The spy narrative is collapsing. Jensen Huang’s downfall is likely made by politics between

China hawks and China doves as well as struggle between Open model AI vs Closed model AI in AI developing strategy.

1. China doves: Lutnick, DOJ (and of course  Huang). China hawks: Rubio, Bessent. Trump who likes Huang very much is caught in the middle. In DC, China hawk basically is bipartisan. 

2.  On open model (Open weight, open source) and closed model in AI developing strategy.

Open model AI advocates: Huang, Musk. 

Open model AI opponents: Anthropic. 

Open model AI traitors: Open AI and Meta. Both switched from open model to closed model. One of reasons Musk sued open AI is its betrayal from open model to closed model.  

“Closed in face open in mind” model: Google (Alphabet) and Amazon. In Google, frontier model Gemini is closed model. But its Gemma is open to developers and then transition what they did to Gemini. Keep the face closed while keep the mind open. 

Open model is Chinese route toward AI development. I posted it before.  I am an open model advocate too. Note, most of open model avocates including Huang and Musk don’t against closed models. They just don’t want a purely closed model AI industry. They want open model + proprietary model, a hybrid AI industry. 

3. The leak to NYT which eventually led to downfall of Huang is from state department, not from CIA, FBI, other intelligence agencies. So it’s likely Rubio memo was created for the purpose of leaking. Quite many people got the memo. Of course some of them will leak it. Hawks don’t like Huang selling chips to China. 

4. All current evidences indicate Alice Huang is not a spy.  NYT story says  she bragged to people at the party by claiming she can call Huang come to join the party. Shortly after Huang indeed showed up. A spy wouldn’t do that. A spy wouldn’t post her photos taken with Huang in instagram to showcase how close she is to Huang either.  Alice’s husband was arrested at beginning of this year indicates this couple are just risk players. They like to play in grey area and on the edge to make money. 

5. Jensen Huang is our national treasure. If you know how Nvidia operates its business, you know Huang is irreplaceable at Nvidia. As a pioneer and founder of AI industry Huang didn’t think Chinese competition as a threat to his business model. He believed he could always out-compete them technologically. Instead he wanted to sell chips of limited amounts to China to make them rely on U.S. and also make Nvidia chip a world standard.