Nvidia weighs ousting Huang; TSMC backs Anthropic and OpenAI

Nvidia's board met late Wednesday to decide Jensen Huang's future, after The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to oust him and The New York Times reported a romantic relationship with an Nvidia vice president. That report comes days after Huang admitted an affair with a woman US officials believe works for Chinese intelligence, which the board had already hired a former federal prosecutor to investigate. No decision had been announced by Thursday morning. The board has no chair, Nvidia has never published a succession plan, and Bloomberg reports an outside firm is now identifying candidates. The shares fell more than 8 percent in after-hours trading.

The world's largest contract chipmaker will put up to 500 million dollars into Anthropic common shares at the IPO price and up to 500 million dollars into OpenAI preferred stock, according to board resolutions TSMC filed with US regulators. TSMC was already among the seven chip and cloud partners named in Anthropic's amended filing as buyers at the IPO price. The same board meeting approved about 41 billion dollars of new capital spending and a separate fund for investments in the chip industry. Both AI labs are major buyers of hardware TSMC manufactures, which makes the deals another example of suppliers financing their own customers.

OpenAI brought in more than 10 billion dollars in the third quarter, Bloomberg reports, up almost 50 percent from about 6.7 billion dollars in the second quarter, on demand for its newest models. Its losses narrowed too: an adjusted operating loss that equaled 150 percent of revenue in the second quarter shrank to 109 percent in the third. Growth had slowed to about 18 percent between the first and second quarters. OpenAI still trails Anthropic, whose IPO filing put third-quarter revenue at 17 billion dollars. The figure is separate from the 10 billion dollars Microsoft reported earning from its OpenAI arrangements over the same period.

United says it will block unauthorized personal AI assistants, the kind Meta's Muse and OpenAI's Dots offer, from completing bookings, both on its own site and through travel agencies and aggregators. Agents can still show United flights; they cannot buy them. The airline cited exposed account credentials, unintended purchases or use of MileagePlus miles, and federal rules such as passengers personally confirming their bags carry no banned items. "To be honest, I don't want to create another middleman," chief executive Scott Kirby said, according to The Wall Street Journal. United says few customers have tried it so far, and it could revisit the policy once protections exist.

AlphaGenome 2 predicts how a DNA variant changes gene activity in one chosen cell type or tissue at a time, rather than averaging across tissues, and it was trained on more than 100 million single-cell and bulk profiles from human and mouse samples. Google DeepMind says it finds nearly twice as many expression-changing variants as the previous best model. It is available through the AlphaGenome API for non-commercial research, with commercial access in private preview. Genomics Limited plans to build it into its Mystra platform. DeepMind stresses the model is for research only and has not been validated for clinical or diagnostic use.

Google's Decisions API runs a new model, Gemini Decision 1, that answers up to 1,000 yes-or-no, multiple-choice or rubric-scoring questions about a single input of text, images, audio, video or PDFs. Instead of writing an answer, it scores the options it is given and returns probabilities and confidence levels. Pricing is 10 cents per million input tokens with no charge for output, and the shared input is billed once per request. The service is available in the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. OpenAI made an API with the same name generally available in October, and Microsoft and TypeSafe already sell models built for the same job.

Fractile, based in London and Bristol, confirmed the funding round first reported at the start of November, and it came in slightly larger: 720 million dollars, led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed and Redpoint, with the UK government's Sovereign AI Venture Fund and the British Business Bank also investing. The government put the valuation above 5 billion pounds, and the Financial Times reported about 7 billion dollars. Fractile stacks ordinary memory directly on top of its chips to run large models faster, aiming at the long chains of work AI agents now perform. Chief executive Walter Goodwin says the money will let it ship its first chips and systems next year.

Nineteen members of the jury for the Independent Games Festival Awards said they will not vote for any game that used generative AI in any capacity. The debate then centered on Big Walk, whose developer House House disclosed that a chatbot helped fix one engine bug, yielding about 10 lines of code it says make up well under 0.1 percent of the game. Steam's disclosure form covers AI-generated content rather than coding help, so the studio had mentioned it only in its festival entry. Several jurors who called the game remarkable said even that much AI use rules it out, while House House apologized and said its disclosure is not an endorsement of AI tools.