1. This is astonishing:
SpaceX’s giant Starship spacecraft pulled off a remarkable feat on Saturday afternoon in the quest to build fully reusable rockets. For the first time, the spacecraft successfully returned from orbit to its launch site in South Texas, where it was caught between two mechanical arms on the launch tower. The Spacex video is here. You have to see it to believe it. (Sources: nytimes.com, theguardian.com. Italics mine.)
2. Regarding the Nvidia scandal, from Will Depue:
I have a major result to share.
I’ve found conclusive forensic evidence that the top 4 Chinese AI labs—DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax and Ant Group—have built their newest models on NVIDIA’s most advanced Blackwell chips, which are barred from export to China.
This sounds insane, but I discovered that almost every AI model carries a hidden signature of the GPU that trained it. When a model is first set up, the starting values of its weights are laid out in a pattern that depends on the exact GPU. Each combination of GPU and seed number produces a unique pattern—a sort of fingerprint of the hardware used to create the model. Traces of that pattern survive training into the published model.Again, this evidence isn’t based on any insider information or leaking. It’s based on a forensic analysis of the model weights released by the companies themselves. (Sources: willdepue.net, x.com)
3. The Wall Street Journal:
Jensen Huang built a multibillion-dollar business to feed the ravenous appetite of Chinese customers for American chips, cultivating a network of Asian partners who could serve the Chinese far from Washington. He made a friend of President Trump and lobbied Washington hard to keep the backdoor to China open.
China jumped to take advantage of the avenues Trump didn’t close. Its AI developers exploited the Nvidia chips they desperately needed to catch up with America’s leaders, either using smuggled chips or accessing them remotely in places like Malaysia.
Revelations about Huang’s affair with an executive at one of those Asian partners—a possible Chinese intelligence asset—didn’t just blow up his career. They now threaten to implode the entire lucrative ecosystem he built in Asia to get China the chips it needed. (Source: wsj.com)
4. Zvi Mowshowitz:
Megaspeed may only be the secondary scandal. The primary scandal could be Shanghai Century Litong, which became the central supplier to Chinese companies and facilitated at least $7.5 billion worth of Nvidia chips.
The timeline and circumstances strongly suggest that Century Litong was able to do this, and get status as a preferred Nvidia customer shortly after being founded, through the influence of Alice Huang, despite her having zero AI background. (Source: thezvi.substack.com)
5. Chris Miller:
Jensen Huang’s exit from Nvidia, the company he co-founded, after revelations of an affair with an alleged Chinese spy is a humiliating end to an extraordinary career atop America’s AI sector. Yet his replacement will not end the investigations. The company’s remaining leaders will have to answer for staggering compliance failures that stretched beyond the CEO. And US President Donald Trump — until recently one of Huang’s biggest backers — will face intense pressure to increase his administration’s lax effort to track the smuggling of US chips to China.
