Jensen Huang resigns over a spy affair

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang resigns LINK

• Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and led it as CEO since 1993, resigned today over an affair with an executive at a customer firm whom U.S. intelligence suspects of spying for China.
• Huang stepped down after acknowledging the affair with Alice Huang of Singapore's Megaspeed, plus reports of a second affair with the executive who ran Nvidia's health care business; China called the spying claims "smears."
• Finance chief Colette Kress becomes interim CEO while the board, now chaired by longtime director Harvey Jones, searches for a replacement; Nvidia shares fell as much as 14% and have lost over $1 trillion this month.

Starlink speed cap disrupts Ukraine's drone defense LINK

• President Zelensky said today that Starshield, the military version of SpaceX's Starlink, is again cutting the satellite link on gear moving faster than 161 km/h along Ukraine's front, crippling drones used to shoot down Russian attackers.
• The limit blocks interceptors from chasing Russia's jet-powered Geran-4 drones, which fly 300-400 km/h, and Zelensky said some strikes have already gotten through because interception systems cannot reach high enough speeds.
• The cap returned less than three weeks after Ukraine's Defense Ministry recorded stable links above 400 km/h on Oct. 24; Musk says the U.S. government controls Starshield, while Washington says only Musk could have made the call.

United bars AI agents from booking flights LINK

• United Airlines will block unauthorized third-party AI agents from booking, buying or managing travel through its website, app and other channels, pointing to privacy, account-security and possible conflicts with federal aviation rules.
• The airline's revised Contract of Carriage covers assistants in social media, browsers and travel-agency connections, and lets United cancel such bookings, void tickets, erase MileagePlus miles, revoke elite status and pursue legal action.
• AI research and planning stay allowed if tools use general information and never touch United's site or credentials; bookings made before November 11, 2026 won't be canceled, and United says it currently works with no third-party AI agents.

Google joins the decision-model wave LINK

• Google today released Gemini Decision 1, a low-cost AI model that answers a narrow set of questions and runs nearly five times cheaper than its entry-level Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite.
• Unlike chatty language models, it handles only yes-no, multiple choice, and rating questions, giving terse answers plus a confidence score, and accepts up to 256,000 tokens of text, audio, images, or video.
• The model costs $0.10 per million input tokens with no charge for outputs, and Google says it beat TypeSafe's Jev and OpenAI's Decisions API on seven of nine benchmarks.

Tesla extends Cybertruck production LINK

• Tesla will keep building the Cybertruck through the end of summer 2027, Elon Musk said yesterday, pushing back the planned end of the truck to clear its large order backlog.
• Tesla has already trimmed the lineup to one version, the Cyberbeast starting at about $110,000, after discontinuing the Cybertruck All-Wheel-Drive and Premium All-Wheel-Drive models in its final production months.
• Musk admitted the move isn't the smartest from a profit standpoint, citing "sentimentality," as Tesla frees up space at Gigafactory Texas for the Cybercab and its "transportation-as-a-service" plans after a roughly three-and-a-half-year run.

Google's AI traces disease DNA to specific cells LINK

• Google Deepmind has released AlphaGenome 2, an AI model that predicts how genetic variants affect specific human cell types, finding nearly twice as many relevant gene changes as the earlier version.
• Trained on over 107 million individual cell profiles from 68 tissues in humans and mice, it takes a DNA sequence plus a chosen cell state and calculates gene activity, DNA packaging, and methylation for that one cell type.
• On the TenK10K immune-cell benchmark it found about 30 percent of causal variants, up from 16 percent, and it reproduced an inflammatory bowel disease mechanism by isolating the exact variant overactivating ETS2 in gut cells.

Other news you might like

• Roku Abandons Its Smart Home Ambitions LINK

• AWS gives developers a free local stand-in for its cloud, built from scratch by AI agents LINK

• IBM plans to link two quantum chips into a 1,040-qubit system in 2027 LINK

• Helsing launches Clarity, a European rival to Palantir’s Maven LINK

• Cyberattack on Fireworks AI allowed hackers to access Notion customers’ chat transcripts LINK

• Gemini is now on Apple CarPlay LINK

• Reddit defied US and German attempts to unmask users LINK

• Who is Colette Kress, Nvidia’s new interim CEO? LINK

• Apple HomeView review: Shallow launch, but incredible potential LINK

• Howard Lutnick Doesn’t Want to Stop the Flow of Nvidia Chips Overseas: Report LINK

Trending tools

Hoy: a Mac menu bar tool for messaging contacts via faces, sharing files, voice, and screens through iCloud with no server LINK

Yogurt: records and transcribes Zoom, Meet, and Teams calls locally without a bot, generating summaries and searchable notes while keeping data on your machine. LINK

Recalc: a spreadsheet where each cell can run a Claude Code or Codex terminal session, with cells communicating via named references or MCP. LINK

MeowDisplay: mirrors and controls your Mac from an iPhone, iPad, or Android device, offering window, mirror, and extend views with multiple touch input modes. LINK

TermSheetPlease: a Papers Please-style game where you play a VC reviewing and deciding which YC startup applications to approve or reject for funding. LINK

TinyValencia: renders the city of Valencia, Spain as an interactive isometric map styled like SimCity's classic visual presentation. LINK

Trending papers & reports

Agent setup choices for business workflows show no single winning design, with fancier multi-step agents burning up to ~4.7x the cost and ~5.8x the delay for gains that rarely justify ditching one simple agent. LINK

AI medical scribes are measured in 96 different ways across 54 studies, with a third used by just one study each, making results hard to compare and mostly ignoring safety and patient outcomes. LINK

The language tax shows models charge up to 10x more to process underserved languages like Amharic, and a Portuguese-built vocabulary cuts that cost ~24% for Guarani and Quechua. LINK

Online community churn affects about a third of US adults who say they have left one, with more than 8 in 10 of them citing declining interest, a Pew Research Center survey finds. LINK

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