The Huang Affair: A Threat to NVIDIA's Dominance - DTNS 5391

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3:02this is the daily tech news for monday november 9th 2026 we tell you what you need to know give you important context and try to help each other understand today jason howell talks to opera about

3:13Robb Dunewood: their feature to let you run your own models in the browser and nvidia's jensen huang had an affair and she just might have been a spy. You know, Mondays usually come. We usually don't have the Huang affair on a Monday. This is a TV for me movie. Yeah, it is. I'm Todd Merritt. And I'm Rob Dunwood. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. A few notes before I break down the whole thing, in case you haven't been keeping up on this. Mega Speed executive Alice Huang also goes by her Chinese name, Huang Xiaolei or Huang Le for short. This is a very common thing for people in Asia to do to make their names easier for foreigners to pronounce.

3:55There's nothing suspicious about that in and of itself. Even our own Roger Chang is also known as Chang Yao Wei sometimes for simplicity. I'm going to refer to her throughout our discussion as Alice Huang. Also, Jensen Huang Huang and Alice Huang are not related. Different, same last name, no relation. Maybe distantly in the past they're related somehow, but no immediate relation. All right, let's get into what we're talking about. Jensen Huang has admitted to an affair with Alice Huang, and the NVIDIA board of directors is investigating. Why is this a big deal? That's what we're here to tell you.

4:35Alice Huang started as a TV reporter in mainland China. I think that's interesting. She started as a journalist, then started working for several financial companies. She was a financial reporter, so that kind of makes sense. She worked for London-based HSBC, among others, and then started moving from the financial into the funding part of things, funding tech companies. Alice Wong worked as an executive for Megaspeed. mega speed is a singapore-based company that spun out of a mainland chinese video game company which also was doing a lot of data centers in china for its video game business that company was called seven road mega speed spun out of it in 2023 here's how that happened seven roads sold its singapore entity they had a singapore division so they sold it off to huang le limited in 2023 That's Alice Wong's financial arm.

5:30And then Huang Le Limited named it Megaspeed and sold it to a Singapore shell company. So this is basically, again, it might sound suspicious if you're not familiar. Seven Road says we want to divest ourselves of this so it's independent and outside of mainland China and therefore not subject to the restrictions on exports and imports. Again, that's not something a lot of companies have done, not to do something nefarious necessarily, just to be able to conduct business outside of China easier. And so they sold it to Alice Wong. She's the one who bought it and then turned it into its own company.

6:04Days after that happened, Megaspeed was designated an official NVIDIA cloud partner, likely because they were no longer involved in mainland China. Probably greased the wheels. That means it has a priority relationship with NVIDIA to get chips to use in data centers, which it has built throughout Southeast Asia. It's a legitimate business with legitimate data centers. And it rents those data centers out to other companies. Alice Wong was going around introducing herself as Megaspeed's CEO as recently as August 2025. There's no doubt that she was an executive at the company. She and Jensen Wong met at an NVIDIA event in early 2024, just a little while after Megaspeed was spun out.

6:48The earliest photos of Jensen Huang and Alice Huang together are from June 2024 at Computex in Taipei. Now, let's jump to 2025. In early 2025, Alice Huang and a business partner named Kong Wei told potential investors they had no problem securing GPUs and that they counted Alibaba as a client. Now, again, this might sound suspicious, but Alibaba can legally rent access to NVIDIA GPUs for its businesses outside of mainland China. So far, nothing that nefarious. This is a company that wants to continue to do business in light of these restrictions. They spin out the company. Alice Wong is the financial arm of it, so she's running the company.

7:31She has a relationship with NVIDIA, as many do, gets access to GPUs. And Alibaba is a big client because she's from mainland China. She probably knows people from Alibaba. All right. Here's where it starts to get interesting. A video from May 2025 shows Alice kissing Jensen on the cheek, very chastely, peck on the cheek, at a gathering of executives at a Taiwan restaurant. They're also showing getting in the same car when leaving. Last year, U.S. officials concluded that Alice Wong was sharing information with the Chinese government. So those two things start to make everyone pay attention. last year nvidia also found during an audit that megaspede seemed to have 50 000 fewer chips in its data centers than nvidia had shipped it and so the u.s wanted to know where those 50 000 chips were they suspected that between june 2024 and february 2026 megaspede bought at least 4.8 billion dollars worth of nvidia powered hardware and they purposefully were going to secretly give some of that to mainland chinese companies that were barred from buying it otherwise representatives of the u.s commerce department visited one of mega speed's malaysian data centers and found equipment still in boxes which is odd for somebody who's running a data center you usually unbox that stuff and put it in the data center unless you're planning to ship it off somewhere else.

9:01Anyway, that's just suspicious. It's not evidence. However, the Singapore police force were also suspicious. They brought Alice Wong in for questioning last year and barred her from leaving the country, something that she seems to have violated. We'll get to that in a minute. The Singapore police force is continuing to investigate Megaspeed, but they are not commenting any more about that. Wall Street Journal sources say authorities both in Singapore and Taiwan believe that Alice Wong may have been recruited by the Chinese government after they learned of her relationship with Jensen Huang. So the theory there is those two get close.

9:38Everyone realizes that it's a controversial thing. They hold it over Alice Wong and turn her into becoming an informant because of it. That's the theory anyway. Last spring, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio drafted a classified memo warning of the relationship after intelligence gathered from electronic surveillance of Alice Wong showed that she might be working for the Chinese Ministry of State Security. On October 29th, we talked about all of this on DTNS, and NVIDIA wrote, Jensen's interactions with Ms. Wong are not unusual or unexpected. Meetings with customers are part of a CEO's job. Jensen talks with thousands of customer executives every year.

10:20Our regional cloud customers receive ordinary business information, not sensitive NVIDIA trade secrets. and zero information relevant to national security. At the time that we talked about that on October 29th, I was like, that's a lot more words than they needed to say. Last week, members of the U.S. House of Representatives requested a briefing with Jensen Huang to discuss all of this. That briefing is now scheduled for next week, November 18th. And then the big news on Sunday, possibly in preparation for this meeting, they decided to do this. jensen huang sent a memo to his employees admitting he had an extramarital affair with alice huang that is not suspected anymore he said yep we did that he wrote i was unfaithful to my wife my actions hurt her and our children there is no excuse for what i did i am deeply sorry so now nvidia's board is putting together a committee of independent directors to investigate reports that Jensen Huang was, quote, the target of a foreign intelligence effort.

11:24They're going to look into it. They say they have, and I quote again, no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised. Going back to Jensen's memo from Sunday, he said, I love our country and our company, and I'm committed to protecting NVIDIA and supporting America's national security. And as for Alice Wong, she no longer works for Megaspeed. She is no longer listed as an employee or a director or an investor and is reportedly back in China, according to two people who were in contact with her earlier this year, but she hasn't been heard from in a while. And of course, there was an order that barred her from leaving Singapore, so we don't know how she got to China.

12:02If you want to know, Jensen Huang has been married to his wife, Lori, for 40 years. His daughter, Madison, works in NVIDIA's software division, and Madison's husband works in the financing of cloud computing for NVIDIA, and Jensen Huang's son, Spencer, works in NVIDIA's robotics division. Madison Huang canceled an event in Seoul on November 9th due to, a family matter. So Rob, first of all, what do you make of all of that? And then let's talk a little bit about what this might end up meaning for NVIDIA.

12:31Robb Dunewood: So the thing that I am thinking of from a CEO of NVIDIA standpoint is that, okay, we have to now admit this because we're getting pulled in front of Congress, and if I keep lying, I potentially could go to prison. So, okay, so now strategies shift from trying to keep everything secret and know nothing was unthwarted, everything we were doing was fine and above board, to, okay, how do I keep from going to jail? That is where I think at least Jensen Huang is at this point. But it seems like when we – this is big. Like I said, I said made-for-TV movie. This can actually be a regular movie. This is a big deal.

13:15Robb Dunewood: We still need to see what is happening here. But you're talking about, depending on the day of the week, the first, second, or third biggest company in the world. and their CEO allegedly may have been finessed by a Chinese agent of the state. That does not look good at all for the CEO of NVIDIA. But it doesn't look that bad because as we were going through the rundown and getting everything ready, I just started looking, what are analysts talking about? And it's like, yeah, this is really, really bad. Probably won't lose his job. Why? Because Jensen Wang makes a lot of money for NVIDIA. So if this was anyone that was not CEO, they would be getting terminated.

13:58Robb Dunewood: There is no question about that. With this being the top person at the company, I don't say they're being given grace. They're being given the ability to continue to make boatloads of money for NVIDIA shareholders. So we'll see how this turns out. But this does not look good at all. It doesn't look good at all. Yeah, the biggest question that neither of us can answer is, did he give any secrets to Alice Wong? And was that knowingly done? Those are going to be the biggest questions in my mind, which is, was anything leaked? Jensen Wong is going to be on the hook for that if they can prove that something was sent over that shouldn't have been sent over.

14:48and Vidya's saying we don't have any evidence of that. We don't think that happened. And they're saying it in very short words, which makes me think they're pretty confident that Jensen's like, no, I didn't tell her anything. I wouldn't have told anybody else. It doesn't look good, but if that's the case, all this does is weaken Jensen Huang's standing in the public space. Maybe he can't bargain as hard for weaker export restrictions as he used to. Clearly there will be shareholder lawsuits. just because he had an affair with a client, if nothing else. But he probably, like you say, he escapes unharmed and bounces back stronger because of this adversity that he's gone through, if that's the scenario that plays out.

15:32If he did pass secrets, he could still survive if he can show like, hey, you know what, I didn't realize she was an active asset of the Chinese state. Maybe I should have realized that, but I didn't. And it would depend on, you know, what the level of the information was that he gave. I can't imagine that he would even in that situation share anything particularly, you know, secretive that he is under any kind of classified restrictions from the United States government for. But if he did, then he's toast. uh and if if you know and i guess that's where i'll leave it there is it depends if it does turn out that he passed secrets how serious were those secrets i don't think he's going to ever admit that he knew she was an agent uh and so then it just is a matter of of how serious was the leak my gut tells me it probably wasn't that serious if anything was passed along but it could make his life difficult for a long time if anything leaked oh it would definitely make it difficult because

16:32Robb Dunewood: at worst, you were passing secrets and you knew it. A little bit better than that, you got finessed. Neither one of those looks good for the CEO for one of the biggest companies on earth. So if they determine that secrets are passed, he's not long for this job. You simply just can't keep him there because you either did it knowingly or you're just inept. And that's how he's going to be looked at. And folks are going to say, well, maybe she was just really good at what she was doing. Doesn't matter. You are the CEO of the company. You knew you were having an improper relationship. That is enough to get, you know, the improper relationship is enough to get many, many, many, many, many people fired from their job that don't run the company.

17:19Robb Dunewood: But if you were passing secrets from a shareholder standpoint, you just can't do this anymore. You know, you have shown, you know, first time shame on me for having you in a situation. if we leave you there knowing that this is what happens to you because of things that you do in your personal life. Like I said, if you if you said that I actually gave secrets away that you're going to prison. If you got finessed, you can't be trusted to be in that role any longer. So if anything gets close to secrets or traded, he is not long for that job at all. I can't I can't he'd step down, I think, before he get fired.

17:54Robb Dunewood: But I can't I can't imagine that they would keep him there. I think for most values of secrets, that's true. I can imagine some things where it's like, oh, he let her know that the GB20 ban was going to happen like a day before the news went public. Maybe he gets a slap on the wrist for something like that. Right. That's the kind of thing where it's like, well, it's not a state secret. It was more insider trading ish kind of thing. And maybe that happens with other clients that you're not sleeping with. Right. So I can imagine that scenario. but I'm having a hard time coming up with too many examples of that in this situation, especially if she actually was working for the Ministry of State Security.

18:35She's going to be going for bigger fish than that. And it's worth pointing out that if Jensen Wong were to step down, there's no succession plan. He does not have a typical hierarchical structure. There's no obvious person to step in, even on an interim basis. So that makes things difficult. On the other hand, he also doesn't have control of this company the way a Mark Zuckerberg or somebody does. He is a major stockholder, but he doesn't have that dual controlling, you know, limited voting stock that those guys do. So the board will do whatever they want with him. They probably don't want to get rid of him because he's good at his job, like you said earlier, but they will if they have to.

19:14Robb Dunewood: You make a very, very good point. This is one of those situations where if the board say, hey, you got to go, there's nothing he can really do to stop that. He's going to get paid quite well in his exit, but there's nothing he could do to prevent that. There's a lot going on here, though. He's got multiple adult children and in-laws that are working at this company, and Madison is like, I'm canceling stuff that I got. We've got family stuff. What do you think the family stuff is that is going on? I bet we can guess. This is just a it's a really, really bad look for it. The very best for a decision that he made, knowing that he shouldn't be doing this.

19:54Robb Dunewood: He should not be having an improper relationship outside of his marriage with, you know, with people that he works with. That's just not something that you do. And that's what he's done. So the best case scenario is that you're just a creep. And because you're the CEO, you'll be able to keep your job or probably no one else would be able to. Yeah. My usual take on a scenario like this would be people are probably exaggerating how bad this is for the company. NVIDIA has got a lot of momentum. They've got a lot of good businesses. If Jensen Huang were to have to step down, the company doesn't fall apart overnight.

20:29There's a lot of competent people working there and they will continue to be extremely valuable. However, the fact that he doesn't have that typical structure makes it murky. Usually, my guess is like, hey, if a company this big is doing this well, they have to have a lot of competent people. Somebody will step up. But usually you have a better idea of who those people might be. And the analysts that I've seen, I don't make a close study of it myself, but the analysts I've seen that I trust on this are like, yeah, nobody knows. Nobody knows who would be that person. There's not like a consensus pick or even a consensus selection of picks.

21:02Robb Dunewood: Well, you know, Tom, you know what we're going to do? We're going to stay tuned because this is nowhere near being done. We'll be talking about this for months, if not years to come. Yeah, I think there are multiple shoes left to drop for sure. DTS is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to Reed Fishler, Larry Bailey, Michelle Sergiu, and Josh. And a brand new patron, Brian F. Welcome, Brian. Good to have new patrons. Brian came in over the weekend. Brand new patron. Good to have you. Thank you, Brian, for your support of this show. And thank you, everyone who supports the show. Could be you next.

21:42That is the wrong music. I got so excited about Brian, I didn't play this music.

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25:30There's more we need to know today.

25:32Robb Dunewood: Let's get to the briefs. In his weekly Power On newsletter, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman says a December update to iOS may give Siri the ability to control Apple's first-party apps to execute requests. This could include organizing tabs in Siri, sorting folders and files, or making an edit in photos. Third-party support for these kind of functions won't arrive in preview until spring of 2027, according to Gorman. In fact, in his newsletter, he says an open table, for example, could theoretically create a plug-in that lets a user act Siri to make an advanced restaurant reservation, or Uber Eats could allow customers to place an intricate order entirely through Siri.

26:08Robb Dunewood: or the assistant could retrieve information from one third party app and provide it to another app to fulfill the request. And once again, that doesn't come until sometime next year. That's not a this year thing. Pretty cool, though. So, you know, I I think this is it's kind of slick. But I think back to one of the things that Uber just recently said out of tens of millions of orders. They had like four people use agents to book a ride. and it had maybe under 500 out of tens of millions of orders uh have people actually use agents to to you know to get food so i think that if any company can do it apple can't they you know they've got devices in so many people's hands that this would actually be a cool thing for them to be able to do this kind of thing but i just i think it'll be a slow roll i don't think this is going to be something that would be massively adopted extremely fast yeah the stuff that on doordash though is more the grok muse kind of stuff or dot from open ai this what we're talking about is a little bit short of that this is basically saying to your phone hey can you book something through resi and that's that's agentic but it's not the like you just go and do it on your own when you have a chance right so maybe this is the kind of thing that increases that adoption because it's a little easier for people to understand it's taking advantage of stuff they're already doing on their phone versus, well, now I have to open Muse and then I have to tell it what to do and then hope it does it right.

27:38And maybe I will, maybe I won't. If it's just part of iOS, then suddenly you're like, oh, okay. Can you help me book something through Resi? Like, yeah, I can do that whole thing for you. I can see if Apple does it right, that working well. And it's very Apple to be like, yeah, you already have features and services that can do more than this, but let's do

27:58Robb Dunewood: this really well first right so it seems like the the the you know the gateway drug for for agent nature of things um and the other part too and i think that one of the things that we have to remember is that people like interfaces is not just saying hey open table or hey siri go do something in open table it's been able to look and see what's open what's available in open table having that interface where you can just look and see oh here's here's restaurants that have availability on these nights that i would like to go out just looking at that actually makes you feel a little comfort as compared to just letting the AI go about it.

28:31Robb Dunewood: So I think that what Apple is doing here is basically we're going to take baby steps into getting you into this. So we're going to do it through third-party applications that you can still use. You can still open those applications up. But we're just going to give you some additional functionality that if you just want to say, hey, keyword, it'll just do it for you. And Google has started rolling out its November update to Google Books with performance updates some bug fixes among the improvements better memory management both in the npu and the browser improved touch responsiveness one of the bugs in bluetooth that was preventing uh bluetooth low energy devices from pairing has been fixed there's also fixes for power management monitor bugs settings and files app the zoom app specifically got a fix the linux terminal got a fix so rob i just have a quick question do any of these make you regret returning those two google books you bot?

29:21Robb Dunewood: Um, not at all time, because my Google books, I could not get the basic functionality to work. And this isn't addressing that. So, um, you know, if I were to, if I were to switch my phone over to a pixel, then there may be, yeah. Okay. Okay. But I, I simply couldn't get it to work with my, with my galaxy devices. That being said, um, this, this is like, these are fixes that probably should have been there at release. And I don't want to keep hammering that same nail. But I am I'm very shocked that this was just as half baked as it was when it came out out of the gate. So very anecdotally, when I took the when I took the last device back, the guy working in the Best Buy store said to me is like, I've never seen devices returned at this rate, they actually have more return devices in stock than they actually have devices in stock, because they slowed down on getting the orders from, you know, you know, from, you know, from the OEMs because it's like, we don't want to just keep getting these things and they sit on the shelves and we can't sell them because they've got like right now they've got a bad reputation.

30:24Robb Dunewood: So like, so that's very anecdotal that there's no research behind that. That was one guy telling me one thing at one best buy, but you know, the returns on these, I can't imagine that they're low. I would have to only imagine that they're extremely high. Yeah. Google book status has not changed a lot for you. I think it is fair to say. All right, folks, we do live streams every Friday. Rob has talked about his Google book experience on there. Last week we had Robert Heron on talking about televisions. We deal with the big tech questions of the week. You know, questions like, can Jensen Wong survive this?

30:57Might show up on our Friday show. And you can watch those live by becoming a subscriber at youtube.com slash daily tech news show.

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32:55Now some quick headlines that are just good to know might make you look smarter in the future.

32:59Robb Dunewood: money announced monday that will expand its age estimation technology on instagram worldwide it continues to roll out the tech on facebook with a rollout for threads planned for later this year google introduced two new tensor processing unit variants the tpu 8 tx is meant for secure and confidential work and the tpu 8i max is for applications that need long context windows Good day to have NVIDIA competition hardware on the market, I would expect. Apple successfully registered Apple Intelligence with China's regulatory agency in Shanghai on Monday. That is a required step before making it available to the public in China.

33:42Uber has added parking reservations to its app in 15 U.S. cities using Spot Hero's network. Uber agreed to buy Spot Hero back in February and plans to use the Spot Hero network to help robo-taxis find a place to wait for their next task. That way they're not on the road going back and forth between the hub all the time.

33:58Robb Dunewood: Burning battery up. Yeah. Disney and Adobe have reached a multi-year deal to develop generative models to use across theme parks, studios, and sports. That was supposed to be OpenAI, but OpenAI pulled the video generation, so I guess they went to Adobe instead. An internal European Union report found that a network known as Operation Overload, attributed to Russian actors, was spreading video impersonating Western media to French audiences to try to foster false claims about migrants and imminent attacks. So that's not speculative. That actually happened. The videos in question received 49 million views between October 16th and October 18th.

34:36That's a lot.

34:37Robb Dunewood: Almost 50 million in three days. Deep fakes are something we've got to keep looking at. Early builds of Samsung's One UI 9.5 show a redesigned desktop interface from running inside Samsung Dex. Betas appeared on Samsung's Korean and U.S. update servers, meaning that the beta should open for registration very, very soon. Ad agency Ogilvy has signed an agreement with Creative Artist Agency, CAA, to create, and I quote, a system where the biggest stars can license verified digital replicas safely, unlocking unprecedented agility for brands and assured control for talent. Basically, the talent makes money off their image getting generated, but they don't have to show up for the shoot.

35:18Terry Crews is reported to be among some of the first actors to have opted into the system. It is opted.

35:26Robb Dunewood: NVIDIA announced Group 2, an open-source, or excuse me, an open-world action model to help robots learn hand skills. NVIDIA says it reached 95 % average success with five demonstrations per task and testing. And thanks to RWNash for noting this one on our subreddit. open source developer Ian Kay has created a bash script called RAM Altman that will monitor how much idle RAM you have and then regularly send an email to whomever you wish to let them know. Now, the automatically generated email text is addressed to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, but you have to set up the mail server yourself. It won't automatically do it.

36:03Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper.

36:07Robb Dunewood: Last month, Opera announced a feature to add local models to its browser. Jason Howell caught up with Dan Bertay from Opera to find out more about what this means for you. All right. Last week, Opera started building AI into its browsers with something called WebAI. And we talked about it on the show. It runs AI models on your computer instead of sending the data to the cloud. There's a big movement for this right now. Along with it, Opera kind of mentioned that everyday AI use doesn't actually need a data center. And after the midterm elections, this is even bigger of a comment to make. It's definitely more relevant.

36:46Here to talk about it is Dan Bertay, who is Director of Developer Relations at Opera. Welcome to the show, Dan. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's great to have you here. We get to talk to you a little bit about web AI, what it means, and kind of what it's all about, and what it says about people in the post-election data centers are bad universe that we suddenly find ourselves in. Why don't we start with what WebAI actually is for an everyday user, right? What changes for me if I'm using Opera with WebAI inside? I mean, I think it would be best if we can start framing it to what it is. And it's basically a proposed web standard that we're proposing.

37:32it's a website that's also backed by Microsoft and Google and it's just something that we're trying to push out there and make local models available in the browser for agentic workflows for everyone. And of course we can talk about the advantages but first and foremost as a proposed standard the advantage of this is going to be something that's universal that people can use on multiple platforms further on. why uh we're at the point where local models are powerful enough that they can do many a thing that most people need there's no you know this this we're not picking sides here what we're saying is we're at the point where uh for a lot of the tasks that me and you maybe have a local model is powerful enough and for that you don't necessarily need to subscribe to uh you know a frontier model.

38:27You don't need API keys, you don't need a cloud involved. So you can run this stuff locally, which means obviously a certain degree of privacy, right? Which is great. And a certain degree of freedom. And of course, naturally, no cost. So if you have a modern enough computer, if it's a Mac, you can run the Gemma models and the Apple Foundation models. If it's a Windows machine. It's the latest Gemma models as well. And it's the biggest Gemma models that runs currently on a PC. So you're getting all that power to run APIs that are advantageous for... And I want to take a sec back also, I guess. I'm very tempted to give examples of what things you can do.

39:17But at the same time, Opera's always been an a la carte offering, right? The browser that we offer are streamlined to different purposes, right? So, you know, it's Opera One, and it's Opera GX for browsers, it's Neon for the Agentech workflow. So it's always an a la carte situation. It's always something that we give our users, you know, the possibility that they can build and experience the web the way that they want. This is no different, right? It's just something that allows people to build their own applications and extensions locally, and they don't need to obviously run the stuff in the cloud.

39:56So you have a bunch of APIs that you can use, you know, prompt API, you can generate text, you can use a decision API, classification and categorization, semantic embeddings, and all these things are available with these models. Interesting. Yeah, one thing that one thing that comes to mind for me is that when you're talking about AI in the browser locally, I mean, local AI really relies on the capabilities of an individual's machine, right? Correct. How or does this system kind of optimize around the many, the myriad different configurations that exist out in the world on machines running opera that might tap into this ecosystem, the web AI?

40:41I think if you're using a relatively new machine, So let's say an Apple MacBook that's, you know, an M chip that's reasonably new and you're running more than 8 gigabytes of RAM or a PC with a comparable package. It's going to be fast enough and plenty powerful to run these models for a lot of the stuff that you need. So it's crazy that we've gotten to the point that we can use a machine that we already had laying around. We don't have to go and buy something new. at the same time, you know, in a very, because this is also something that we cared a lot about, in a very simple manner. So a lot of the, you know, a lot of this has to do with, you know, users having a concern that it might be difficult to deploy.

41:30It might be, you know, what do I choose? Does it work? Blah, blah, blah. For us, it's a pretty simple thing. Download the, you know, download the Opera browser. And yes, this is an early preview. So even so, it's an on-demand thing. You have to go in the menu, in the settings, toggle Opera AI on, download the models, and then it's a one-click thing. So we make it very easy. That's nice. Yeah, I like that. A lot of users just worry, oh, it's a complicated thing. So I feel, I mean, we generally feel very confident that a lot of our users are running capable enough machines to have a good experience using these models, especially for the tasks that we expect them to run.

42:13Okay, so then let's zone in on that because when I think of like smaller local models, you know, and it sounds like, you know, these are going to be small enough that, you know, that it's going to be more accessible to more people, right? But within there often lies limitations for everyday use, certain tasks, I'm sure, more capable than others. What are everyday users like myself doing that makes these smaller models good enough? Where do those limitations actually come into play in that whole scenario? Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if they do, really. I mean, we're doing research. We're doing summarization.

42:52We're just doing analysis. We're compiling pages and putting things together, trying to understand left from right, writing some copy, generating some images. This is plentiful. We can totally do these things currently. And let's not stop here. This is all work in progress. New models are coming about. Optimizations are happening. People renew their machines. So I think the convergence is kind of starting to be there to the point that everybody's going to have a good experience using these models for the most typical tasks. Of course, people would be wondering, okay, so why would I use a frontier model?

43:37And there's plenty of applications for frontier models that are beyond the reach of what we need to do on a day-to-day basis, right? We're not researching material science, biology, chemistry, rocket stuff. So I feel like there's definitely going to be personally, I'm looking at this and it's definitely a detachment from what we need in a personal or professional environment as, I don't know what to call ourselves, average users, but we're definitely not material science researchers. So for all of these tasks, we find that the available models are plenty powerful, in fact, surprisingly so. And we're giving them an environment in the web browser that can spawn a whole new host of web AI-powered applications that have never been seen before.

44:25So we're generally excited to see what our users come up with. in kind of a tidbit, right? So what's special about Opera first and foremost is that every single one of our users have made a conscious choice to download and use Opera. We're never pre-installed. So that's kind of a cool thing to know that people have made their research. And then moving forward, this is today is a big day when we crossed 100 million active monthly users on desktops, which is a big celebration for us. And thank you. And all of these, every single one of these people can now activate and download an update that runs a preview version of the WebAI technology we built in Opera.

45:11So it's incredible to think that 100 million people now have the capabilities to develop applications or to, you know, build extensions or do reasoning and, you know, different other, who knows what kind of applications and a form factor of a browser today. And I'm very proud to be part of this, frankly, revolution. Yeah, yeah, it's super cool. And I do agree. I think one of the ongoing challenges as we get further and further into this fun world of modern AI is how do you keep the potential complexity of all this stuff accessible for people? And it sounds like what you're doing with web AI is kind of addressing that.

45:55It's giving everyday users kind of the keys to do some really interesting things with AI without having to deal with some of the grunt work of setting it all up. And yeah, big time. Congratulations on crossing 100 million desktop users. I was going to compliment you on that or congratulate you on that, but you got to it first. Dan, really appreciate you taking time to tell us a little bit about WebAI and what you got going on at Opera. Thank you so much for hopping on DTNS with me today. Thanks for having me, Jason. I appreciate it. I was able to actually install Opera Web AI during their interview while we were listening to it.

46:36So it is pretty easy, actually.

46:39Robb Dunewood: So Dan is really, really good at explaining what everything can do. He's also very well media trained because he didn't pick any winners. I was like, he almost said, here's an example of what you can do. And that might have made, if he would have gave one example and didn't give another one, somebody would have been upset. But I saw that. I don't have a favorite child. I don't have a favorite. So, but yeah, but I, you know, I'm a visual person. I want to see what can it actually do. And I, and Tom, you and I can come up with probably dozens and dozens and dozens of things that it can actually do.

47:13Robb Dunewood: But I want to actually see someone say, okay, here, you can do this kind of thing. If you're doing this in a spreadsheet and you want to actually turn it into a Word document or you want to turn it into a webpage, here's how you could do it with this model. I want to see those examples of how that could happen or how someone might actually build a little agent that's doing something. But this is really cool because it's like, you know, unlike what Sam Holtman might think, people have RAM in the computers that can do stuff. Yeah, turns out you might have a little extra RAM. And it was super simple to turn it on, and it just downloaded models, and now it's ready to go.

47:45And I can start messing with it now and see what it's good at. But when he said, like, no, no, it's super easy, no barrier to entry, I'm like, really? Let me see. Now, your machine may be a little older than mine or whatever, so you may not have as much space on your hard drive. But it was as easy as going into the settings and saying, hey, turn on WebAI. And then it's like, great, downloading the inference engines right now. We'll see how easy it is to use and what it's good for next.

48:10Robb Dunewood: Yeah, that is pretty cool. Folks, we end every episode of DT Nestle, some shared perspectives. And today, Philip just has some kudos for us. Yeah, Philip wrote, a couple weeks ago on DTNS, you were discussing the story involving NVIDIA Jensen Wang and a possible Chinese spy. I remember you questioning NVIDIA's unusually long and detailed statement denying Jensen had any involvement. You mentioned that the length and detail of the response gave you pause. In light of the additional information coming out tonight, I just wanted to give you credit for your instincts. This is exactly why I listen to DTNS and why I'm a proud patron.

48:45It's not just the tech news you deliver, but your ability to look beyond the headlines, ask thoughtful questions, and recognize when something doesn't quite add up. I've always respected your perspective, and moments like this reinforce why I value your take on the news so much. Thank you, Philip. It's a little self-congratulatory for me to read this, but it made me feel good that that is the thing I'm trying to do the most on this show, is figure out what's behind the headlines, what's beyond the clickbait. And so I'm glad that Philip values that. and it showed off this time.

49:14Robb Dunewood: I'm glad that he values it. And it's what makes doing this fun. We could literally just say, here's the news. Here's what happened. Here's who did it. Here's who they did it to. But the fact that we can, to some extent, say, but you know what? This smells a little funny. And the fact that we can actually give you that as well without trying to swing a story one way or the other based off of whatever we might want to do that, it's cool to be able to talk about stuff. and people who listen, people who read what we say, you know, are moved by it. So yeah, that was a good call back, you know, a month ago when we last talked about this.

49:49Yeah, man, I get it. I get that advantage from you, the folks that we work with together, Rob, like you have experiences in the workplace that I never had. And so when you say like, you know, this reminds me of something, I've got a little feeling that this is the way it works when you're in those rooms, I pay attention to that because, you know, that's the kind of stuff that separates us from the generative models, basically, is, you know, Rob's got a feeling about this. I better pay attention to that.

50:18Robb Dunewood: Well, folks, we want to know what you're thinking about. So if you've got insight into a story, please, please, please share it with us at feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks to Jason Howell, Dan Berte, and Phillip for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. You're the folks keep us in business. Become a patron like I like Philip. I like Brian F. I like everybody else who supports us. Join the crowd. Patreon.com slash DTNS.

50:46The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

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