29:58
Jensen Hong was forced to resign as Nvidia's CEO on Wednesday after it came to light that in addition to leaking secrets and fluids to suspected Chinese spy and former Mega Speed executive Alice Huang, also Huang, no relation, he was also having two other affairs, highlighting his reputation as the hardest working man in tech. also highlighting the importance of not having carnal relations with someone that has the same last name as you, especially when that name is also a phallic euphemism. These are things to consider. I'm Riley Murdoch. This is Techl. And for those of you who are unaware, the story broke on November 6th when the Financial Times reported that Jensen had been mounting his Taiwanese
die on Alice Wang's illicit Chinese hardware. Yeah, I know. It's good. This turned out to be a matter of national security as Alice Wang was a suspected Chinese intelligence asset with the information reporting on Tuesday that she had been responsible for illegally shipping 7.5 billion dollars worth of exportc controlled NVIDIA chips into China. Then on Wednesday, as the Nvidia board was still deliberating on what to do with Jensen, the New York Times reported that he had been cheating on his spy mistress with Nvidia's VP of healthcare, Kimberly Powell, who he also was not married to, just to be clear. at which point the board forced him to resign. But not before Reuters broke another story that
he completed the infidelity hat-tick by cheating on his first two mistresses with yet another unnamed Nvidia employee, making Jensen Wong the Wayne Gretzky of cheating on his wife. Nvidia's CFO Colette Crest has been announced to be the interim CEO. And while she has been with the company since 2013, she has some pretty big leather sleeves to fill here. After all, being CEO of Nvidia requires you to have a solid grasp of the technical and business aspects of both the gaming and the AI industry, all while having sex with at least three people who you're not married to. It's tough. To Miss Crest, we at Techlink want to say good
luck. And if you're going to have an affair, try to avoid spies and or direct reports. Anthropic has announced it's targeting a $1.4 trillion valuation, not the 2 trillion figure it floated a few weeks ago as a result of the recent downturn in AI stocks, and we're all very sad for them. The target share price has been set between 70 and $78. The sale of which is expected to bring in about $90 billion to help the industrial money furnace that is anthropic continue to build a technology that at best will take all our jobs and at worst will create bioweapons that will kill everyone. What are we doing? And for those of you ready to criticize us of doomerism, that's what Anthropic put in their IPO filing. They call themselves a money furnace.
For all of Daario's rhetoric about being the good AI company, Anthropic is approaching the IPO in the exact same way as their competitor SpaceX AI did. Uh, hold on. Their name is actually even worse now. Apparently, it's SpaceX SI. Stay with us. Anyway, Anthropic's doing kind of what SpaceX SI did and having regular retail investors being used as liquidity sources to let existing shareholders cash out. meaning that the amount of shares being released is a smaller than usual percentage, artificially driving up the price. Although where Musk made his employees wait 2 months before selling, Amday is letting his employees sell their shares
on day one at the peak of the hype. Anthropic will also be benefiting from the index fund exemption that the NASDAQ added for Space XSI, meaning it will be included in index funds after only 15 trading days instead of the 3month seasoning period that's been the standard for the whole history of the stock market. So, in summary, another AI company is going public at a crazy high valuation, and people who are supposed to regulate the stock market are teaming up with the finance bros at Charles Schwab and the cool fintech billionaires that run retail trading platforms like Robin Hood and SoFi to get you in at the peak of the hype. Thank you for helping uh the economy. This is going to be
great. Microsoft 365 has been down for the better part of two days this week and as of filming parts of it are still down but some of the services affected include Outlook Copilot and parts of Teams in at least 74 countries where I assume life was briefly much better. It started around noon Eastern on Thursday and peaked at 131,000 outage reports on Down Detector. Microsoft first said its servers were overloaded, but then this morning said a network capacity upgrade had gone wrong and stressed the whole thing was quote not related to cyber or AI/ agents. Nobody said anything about agents. So that sounds a little suspicious. Funnily enough, the outage didn't cause emails to bounce. They were
just delivered late, some by more than a day, to affected customers, including government workers in the US, UK, Australia, and Canada. where Toronto's sick kids hospital was also affected. Thanks a lot. Definitely not AI agents or cyber office workers in Japan posted that they were going full analog and which apparently means faxing their PDFs. It could mean anything. And the rest of Microsoft's week didn't help. Patch Tuesday fixed an Outlook flaw hackers were already exploiting where opening a booby trapped message file made Outlook hand your login details to the attacker server without the usual warning. And Microsoft announced the
free Office 365 plan that schools use for student email retires on January 1st, 2028, after which they have to pay for it. A change Microsoft says is shaped by what education leaders are asking for. But seriously though, uh, without email, all those kids are going to have to carry their documents to class. Well, at least their feet can stay dry with our sponsor, Vessie. As a professional speed walker, I can't let a little rain slow me down. That's why I love my Vessie Storm Bursts. Powered by Datex technology, Bessie says they're waterproof, breathable, offer extra traction on slippery terrain, and have a cushioned dual density midsole to keep me comfortable on long walks, just
how I like them. On your left, on top of that, just in time for the holidays, Vessie is offering up to 40% off items sitewide from November 20th to 30th. Branch, get ahead of the holiday rush and get ahead of the competition with the Vessie Stormburst. TAKE THAT, CARL. GET A PAIR FOR YOURSELF OR someone on your list at the link below. I got to go. Got to get my steps in. WHAT? WHAT'S HAPPENING? In 1965, the Quickbits took the form of a professional pickle ball team, which made them the only one since pickle ball had only just been invented that summer in a guy's backyard and he hadn't told anybody yet. It's weird, but I've
learned not to question these things. Google's multiple Gemini powered smart glasses finally have a price, $395, and they're supposed to be the AI glasses that won't creep anyone out, despite Google's reputation being only slightly better than Meta. I mean, uh, the frames come from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster with a camera but no display, and they ship December 10th in the US. Google says the glasses blur bystanders faces uh before Gemini sees them. They have to see the people and detect a person and then sure the camera shuts off if you cover the recording light. Standard feature now. And anyone caught filming people without permission can have their glasses disabled. What? Why'd
you break my glasses? You were filming a guy and he looked uncomfortable. HOW DO YOU KNOW? France is now blaming Iran for the rash of cyber attacks on supermarket and blood bank refrigerators that started in France and spread across Europe this past month. The hackers used the defrost cycle of the refrigerators to crank up the temperatures, spoiling tens of millions of euros of groceries and destroying vital blood supplies needed by hospitals and vampires. Did anyone think about those guys? According to French officials, the hack used infrastructure and tools that are known to be used by Iranian military forces.
However, Iran has denied any involvement, stating that all this is an attempt by France to distract from the fact that France has been hostile towards Iran. We didn't hack you. You're just accusing us of hacking you because you were already mean to us. Yeah, that makes sense. Australia has announced plans to launch a regulatory body focused on AI safety in response to an event back in June where during testing, one of OpenAI's agents escaped its sandbox and hacked the Australian National Health Service portal among probably many other things. What haven't they hacked at this point? Open AAI then failed Wait, did OpenAI hack the fridges?
Totally could have been. OpenAI then failed to disclose the hack for 84 days. And when it finally did, it sent the disclosure to a generic Services Australia address. The new regulations will mandate that Frontier AI companies disclose security breaches and make it possible to impose significant penalties, including criminal charges if they fail to comply. Or as they put it, oi, get the out of our PCs, you cheers, mate. New York's attorney general has made T-Mobile drop a 50 gigabyte cap from the $15 home internet plan that state law requires it to offer lowincome households. The law calls for 25 megabits and T-Mobile delivered that until customers hit 50 GB, usually about 4 days in, and then speeds fell by 97%
down to 650 kilobits. Not very fast. T-Mobile also hid the plan's web page from search engines. The company says it will keep the same low price, which is generous since the price was the only part of the plan. It hadn't shrunk. And researchers at Stanford University have taught a two-armed robot to flip pancakes, hand you the butter, and help you into your jacket at close to human speed, which has been a huge bottleneck for robot development. It's flipping pancakes, handing butter, and then jacket. Yeah. Yeah, just a normal human. Did an AI design this test? Aloha. The university's robot normally learns by watching a human drive a twin set of arms slowly cuz it's dumb. Flash Aloha has the human
grab the robot's own arms and move them through the task 50 times. So, the robot learns the motion at the speed a person actually does it, or at least at the speed a person would do it if someone else was holding their arm and moving it for them. But hopefully I don't have to grab your arms and bring you back here on Monday for more tech news. Oh, shoot. I have to go now. The Quickbits just found out other people also play pickle ball and they are not taking it well. Sit. Bye.
