions predates Thursday’s resignation of Huang,…

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Bessent and Lutnick clashed over firm at heart of Nvidia affair

Bessent and Lutnick clashed over firm at heart of Nvidia affair

The New York Times reports: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confronted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick last week over his handling of a Singaporean company at the heart of revelations about Chinese spying on Nvidia, demanding to know why the United States had not already banned sales of advanced A.I. chips to the firm. The exchange, described by people briefed on it, highlighted growing tensions inside the Trump administration over A.I. policy in general and the Commerce Department’s posture toward Nvidia in…

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The race for AI dominance is only going to become more reckless

The race for AI dominance is only going to become more reckless

Catherine Thorbecke writes: In addition to being an ardent advocate of selling hardware to China, [Jensen] Huang was also one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful champions of open models, where Chinese firms have concentrated their bets. In July, he used his first-ever X post to rally America’s tech industry behind open-weight AI after fears mounted of a US ban on Chinese offerings. He has defended distillation, or training one model on the outputs of another, as a “widely used technique”…

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AI is exposing decades of software vulnerabilities that permeate the internet

AI is exposing decades of software vulnerabilities that permeate the internet

Brett Goldstein writes: On Oct. 29, hackers that FBI analysts link to North Korea stole nearly $6.4 billion from Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange — roughly four times the previous record for a crypto theft. About a week earlier, the National Security Agency told anyone running a website on PHP, the programming language behind roughly 7 in 10 websites, to install an emergency fix or take the site offline after vulnerabilities were discovered. In Japan, more than 20 major…

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Democrats plan investigation into climate and science cuts under Trump

Democrats plan investigation into climate and science cuts under Trump

The New York Times reports: Congressional Democrats have alerted more than 60 companies, individuals and agencies that they are potential targets of investigations into the Trump administration’s cuts to scientific research, rollback of environmental protections and pursuit of unorthodox business deals. The letters reveal where Democrats, soon to be empowered with subpoena authority after their sweeping wins in last week’s elections, intend to focus as they examine some of the administration’s most unabashed deals and policy changes. The notices sent…

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How a metabolic spark could have jump-started life

How a metabolic spark could have jump-started life

Jake Buehler writes: For well over 4 billion years, the fire of metabolism has powered the engines of life. The ability of cells to gather, transform, and harness chemical energy from their surroundings is the central force driving the dizzyingly complex network of chemical reactions that sustains living things. Metabolism is so crucial to life that some researchers believe that these reactions could have helped spark life itself. They argue that life’s first glimmers were found in self-sustaining cycles of…

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Nvidia prepares to oust Jensen Huang. Reported affairs multiply, $7 billion of chip sales to China

Nvidia prepares to oust Jensen Huang. Reported affairs multiply, $7 billion of chip sales to China

CNBC reports: Shares of Nvidia fell more than 7% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after The Wall Street Journal reported that the company’s board is preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang. The news landed minutes after The New York Times reported that Huang had an extramarital relationship with another executive at the company. The alleged relationship was with Kimberly Powell, vice president of health care at Nvidia, according to the report. Powell’s bio on the Nvidia website says she’s “responsible…

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Trump’s reaction to the Nvidia scandal shows how little he cares about national security

Trump’s reaction to the Nvidia scandal shows how little he cares about national security

David A. Graham writes: Sometimes a news story is important because it reveals information for the first time. Other times, it’s a big deal because it confirms what many people already suspected. The latest development in the story of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang falls into the second category. As news of Huang’s extramarital affair with a suspected Chinese spy rocks Silicon Valley, Washington, and Wall Street, President Trump has pleaded ignorance. In particular, he has said he was unaware of…

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How Scott Colom won deep-red Mississippi with little help from the Democratic party

How Scott Colom won deep-red Mississippi with little help from the Democratic party

The Guardian reports: The ad is simple, less than half a minute long, but many say it was the moment the nation took notice of Mississippi’s US Senate race. In it, the incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, a cattle farmer, answers a reporter’s question about the rising price of beef: “You know, you have so many proteins to choose from,” she says. The ad then cuts to a man flipping burgers on a grill. “Pick another protein?” he says. “Shhiiiiii…

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A closed border was all that mattered for Palantir’s Alex Karp in 2025

A closed border was all that mattered for Palantir’s Alex Karp in 2025

  Futurism reports: For years now, Palantir CEO Alex Karp has been cozying up to the Trump administration, from aiding Immigration and Customs Enforcement through AI-powered surveillance tech and musing about legalizing war crimes to making unsavory comments about women and bragging that he frequently chats with “real Nazis.” Karp has been accused of going “full MAGA,” defending president Donald Trump by trying to argue that he isn’t a fascist. His company helped the so-called Department of Government Efficiency as…

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Argentina’s Milei cares more about the U.S. tech oligarchy than serving his own constituents

Argentina’s Milei cares more about the U.S. tech oligarchy than serving his own constituents

Julia Kornberg writes: After decades of chronic inflation and atrocious economic mismanagement by the country’s center-left, Argentines were initially won over by Mr. Milei’s outsider status, his unvarnished style and his vows to repair the country’s shambling finances once and for all. Over the last three years, the president has made major inroads in his efforts to downsize the state and deregulate the economy, slashing funding for the country’s public health care, infrastructure and education systems — increasingly unpopular austerity…

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Prepare for the AI apocalypse like you’d prepare for a natural disaster

Prepare for the AI apocalypse like you’d prepare for a natural disaster

Matteo Wong writes: Since late last year, a small but growing chorus of cybersecurity experts has been warning that AI models were pushing the internet toward a sort of cataclysm. Hospitals, banks, utilities, basically anything and everything connected to the web could be hacked. Over the past month or so, those scenarios have come alive in almost spectacular fashion: Last month, AI was used to find major security flaws in software used by 70 percent of websites, prompting governments to…

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Theory that the universe is twice as old as we thought, passes key cosmological tests

Theory that the universe is twice as old as we thought, passes key cosmological tests

University of Ottawa: A radical alternative to the standard picture of the cosmos is gaining attention after researchers at the University of Ottawa reported that it successfully matched several important astronomical observations. The model suggests that the Universe could be 26.7 billion years old, nearly twice the widely accepted age of 13.8 billion years, and that neither dark matter nor dark energy is needed to explain its behavior. If further research supports these findings, the theory could offer a very…

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