171 pointsby mgh24 hours ago27 comments
  • janalsncm24 minutes ago
    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.

    • aurareturna few seconds ago
      There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is just a hit piece - IE, they were looking to paint Nvidia and Jensen in some bad light and found a vague lead. Didn't matter if the evidence isn't substantial. Just publish and smear first.
    • int0x2918 minutes ago
      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
      • mudil3 minutes ago
        As if NYT is a model of credibility.
    • giantg27 minutes ago
      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.
    • CodingJeebus18 minutes ago
      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.
  • lakeviewterrace44 minutes ago
    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.

    • _--__--__35 minutes ago
      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.

      • paxy27 minutes ago
        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.
      • jordanb5 minutes ago
        Zuck apparently made a huge statue of his wife.

        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"

    • alexjplant4 minutes ago
      [delayed]
    • nielsbot42 minutes ago
      I can see it now. A US national security program to get future CEOs laid more. What.
      • lakeviewterrace40 minutes ago
        I don't understand how anyone could not support that idea.
      • thereisnospork29 minutes ago
        I mean that probably already exists in the broad sense of counter-intel. A premptive honeypot if you will.
    • Lerc29 minutes ago
      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.

    • wand3r9 minutes ago
      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
    • rglover37 minutes ago
      Likely never as that's an ego death many of these guys couldn't handle. They'd implode from shame.
    • JumpCrisscross39 minutes ago
      > not getting enough trim in your younger years

      Huh?

    • throwaway38403430 minutes ago
      Maybe monogamy is not natural for men?
    • some_random9 minutes ago
      wtf would that discussion even look like?
    • pphysch28 minutes ago
      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.

      • kraken_cult22 minutes ago
        Gates and co were/are "Epstein types". They were just honeypotted by Mossad not China via the girls Epstein trafficked.
  • PowerElectronix28 minutes ago
    The honeypots are 100% the best part of being a spy or a VIP target for an intelligence agency.

    On that note, they never worked on french spies as infidelity and sex stuff hold seemingly zero leverage over french men.

    • slowin24 minutes ago
      > 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

      • throw-qqqqq18 minutes ago
        IIUC: Brunel was into underage girls and intelligence agencies cannot employ kids..
        • kraken_cult15 minutes ago
          They can traffic them though, see Epstein and Mossad.
      • wand3r15 minutes ago
        The "sex stuff" is doing A LOT of heavy lifting here.
    • flowerlad25 minutes ago
      Only a "close relationship", no sex is alleged.
    • insane_dreamer4 minutes ago
      It was publicly known that Mitterrand had a mistress
    • jonathanstrange26 minutes ago
      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.
      • PowerElectronix25 minutes ago
        "I swear it was to make them waste resources and time on me, mon chérie!"
    • whoanoway24 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • Timpanzee2 hours ago
    Sounds like a good Chinese spy. Jensen Huang is the exact kind of relationship I would want my spies to foster if I was China.
    • wadayano2 hours ago
      You’d be a pretty shit spy agency if you didn’t have agents at least in these people’s orbits.
    • slowinan hour ago
      Kind of like Jeffery Epstein and his relationship with Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Reid Hoffman...
      • an hour ago
        undefined
      • peri-clan hour ago
        Or Cami Clark and her relationships with Jeffrey Epstein, Eric Schmidt, Dario Amodei...
        • Onavo7 minutes ago
          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...

          (According to the Wall Street Journal at least)

      • 43 minutes ago
        undefined
    • blondie9xan hour ago
      What is going on with Megaspeed anyway?
    • lurk2an hour ago
      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?
      • AlecSchueleran hour ago
        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

        • ballon_monkey5 minutes ago
          China who is encroaching on its neighboring countries? Attacking ships in Philippines waters. Yelling at everyone demanding respect while disrespecting everyone around them.

          No, China is no more a grownup than the US.

      • throwaway384034an hour ago
        China is high IQ. It is one of the top countries you will want to brain drain from.
        • Avicebronan hour ago
          This is nonsense, China has a massive population, like india. So they have some benefits when it comes to distributions.
          • throwaway3840347 minutes ago
            >It has always struck me as absurd that America is so accessible to Chinese nationals.

            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.

          • pixl9723 minutes ago
            Why it is nonsense then?

            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.

          • shimman22 minutes ago
            Unlike India tho, China isn't burdened by American Imperialism and suffering from extreme economic poverty.
            • Avicebron20 minutes ago
              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.
              • analyst742 minutes ago
                There are plenty information about China on the outside, but nobody is paying anyone to push those into your feeds. It doesn't benefit any US entities to paint China in good light, and China largely doesn't market itself to the wider world (maybe to their detriment).
  • zetazzed30 minutes ago
    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...
    • everdrive29 minutes ago
      Are you a CEO? Those invites might work a bit differently.
  • markus_zhangan hour ago
    I doubt Jensen is completely out of the scheme TBH.
  • madhacker5 minutes ago
    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.
  • lurk2an hour ago
    This is why courtiers were provided with state-mandated GFs for all of human history up until about 40 years ago.
  • nostrademonsan hour ago
    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.

    • peri-clan hour ago
      > "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.

      • contingencies39 minutes ago
        Gee that's pretty much an antitrust case right there. Sell NVidia while you can.
        • pixl9722 minutes ago
          Um, lol, no.

          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.

          • contingencies18 minutes ago
            "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.
      • ActionHankan hour ago
        The models are still on AA, not sure what you mean
    • jdale2718 minutes ago
      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.
    • UncleOxidantan hour ago
      What about this part: "President Trump was briefed and took no action." ?
      • nostrademonsan hour ago
        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.

        • petre40 minutes ago
          It's not the NYT but the NY Post, Rupert Murdoch tabloid media.
        • apical_dendrite39 minutes ago
          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.
          • nostrademons21 minutes ago
            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.
      • ActionHankan hour ago
        Needs to check in with daddy putin first.
    • Kenjian hour ago
      [dead]
  • imagetic18 minutes ago
    Content aside I am not sure why anyone on HN reads the nypost. Be better than that. Please.
  • laimewhisps31 minutes ago
    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.
  • paxyan hour ago
    > 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.

    Lmao

    • nielsbot40 minutes ago
      He's saving it as kompromat.
  • sirmike_21 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • greenchairan hour ago
    Perhaps she is the one who makes him wear that mid life crisis jacket?
  • lakeviewterracean hour ago
    He should call Eric Swalwell for advice.
    • estearuman hour ago
      What would Swalwell know?

      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.

  • pr337h4man hour ago
    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?).
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0an hour ago
    > 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.
    • ActionHankan hour ago
      lol, honestly this is so stupid, did they really think that the GPUs wouldn't have wound up there?
      • 2OEH8eoCRo0an hour ago
        If might be stupid but it was the law. Did Jensen know that superspeed were sending chips to china and still sold to them?

        What did Jensen know and when did he know it?

        He should be forced to testify in front of congress.

        • ActionHankan hour ago
          If they start pursuing the law the entire administration is gonna have a hard time.
  • tehjokeran hour ago
    "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.

    • ActionHankan hour ago
      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.
    • MetalBreaksAndBan hour ago
      "Nvidia Corporation[a] (/ɛnˈvɪdiə/ en-VID-ee-ə) is an American multinational technology company"
      • ActionHankan hour ago
        That's the thing about capitalism, businesses can sell to customers.
  • Poudlardoan hour ago
    poor jensen huang he was obviously tricked by this malicious spy and has nothing to do with any of this (/s)
  • slowinan hour ago
    [flagged]
  • Varelionan hour ago
    I would be very interesting in seeing who this spy is, and what her relationship with him was.
  • brcmthrowawayan hour ago
    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.

    • 42 minutes ago
      undefined
    • david-gpu43 minutes ago
      I wish more billionaires kept their opinions to themselves, rather than trying to influence everybody.
      • nielsbot39 minutes ago
        Agree. Fuck off to billionaire island already. Instead we get "casual destroy the government".
  • jon12830 minutes ago
    Is she relatively hot? Did he get honeytrapped? Someone like him should be aware of the meta of such shenanigans.
  • zkmonan hour ago
    Sounds like a Bond movie plot.
    • slowinan hour ago
      It sounds like anti-Chinese propaganda. This is the NY Post we're talking about.
  • autoexecan hour ago
    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.
  • aurareturnan hour ago
    Looks like McCarthyism is back on the menu. Big media is out in force to push a narrative.
    • Murfalo17 minutes ago
      McCarthyism on the menu? Why, Cold War II is already being served! Hurry up, it's getting... cold : o
    • nielsbot42 minutes ago
      It is NY Post after all

      EDIT: Looks like link now points to NYT

      • JumpCrisscross38 minutes ago
        They cite their source in the second paragraph…
        • laimewhisps31 minutes ago
          I don't see that in either article.
          • nostrademons19 minutes ago
            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.
  • jurschreuderan hour ago
    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
    • dgellowan hour ago
      The article has nothing to do with race.
    • talon8635an hour ago
      Lol what on earth?