Jensen is OUT!? Fable 5.2 and the Anthropic IPO, Gemini 4 Carbon and Hydrogen, live from AI Engineer

Hey folks, Alex here 👋

We said it on the show and I will say it again here: this could be the most consequential week in AI’s history. Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang has resigned as CEO and left the board. This is following a wild week with reported affairs with a potential Chinese Spy, and two other women. We talk about this at length.

In the same week, Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.2 and started its IPO roadshow, Google made Gemini 4 Carbon generally available and launched a model that only makes decisions, and CoreWeave reported a quarter people are saying saved the AI trade.

We broadcast this one live from the AI Engineer Code Summit in San Francisco, and because of that we had five guests walk straight over from the conference. Kent C. Dodds explained software factories, Michelle Chen told us why Cloudflare is now a neolab, Ivan Leo from Google DeepMind broke Gemini 4 Hydrogen live on the show, Zach Lloyd came off the main stage to walk us through Warp’s factory stack, and Swyx closed the show.

The quick TL;DR:

* Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia CEO, CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO

* Claude Fable 5.2 is #1 on Artificial Analysis and 20% cheaper, and Anthropic starts its IPO roadshow (ticker ANT)

* Gemini 4 Carbon is GA, Gemini 4 Hydrogen launched live on the show, plus the Gemini Decisions API

* Nous Arete-27B trains the propaganda out of a Qwen model without losing capability

* Interviews: Kent C. Dodds, Michelle Chen, Ivan Leo, Zach Lloyd and Swyx

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No more Jensen: Huang resigns from Nvidia after affairs and scandals

Jensen Huang resigns, Colette Kress is interim CEO (Announcement, X)

This morning Nvidia announced that Jensen Huang has resigned as President, CEO and member of the board, effective immediately. He founded the company 33 years ago and turned it into the most important company in AI. CFO Colette Kress is now the interim CEO and keeps the CFO job, Harvey Jones (former CEO of Synopsys) becomes the first-ever board chair, and the board is searching for a permanent CEO among internal and external candidates.

How we got here took about four days. On Sunday, Jensen emailed Nvidia staff and admitted to an affair, and the board opened an independent investigation into whether he was the target of a foreign intelligence effort. The reports center on Alice Huang (no relation), and The Information reported that her network helped move about $7.5B of Nvidia chips to China. Then the New York Times reported a second affair, the Wall Street Journal reported the board was preparing to oust him, and this morning it was official. Note that the release says “resigned” and gives no reason.

I said it on the show and I will repeat it: I don’t care about the affairs, that is between him and his family. What matters to us is that this is a person at the center of the AI ecosystem. He is the chief allocator of compute, and he has been one of the loudest voices for open source AI, both in public and in the President’s ear.

That open source angle is what worried the panel most. Yam said it straight: he fears for open source. Ray pulled up Jensen’s first post on X from July, a letter Nvidia signed on why open models matter, saying the world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models. Wolfram pointed out that Jensen was pro open source as a businessman, since open models run on his GPUs, but that he was still one of the most influential people pushing for it, and that losing him over allegations, with nothing proven, is a blow to the open source community.

Peter, speaking as what he called a casual observer, thought the first story was much worse than the second. From what he read, Alice Huang looks like an influential person with links to Chinese authorities rather than a trained spy, which you should assume anyway when you deal with influential people from a government. He found it odd that the first report was not enough for him to resign and the second one was. Nisten thinks the meme campaign against Jensen on X looked coordinated, and he thinks Nvidia’s investors should ask for him back.

Swyx, when he joined at the end of the show, was blunt. He doesn’t agree with the decision, he thinks Jensen should have owned the affairs as private business, but he agrees a possible Chinese spy is a serious matter for a company of national interest. He pointed out that Jensen bought Hugging Face and acqui-hired Poolside and was building toward an American open source AI roadmap. His read is that this is now a state level issue, and he doesn’t expect Jensen to come back unless the CIA clears him.

So what happens to Jensen next? Nisten predicts they bring him back. Peter hopes he starts something new, like a massive fund for AI, because he is an amazing deal maker. Someone asked Elon to hire him and Elon replied that it would be an honor, though I doubt those two personalities would work together.

My attempt at positivity: the company is bigger than one man. Apple is still everywhere without Steve Jobs, and Uber is still around without Travis Kalanick. Nvidia sells the most requested hardware in the world, inference demand keeps growing, and whatever turmoil they go through, they will keep selling GPUs. Good luck, Jensen.

So all is to say, we don’t know anything, and it’s only important what evidence did the board see. This could be a sovereign attempt at taking over, could be anything else. We’re all speculating and are all sad and like the rest of the internet, we are all processing this in real time and are still shocked that we’re now in a world without Jensen at the help of Nvidia!

Anthropic: Fable 5.2 and the IPO roadshow

Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2 (X, Blog)

Meanwhile, someone was having a great week. Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 on Monday. They are the same underlying model: Fable is what we get on paid plans and the API, and Mythos stays restricted to approved programs. Fable 5.2 costs $8 in and $40 out per million tokens, down 20% from $10 and $50, and Anthropic says it is about 30% faster. It is number one on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 65. The system card also flags stronger covert capability and more evaluation awareness, meaning the model is better at noticing when it is being tested.

Peter showed us the Arena agent leaderboard, which comes from people using models for free on real tasks without knowing which model they got. Fable 5.2 is number one, and on the praise versus complaint signal it is nearly double any model below it. He says it is better than Opus on their metrics, with more diversity on creative prompts and better world understanding and attention to detail. But it is pricier, it uses about the same number of tokens, and personally he doesn’t feel it is an enormous shift. He also asked a fair question: if they named the last one Opus 5.5, why is this Fable 5.2 and not 5.5? Maybe they hoped for a bigger jump.

Ray had the most hands-on story. He used Fable 5.2 on extra high inside Bitrig, a tool from the co-creators of Swift, and asked for a multi-plat