Join us live on Nov. 17 at 1 p.m. ET as The Argument’s Kobe Yank-Jacobs hosts a Substack Live debate between philosophers Nick Bostrom and Ned Block: Can AI be conscious?
Bostrom imagines a universe populated by billions of digital minds. Block is skeptical that consciousness can happen on computer chips at all. The two eminent thinkers will make their case, and Kobe will press them on where they disagree and why it matters.
Welcome to The Weekly Scroll!
The Weekly Scroll is a once-a-week roundup of the most interesting, strangest, and funniest stories from around the social internet.
This week, we’re talking about the Jensen Huang scandal, the prevalence of foreign influence campaigns on social media, whether or not young men are normal now, and how platforms keep losing the battle to declare their design choices as speech.
Jensen Huang’s very bad week
Over the past two weeks, Jensen Huang, the longtime CEO and co-founder of chipmaking giant Nvidia, has gone from arguably the most powerful man in AI to ousted from his company in a sordid sex-and-espionage scandal. Huang had been doing some, ahem, parallel processing with Alice Huang,1 who U.S. officials say is a Chinese spy.2
Even before the potential espionage revelation, the affair mattered for reasons beyond personal impropriety. Alice Huang was an executive at AI infrastructure company Megaspeed, which was under investigation for allegedly smuggling advanced Nvidia chips into China in defiance of U.S. export controls. The New York Times has reported that the Commerce Department investigation had to be transferred to the Justice Department after it was compromised by, you guessed it, Nvidia.
It paints a troubling picture: Jensen Huang has a relationship with a Chinese spy, then his company coincidentally happens to sell advanced chips to several companies she’s linked to, and those chips end up being smuggled into China in violation of federal law. On its own, this might be enough to topple Huang from his perch at Nvidia, but adding fuel to the fire, the Times reported Wednesday that Huang had a second affair with one of his direct reports.
And as a wise man once said:
Sure enough, Reuters is now reporting a third affair (and I’d be surprised if that’s where it stops). Huang has since resigned.
There are too many angles to this story to cover in one article, and rather than try, I’ll link you to a few good resources: a complete timeline of events, a discussion of what this means for China hawks and AI safety, and an analysis of how the episode exposes the weaknesses of Silicon Valley’s “cult of the founder.”
But this being The Weekly Scroll, there is one angle in particular that I think is worth covering: When the story first broke, I noticed a number of odd accounts with unusually strong pro-Huang takes. According to Tyler Johnston of the Midas Project, these were part of a network of hundreds of sock-puppet accounts all using the same talking points to defend Huang’s reputation.