This is the biggest irony of the whole Alice Huang / Nvidia saga: the Chinese government actually doesn't want Nvidia chips and is actively keeping them out of the country.
Last year it even ordered Alibaba and ByteDance to cancel their Nvidia orders ( and sent customs teams to the ports to check every advanced chip coming in (
And right now 600,000 Nvidia H200s are stuck in Hong Kong because Beijing won’t let them into the country (
Nvidia also explicitly frames this as a threat to its business in its latest annual report to the SEC: "The Chinese government has encouraged customers to purchase from our China-based competitors and discouraged customers from purchasing, importing, or using our data center products" (
Why does China do that? Because every Nvidia chip a Chinese company buys is one that Huawei or Cambricon doesn’t sell, and domestic chips can only catch up if people actually buy them (which means money for R&D, etc.).
Which means that the notion that Chinese intelligence was running honeytraps to get more Nvidia chips into China gets the whole thing exactly backwards.
In fact, it looks like Megaspeed - Alice Huang's company - was a counter-reaction to official Chinese policy: a private sector workaround to these efforts by the Chinese government to curtail Nvidia.
As was widely reported - including by Western media - Megaspeed built data centers in Southeast Asia and rented their computing power to Alibaba, which the New York Times called "a backdoor way of getting access" to Nvidia chips (
That is a backdoor not only - allegedly - around Washington’s export controls, but also around China's own efforts to wean its companies off Nvidia.
I can’t believe the Chinese government was too thrilled about it: it'd make just about zero sense for it to run countless domestic measures to prevent Alibaba from using Nvidia chips, yet at the same time have its top spy agency help the same Alibaba get Nvidia chips through the back door in Southeast Asia 🤷
At the end of the day, as with all such stories, you always need to look at "cui bono?": who benefits? Who benefitted is pretty clear:
- Nvidia itself: it's in the business of selling chips so a customer willing to spend billions of dollars on chips in Southeast Asia is a godsend. Again, as they themselves state in their SEC filings, not being able to tap into Chinese demand would have "a material and adverse impact on our business" (
- Chinese companies like Alibaba: facts are, 1) Chinese chips haven't yet caught up, 2) Chinese chip companies' production capabilities are still limited and 3) Chinese tech firms' historical tech stack runs on Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem, and rewriting years of code for Huawei chips is painful. Renting Nvidia chips in Southeast Asia is the easy way to stay competitive and serve customer demand in the meantime.
- The US, according to core members of the Trump administration: back in July last year, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained that the point of letting Nvidia sell more chips to China was to get Chinese developers "addicted to the American technology stack" (
Who does NOT benefit, according to official Chinese policy, is the Chinese state, which has made tech self-reliance one of its foremost priorities.
Which means that, to believe the spy story, you have to believe that a person - Alice Huang - was effectively a spy paid by her own government while simultaneously sabotaging its tech self-reliance drive, which it has spent years and trillions of dollars on - pretty senseless.
Stranger things have happened, I guess, but it doesn't pass the smell test.
And there is another absolutely major contradiction in the media story. According to a Financial Times article published yesterday ( "a person who knows [Alice Huang] said they had been asked by MSS for information about her earlier this year after news emerged that Singapore was investigating the company in relation to chip-smuggling allegations. The agency wanted to find out more information about Huang, including the nature of her business and connections, the person said."
Which raises a damn obvious question: if she were indeed an MSS asset, why on earth would the MSS need to ask the people around her who she was and the nature of her business?
It's a complete contradiction with the spy story - but very much not a contradiction with what I described above: a private businesswoman running a workaround to Beijing’s own policy, which the Chinese security apparatus would naturally want to look into.
Especially since, around about the same time, Shanghai police detained her business partner, reportedly her husband, in a stock manipulation case ( also coherent with Chinese authorities looking into her network, and much harder to square with her being a prized MSS asset.
And, to top it all, there is - to this day - not a shred of evidence that's been published that she is, in fact, a Chinese spy: just anonymous intelligence officials, repeated by journalists who never verified it, as I detailed here ( and here ( with one of the key FT journalists on this story actually admitting that he has no idea what evidence US intelligence actually has.
So the claim went to print without anyone seeing the evidence, without anyone being able to check it, and without anyone knowing whether it even exists.
And given everything above, from Beijing blocking the very chips she was supposedly recruited to help get into China, to the MSS asking around about her, to her partner being detained in Shanghai, my bet is that the evidence doesn’t exist at all. If anything, everything we can check points the other way.
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The World is Changing: AI For Creativity
By Jeffrey Katzenberg
A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe.
Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.”
I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both.
In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious.
There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love.
People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft.
Is History Repeating Itself?
The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul."
Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work.
A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept.
They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded.
This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix.
What I Learned From Walt Disney
In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell.
We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not.
That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create.
A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did.
Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.”
A Distinction With a Difference
I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . .
Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new.
Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out.
Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new.
One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable.
Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground.
A Path Forward
In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . .
Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human.
At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling.
The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it.
There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us.
The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires.
What I Learned From Steve Jobs
Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities.
What I See Coming Soon
As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process.
Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.
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1/ gm. gm. Name is Hsin-Ju.
I have a dark, kinda tragic personal announcement.
I've decided I'd rather take $0 than accept a settlement that requires me to stay silent about what happened to me. I have since fired my lawyers at
@sanfordheisler & will be releasing all the evidence from my time
@hack_vc on Wed 8/26.
INTRO: I've been in crypto for 9 years. Most recently I was a partner & head of platform
@hack_vc which is a $600-700M crypto VC firm. Many of you may know me from my time as Head of Growth at
@StellarOrg in 2017 (worked w/ the Mt. Gox founder),
@Solana in 2018 (joined under ~10 ppl, but quit before my cliff), &
@Fhenix in 2024. Or have attended one of my
@DystopiaLabs ETH events (2019-now).
Last year, I was forced to work through a serious medical emergency while at
@Hack_VC due to threats by
@alpackaP @dbulaevsky, saying that they would blacklist me from the space if I quit before finishing the hacksummit conference & side events that I was helping with during
@kbwofficial. I was working 13-14hr days, 6 days a week, sleeping 0-4 hrs a night, and had documented Graves' disease, hyperthyroidism, and severe insomnia. I repeatedly asked to quit. Hack VC refused. This + other threats and intimidation went on for almost a month.
The conditions got so bad I attempted suicide.
The fucked up part is that, even after the suicide attempt, I told everyone at Hack VC (in writing) that I had no plans to sue. I was scared & extremely sick. I just wanted to leave. I told them that as long as there was no retaliation or badmouthing - I had no plans to sue.
@Hack_VC chose to retaliate.
After just 1 month after my near suicide, Hack VC mishandled my COBRA health insurance, refused to fix things, kept shooing me to customer support (when it's legally Hack VC's responsibility to fix this), and my insurance had issues and was not fixed for almost 4 MONTHS. Hack VC did not fix everything until I hired lawyers and had them force Hack VC to adhere to the law & fix my COBRA insurance issues. The sheer cruelty of an employer harming someone's health insurance almost immediately after they nearly committed suicide is extremely fucked up.
And, even during the legal engagement, Hack VC continued to lie & attempt to harm me through their lawyers and other employees/partners (multi-million dollar carry & clawbacks can make even the nicest ppl willing to turn the other way or lie).
@0xRodney @IsTheBaron @roshunpatel @Alex__Botte.
Now. Almost an entire year of engagement & my near suicide anniversary coming up, our lawyers (mine & Hack VC's) have reached the point of preparing for private mediation and settlement. And...I realized that I just can't do it. I don't want money in exchange for silence. I'd rather speak.
I fired my lawyers yesterday.
In case it needs to be said, I did a good job at Hack VC. I was only there full time for 7 months; been part-time since 2021. I got a $50k raise to $300k, $30k bonus, and promises of additional carry that would have been implemented about a week or so after my last day. I was also offered admission into the GP entity (but not sure if admission was actually completed bc it was during my medical emergency). This + my resume, should show that me suing is not a money grab; I was genuinely harmed.
I'm aware that I'm just one person (who is not rich) facing a $600-700M VC institution. I've been told by
@alpackaP that he's known most of the managing partners at most VC firms for almost a decade and he could absolutely blacklist me.
I'm also painful aware that the conclusion of this will probably be extremely poor for me or death - but I've accepted it.
Sharing with other web2 & web3 VCs:
@paulg @ycombinator @500STARTUPS @a16zcrypto @PanteraCapital @dragonflyvc @RaceCapital @hosseeb @haunventures @hiFramework @ElectricCapital @blockchaincap @Delphi_Digital @variantfund @1kxnetwork @archetypevc @shimacapital @robotventures, etc.
TLDR; I’m done with continued threats, pressure, and intimidation. I'm not going to take a payout and allow Alex or Hack VC to walk away from harming me. As mentioned, I'll be dropping the evidence from my case on Wed 8/26 (or before) -- privacy be damned.
Support here (or DM) please:
ETH: 0x68c10776C5c05Cbf5B4C2318bE02D61B9f06B875
SOL: B7S8TPcWWJXTsmgG8ShoTmy8sNPuJ3Dbmt7z5gLFAveq
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