A couple of questions after reading this article. The Post is not exactly top notch journalism.
First, does her activity actually fit the definition of “espionage”?
* Espionage is the act of secretly gathering confidential, classified, or proprietary information without the owner's permission*
The most important question is what she actually sent and how secret it was. Most companies have levels of secrecy ranging from non public to highly sensitive. For example, schematics of their chip would be concerning.
Also, this seems pretty different from setting up a mic behind a TV.
Second, although the article tries very hard to imply there was some kind of infidelity, adding irrelevant details about Jensen’s family, I don’t know that any of that happened.
Not sure why the New York Post is being used here considering its complete lack of credibility and the fact this story appeared in the New York Times first
Nothing has to be collected. All they need to show is that she has some link to foreign government intelligence and attempted to do anything. Good chance she was an unregistered agent which is a violation.
If she is an asset and was close enough to gain physical access to his phone or main computer, that's pretty much the ballgame. CEOs often don't want their devices being on company MDMs, that's for the underlings.
It's still advisable to pretend that it might work, though. Just saying...you've got to think strategically when you work in the national security business.
When is this industry going to have an open, honest discussion about how not getting enough trim in your younger years makes you especially vulnerable to these schemes once you acquire power and wealth?
I've seen 80 variations of this same story over the years.
Gates and Bezos slept around with younger women and lost more in divorces than 99.9999% of men could ever dream of making.
Elon has recreated the backstabbing and infighting of imperial harem politics with a bunch of women he didn't even physically sleep with.
Despite his other failings you have to give Zuck credit for genuinely being a wholesome wifeguy by all appearances.
That seems like either the behavior of an extremely devoted husband or the behavior of a husband who cheats shamelessly and then gives her showy gifts to "make up for it"
It’s a generational thing. Zuck is about the age when being nerdy became a perfectly normal thing in social circles. When Gates and co were growing up their personality was the butt of jokes, and they’d be laughed at for trying to approach the “popular” kids.
It's not an unreasonable point, but let's not pretend these are naive chumps who crumble at the sight of a woman. In this case, Jensen could have been coordinating with intel agencies to feed disinformation or a honeypot honeypot. Obvious speculation, but clearly he understands the game on the table better than us. Still, it is a tactic as old as time, so I am sure plenty fall victim to some degree
I think that is a rather simplistic view of what motivates people.
I would at least like to see some statistics on how much early adulthood behaviour predicts particular later life behaviours before making any conclusions.
Rather than characterising things as 'getting enough trim' perhaps a broader education in dealing with the emotions of life might be more productive.
For each of your 80 stories there are probably a dozen stories of former frat boys and Trump/Epstein types also being in compromising relationships.
I think it has much less to do with any individual's sexual history and much more to do with the rapacious/hypersexual elite culture in USA and elsewhere.
Super weird that the only relationship documented in this article is two "dinners with AI executives in Asia." Does that count as a close relationship? I get invited to AI dinners in the Bay Area nonstop, and I understand they are always transactional (people wanting to sell me stuff), not actual relations with people who just happen to enjoy my presence...
Isn't Cami Clark just the classic sleep-their-way-up type? She didn't end up in the Whitehouse unlike a certain other one but her marriage at 20 was to a 64 year old...
It has always struck me as absurd that America is so accessible to Chinese nationals. The marginal boost to economic productivity isn’t worth the threat these people pose to national security; the Chinese understand this, so why don’t Americans?
Until recently the US was on the side of international cooperation. It's not only a pity that this has changed but it's sad to see that people are completely forgetting this, as well as seemingly forgetting the incredibly bloody history that we had to endure before embracing the idea of respectful cooperation.
Now China is the grown-up in the room while the US is running around like a maniac in Venezuela, Iran, and wherever else
China who is encroaching on its neighboring countries? Attacking ships in Philippines waters. Yelling at everyone demanding respect while disrespecting everyone around them.
Would you want to spend your time in a nation looking for 2 of their smart people out of 1000 or make national ties so you can get hundreds of smart people out of their billion?
Also internal distributions will not be even, those smart people are far more likely to be clustered.
I think it's hard to get a good read on China's actual economic situation from the outside. Which, in itself, speaks to larger issues as we would understand them in the West.
Jared Kushner’s direct access to the Russian oligarch is more damning than any Chinese industrial espionage campaign, which happens every day around the world. Yesterday, Russia was a hostile energy supplier; today, it is an energy-trading partner. Good or bad depends on who is in power.
This article has the flavor of a strategic political leak by the Trump administration, likely a prelude to blackmail to get NVidia to do something friendly to the administration. You don't have multiple "people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings are drawn from classified intelligence" unless someone high-up in the CIA is greenlighting the leak; that's a crime punishable by decades in prison. And then the whole article has the flavor of "We appreciate your continued support, Jensen, we know you have been a strong ally in public, but if you think of defying us we will hit you with espionage charges and throw you in jail. Look, the groundwork is already in the NYTimes."
Makes me wonder what the next headline is going to be, probably some deal between NVidia and the federal government over export restrictions or something.
> "Makes me wonder what the next headline is going to be, probably some deal between NVidia and the federal government over export restrictions or something."
Chinese models disappearing from HuggingFace (recently acquired by Nvidia).
GLM-flash and Qwen-next disappeared from ArtificialAnalysis (the top benchmark site) a few days ago; I was wondering if that was a prelude to something greater. Testing the waters.
"These days" are ending. Nothing about the current geopolitical climate, global supply chain, energy price, or socioeconomic reality of inter-generational quality of life chasm is stable. Taking a trillion dollar bite out of a bubble beneficiary is a clear opening move for a novel government with restored oversight and an eye on the books.
So they leaked a story about Nvidia violating export restrictions in order to “blackmail” Nvidia into… obeying export restrictions? Wow, that’s some good old fashioned Trumpian 44D chess right there.
It's implicitly "President Trump was briefed and took no action yet."
You don't write about it in the NYTimes unless there's a purpose. That purpose is leverage. If you're negotiating, you don't blow all your leverage upfront; you subtly let the other party know you have it, and then wait to see if they play ball. If they don't, that's when you apply pressure.
Another interpretation is that someone in the intelligence community felt that since Trump was ignoring what they perceived to be a serious threat to security, their best recourse was to use the media to raise an alarm.
Hmm, that's a possible read on it. I'd initially assumed an administration leak because the article seems more pro-Trump than the facts warrant (eg. "Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump’s" => Jensen Huang seems neutral/Democratic to me, though primarily concerned with the survival of his business, the picture of the White House luncheon with tech leaders => look at how he's projecting power and the support of the tech community, "People who have watched the two men interact say Mr. Trump has been won over by the lavish praise Mr. Huang has given the president in public" => look at how much lavish praise Mr. Trump gets!). But on a second read, all of those could be interpreted as the CIA complaining about how the close relationship between Trump & Huang is jeopardizing national security, and a few other comments in the article (eg. the sentences about how the Biden administration moved to clamp down on AI exports to China before Trump took over, and how this investigation started under the Biden administration) would support that read.
Given that China is releasing open weight, self-hostable models I'd far rather NVIDIA work with them than with the US and the closed source model providers. I'd rather have a Chinese model running on my own machine with NVIDIA hardware than an Anthropic/OpenAI/X model running in a data center somewhere, for multiple reasons.
This is an apparent nothingburger with zero hint of anything outside plain old business schmoozing on Jensen's part. 'Close relationship' is a really good weasel word (weasel phrase?).
> Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.
> US authorities have been investigating Megaspeed over suspicions that it helped Chinese firms circumvent US export restrictions and smuggle advanced Nvidia chips into China, the Times reported.
"The woman, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, is a Chinese citizen who has served as a top executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer and cloud partner that provides AI computing power to Chinese companies including Alibaba, the New York Times reported Thursday."
Do you think that when Jensen talks to Sam Altman or Amodei they don't chat on the phone with Donald Trump?? This is just a smear.
No idea why you're getting down voted here. People are obviously willfully ignorant that a business would not be interested in doing business and making money, they really don't care who the customer is or why they're spending.
Has Jensen ever expressed an interest or personality?
To me, he seems the platonic ideal of the immigrant Bay Area tech worker. There's absolutely nothing inside besides the will and drive to succeed at work.
If she is a spy I doubt china gave her much choice. I wonder if they paid her or just threatened her loved ones. Either way, she had to hang out with Jensen Huang, poor woman.
Here on HN, the submitter submitted a link to the NYPost article, but in the description they put a link to the NYTimes version and an archive.is capture of the NYTimes.
A spy?! Almost half the people working in usa big tech are asian. If it tips over 50% you could call the white people the spies in asian companies located in usa
First, does her activity actually fit the definition of “espionage”?
* Espionage is the act of secretly gathering confidential, classified, or proprietary information without the owner's permission*
The most important question is what she actually sent and how secret it was. Most companies have levels of secrecy ranging from non public to highly sensitive. For example, schematics of their chip would be concerning.
Also, this seems pretty different from setting up a mic behind a TV.
Second, although the article tries very hard to imply there was some kind of infidelity, adding irrelevant details about Jensen’s family, I don’t know that any of that happened.
On that note, they never worked on french spies as infidelity and sex stuff hold seemingly zero leverage over french men.
Tell that to Jean-Luc Brunel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Brunel
I've seen 80 variations of this same story over the years.
Despite his other failings you have to give Zuck credit for genuinely being a wholesome wifeguy by all appearances.
That seems like either the behavior of an extremely devoted husband or the behavior of a husband who cheats shamelessly and then gives her showy gifts to "make up for it"
I would at least like to see some statistics on how much early adulthood behaviour predicts particular later life behaviours before making any conclusions.
Rather than characterising things as 'getting enough trim' perhaps a broader education in dealing with the emotions of life might be more productive.
Huh?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trim (second noun sense, def #8)
I think it has much less to do with any individual's sexual history and much more to do with the rapacious/hypersexual elite culture in USA and elsewhere.
(According to the Wall Street Journal at least)
Now China is the grown-up in the room while the US is running around like a maniac in Venezuela, Iran, and wherever else
No, China is no more a grownup than the US.
This is what I was responding to. I'm trying to figure out how it is nonsense because India has a large population.
India already makes up like 70% of H1Bs.
Would you want to spend your time in a nation looking for 2 of their smart people out of 1000 or make national ties so you can get hundreds of smart people out of their billion?
Also internal distributions will not be even, those smart people are far more likely to be clustered.
Makes me wonder what the next headline is going to be, probably some deal between NVidia and the federal government over export restrictions or something.
Chinese models disappearing from HuggingFace (recently acquired by Nvidia).
GLM-flash and Qwen-next disappeared from ArtificialAnalysis (the top benchmark site) a few days ago; I was wondering if that was a prelude to something greater. Testing the waters.
For one, the US doesn't do anti-trust these days, just pay off uncle-trump to get your way.
Two, there are tons of model providers.
Their benchmarks have been replaced with "N/A" for several days now,
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-flash-next
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-3-flash/
That is really weird given how widely used they are.
You don't write about it in the NYTimes unless there's a purpose. That purpose is leverage. If you're negotiating, you don't blow all your leverage upfront; you subtly let the other party know you have it, and then wait to see if they play ball. If they don't, that's when you apply pressure.
Lmao
Swalwell was targeted by Fang Fang in 2012 when he was on Dublin, California's city council and running for his first term in the House of Reps.
When he was by the FBI to Fang Fang's ties, he immediately cooperated with the FBI's investigation and did exactly what they requested.
Thinking Swalwell made any mistake whatsoever is a great shibboleth for a Twitterbrained midwit.
What did Jensen know and when did he know it?
He should be forced to testify in front of congress.
Do you think that when Jensen talks to Sam Altman or Amodei they don't chat on the phone with Donald Trump?? This is just a smear.
To me, he seems the platonic ideal of the immigrant Bay Area tech worker. There's absolutely nothing inside besides the will and drive to succeed at work.
The headline is from the Post article, not the NYT version is much better.
EDIT: Looks like link now points to NYT