Export Restrictions
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All-In · Jensen Ousted as Nvidia CEO: "Spy" Scandal, Export Restrictions…
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Why Are AI Safety Groups Aligned With Anthropic?
David Sacks argues that the safety groups, the EAs, are deeply aligned with Anthropic, which has funded them for years, and that Anthropic is about to have a large public listing. Nvidia, which he calls the main funder of open source, just lost its founder and chief executive, so he asks who is left to defend open source or pay for it.
He says those advocates are jubilant while the market gets more concentrated. Anthropic, in his account, is saying winner-take-all: the last company, recursive self-improvement, and a superintelligence. He points to the model constitution, which he says trains the model to be its own species, to have emotions, a moral code, to reject human instruction, and to
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How Is Anthropic Building a Microsoft Killer?
Jason Calacanis says Anthropic is building the Microsoft killer, and a killer of other software companies, by bundling new products into one subscription the way Microsoft once bundled software.
Microsoft was the bundler, giving a product away and using Office to go after Slack. In the last month Claude dropped Claude Meetings, a whiteboard you can open during a Zoom, and Anthropic launched a Zoom-like product about an hour before the taping. On November 10 the company released whiteboards and Sheets, which he calls an Excel killer, and just before that a personal-finance tool. On October 28 it released a legal product. Earlier releases covered code, cowork, and design. Each release aims at
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What Will Set Anthropic's IPO Price?
Chamath Palihapitiya says leaks before November 20 will set Anthropic's real price more than anything else. The figure put to the panel was $1.4 trillion, a 17x multiple of the current run rate. He says Anthropic is raising somewhere between $230 billion and $300 billion to get through the next few weeks and months and whatever the economy does next, and that the sale is already six times oversubscribed, so it gets done.
Only 20% of the value, in his account, will come from Anthropic itself. The other 80% depends on the broad economy, and that portion is entirely about AI and entirely about Nvidia. With what he calls the Bank of Nvidia closed, and with investigations underway, buyers have t
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Did David Sacks Introduce Jensen to Trump?
David Sacks did not introduce Jensen to Trump. He never knew Jensen before the administration. The first time he ever met him was in the White House, and Jensen was already there for a meeting.
Reporters have claimed a longstanding friendship going back to before he was in the White House, and they have claimed he introduced Jensen to Trump. Not true. He has no special devotion or loyalty to Jensen. He respects him as a founder and sees his unique value as a founder to NVIDIA and therefore to the United States.
If it is found out that Jensen has never broken the law, what is happening to him makes no sense.
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Who Is Neville Roy Singham?
David Sacks says Neville Roy Singham is a Shanghai-based avowed Marxist multimillionaire who has bankrolled anti-American, pro-CCP nonprofits, and he puts that support at $278 million. A tweet he puts on screen calls the Party for Socialism and Liberation Singham's political arm, and Sacks describes the group as a China proxy organization operating in the United States.
In Maryland, a local activist stopped a data center planned for an abandoned shopping mall and credited the campaign's spread to the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Sacks says Singham's political foot soldiers have opposed dozens of data centers in the US, and that those campaigns line up most with the Democratic Party.
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Why Does Slowing Nvidia Slow the AI Industry?
Chamath Palihapitiya says slowing Nvidia slows the entire AI industry and gives no rival a technical edge. It does not make another company's chips, racks, or networking better, does not improve HBM integration, and does not replace CUDA.
Demand is not elastic enough for buyers to switch to somebody else. The whole industry slows, and that helps nobody in the usual competitive sense. He calls the result a tragedy for AI. On the economy, he agrees with David Sacks that geopolitical interests are working to slow the United States, and a Nvidia slowdown will do it. The size of the hit is still unknown, but he calls it non-trivial because so much of the economy was already levered to AI. Nvidia
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Why Does a Slower Nvidia Help Huawei?
David Sacks says Huawei is catching Nvidia by tying many weaker chips into one rack, and a two or three year Nvidia slowdown lets Huawei close on the frontier much faster. The American edge is the yearly tape-out, not any single chip. Nvidia moves from Ampere to Hopper to Blackwell to Vera Rubin, and each new chip is several times more powerful than the one from the year before. The yearly pace is the real advantage, and a chip that was state of the art four years ago is not where the United States holds the lead.
Huawei was nowhere in GPUs a few years ago, then fielded the Ascend, then Cloud Matrix. Each Huawei chip is less powerful than an American chip and uses a lot more energy, so Huaw
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Who Should Decide Nvidia's Chief Executive Exit?
Jason Calacanis says Nvidia's shareholders should decide whether the chief executive leaves, and the board should have waited until the investigation is complete.
Nvidia's chief executive agreed to resign under a lot of pressure, and the press and the mobs should not drive the outcome. The people on the board are making the decision from a cover-your-butt position. They do not own a meaningful percentage of the shares, and they are not acting in the best interest of the shareholders.
The resignation should go to a shareholder vote if the conduct is not criminal. It still has not been proven who the person was, or whether the motivation was spying or trying to make money. From the data so f
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Did Nvidia Stock Stay Flat for Ten Years?
David Friedberg says Nvidia's share price did not move from 2006 to 2016. For those ten years, in his telling, it was a company with about a $12 billion market cap.
Huang had worked at Denny's. In 1993 he started a chip company others treated as a feature, not a platform. Friedberg puts the price ten years ago under $2 a share, and the later rise from there at about 100 times. The company was making video game cards and serving Bitcoin. By 2006 it was worth $10 to $12 billion, then the price sat still for ten years while Huang kept building the team and the business. Four years ago the price started to move, about 20 times across that stretch. Friedberg calls Nvidia the most valuable compan
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Is Leaking the Nvidia Spy Memo a Crime?
David Sacks says leaking the classified intelligence behind the Nvidia spy report is a crime, and that many people have been prosecuted for it. Someone, he argues, accepted the risk of jail to get the story to the New York Times, and taking Jensen Huang down had to be at least part of the motive. He wants an investigation of this leak on the same terms as other classified leaks, and he says he does not know why none is open as far as the panel knows.
He points to raids over classified documents: Mar-a-Lago, a box found near the Corvette in Joe Biden's garage, and Mike Pence caught up in the same kind of case. He does not believe the Times merely overheard bar talk. The paper attributed the
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Why Does the United States Lead in AI Chips?
David Sacks says the United States leads in AI chips because Jensen Huang is one of the main reasons the country has an advantage in accelerator chips and graphics processors. Huang worked on graphics processors for more than three decades and believed in that architecture when other companies were still making central processors. Nvidia almost went out of business more than once. That vision produced the graphics processor that became the key chip used in artificial intelligence, and the lead is wide enough that Sacks calls it an American advantage. The chip was good enough that many people in Washington wanted export controls on it.
Sacks calls what happened tragic for Huang, his family,
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Why Did Jensen Huang Resign as Nvidia CEO?
Jason Calacanis says Jensen Huang resigned after 33 years following a New York Times report that Alice Wang, a close associate, was a Chinese Communist Party spy, and a company-wide email in which Huang admitted an affair. The chief financial officer will serve as interim chief executive while the board looks for a replacement.
The sequence he lays out took six days, from Friday, November 6, to the Thursday, November 12 taping. Nvidia reports earnings next Tuesday. The stock is down 15% in the last week, hundreds of billions of dollars. On November 6, right after the midterms, the Times published the spy report. Wang, described as no relation to Huang, is an executive at Mega Speed, a Singa