What's next for the AI industry following Nvidia scandal?

Out of this story, the AI industry is still trying to hold things together after the resignation of CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang. The company is a key part of the artificial intelligence infrastructure in Silicon Valley. For more on what could happen next and what AI companies could do, we're joined by Chris Matman, former UCLA chief data and AI officer. Chris, thanks for joining us this morning. Andre, thanks for having me. All right, so I've been checking the stock price. NVIDIA is still down. But so are competitors like AMD and Broadcom as well as the chip makers. So with this, you know, upheaval happening, the scandalous upheaval happening, does this give these other companies, despite the fact that the other companies are still trading pretty, you know, off right now, give them a leg up to maybe get up to NVIDIA's level in terms of chip making? Andre, great question. Look, it is not sort of too boisterous to say that Nvidia has really been at the top of AI chip making. Not just really the last five years, but really for a long time. Nvidia chips are in everybody's laptops for gaming, computing, all the way to their very advanced chips that are used to train the United States and the world's frontier AI. And sort of that issue in this particular story is that Nvidia has had this big scandal in which, although in the past administration, the Biden administration, they created what are called export controls to make it difficult to get those chips out of the United States to our foreign adversaries. As is alleged, there was this sort of affair that happened between Jensen Huang and this partner. And she was running a company that basically purportedly got these chips out to Singapore and onto China. And so that's the big challenge that we have here, but I don't see any of the other companies catching up to Nvidia anytime soon. Wow, so why is it? It's because the process that they have in place right now in terms of getting those chips made, developing those new New Trips is... Pretty far advanced. I mean, I remember when Intel was a big chip maker, and NVIDIA just leaped right past them. Yeah, and I'm not saying that it's not possible or that AMD or Broadcom aren't competing in the space. Basically, what I'm saying is that NVIDIA has, just in terms of their design, but also their influence in terms of the global AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, they are dependent on NVIDIA chips. And NVIDIA also has a software called CUDA, C-U-D-A, which is really the standard for training AI models. Translating software to the hardware environments that they're running on. So NVIDIA sets that standard. They're embedded in, you know, ChatGPT, Claude, Anthropic, all of these frontier LLMs. That's why they're not going anywhere anytime soon. But Congress is demanding answers and security investigations are heating up. So I wonder what impact that could have on the future of NVIDIA and whether any other company could take advantage of that. Are you watching for anything like that? Yeah, Andre, I'm definitely watching for it. And look, NVIDIA's board did all of the right things. They declared they're gonna have an independent investigation. They moved recently, as we saw, to, I guess, either have Jensen resign or to oust him, we don't know. But they also have an interim CEO and they appointed them. But we're looking to the future Democratic House and Senate and Congress. They are already talking. Senator Cory Booker was on CNN the other night. They are already talking about future investigation. I expect Independent oversight to come and for Congress to probably take the lead in the next sort of Congress for that. One of the more interesting articles I read about this whole thing was that the woman who's taken over as the CEO of the company, Jensen Huang, once belittled her, you know, before previously to this. Now she apparently is replacing him here. He is been kind of the The person, when you think of NVIDIA, you think of Jensen Huang. If he's not there anymore, and he's apparently a whiz when it comes to the development of this type of stuff, he understands it very intricately, could that impact the company going forward? Are you concerned about that, or do you think the processes and procedures are in place in NVIDIA right now for it to continue growing going forward? Yeah, Andre, I think we're gonna learn a lot in the coming months. Certainly, whoever they replace, we have an interim right now, as you mentioned, who is his former CFO. Whoever they replace Jensen Huang with is not gonna be Jensen Huang. He's not gonna be able to whisper, he or she are not gonna be able to go whisper to President Trump, influence policy. They're also not gonna be able to walk around the developer conferences like Jensen Huang famously did and take pictures with developers having grown up from the bottom to the top of Top of one of the world's most companies so We're going to watch. It's not going to be him. I don't know that he's replaceable, but it might be a good thing. It might be a good thing for NVIDIA to have a different type of leader. We'll see. We'll see going forward. Chris Bettman, former UCLA chief data and AI officer, we really appreciate your insight into the story this morning. Thank you so much for having me.