Trump vs Harvard, Nvidia export controls, how DEI killed Hollywood with Tim Dillon

The U.S. moved to restrict Nvidia’s H20 exports to China, a chip specifically designed to comply with earlier controls. Sacks said H20 has less compute than H100 but 20% more memory bandwidth, making it far more capable for newer AI workloads than the “weaker chip” label implies. (SEC)

The more consequential issue may be enforcement, not where the export-control line is drawn. Chamath alleged that Asian intermediaries are routing Nvidia chips to Chinese users, while Sacks said shell-company evasion is documented and argued Commerce’s BIS needs more monitoring, inspections and staff.

Harvard rejected the Trump administration’s demands over governance, hiring, admissions and DEI, after which $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in contracts were frozen. The fight was moving beyond campus policy into whether federal funding and even tax-exempt status can be conditioned on institutional changes. (Harvard Public Health)

Friedberg highlighted a little-understood funding mechanism: Harvard’s general on-campus research indirect-cost rate was 69% of modified direct costs. In practical terms, $100 of eligible direct research spending could carry roughly $69 of added facilities-and-administration reimbursement, making research funding substantially larger than the headline laboratory grant. (Harvard Gazette)

Chamath said a senior Wall Street banker abandoned a Federal Reserve hiring process after being told before his final interview to “play up” being Indian. The banker, whose PhD specialty matched the role, reportedly replied that his relevant diversity was knowing the market better than anyone and withdrew.

Dillon’s best argument about AI job loss came from his own pre-comedy life: a $13-an-hour New York tour-guide job gave him enough flexibility to become a comedian. He argued that eliminating such modest “bridge jobs” could remove the economic runway that lets artists, retirees and unconventional workers pursue something else.

Dillon said a Romanian Bitcoin millionaire once paid him $100,000 for a 20-minute private birthday performance. Most guests spoke Romanian and barely understood the set, making the fee a striking example of how lucrative private entertainment can be compared with ordinary comedy work.

The most concrete science item was a Zhejiang University method that produced 854 times more mitochondria from cultured human stem cells, with 5.7 times higher ATP output. In a mouse osteoarthritis model, the engineered mitochondria promoted cartilage regeneration, making scalable mitochondrial transplantation a plausible new regenerative-medicine research path rather than just a theory. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)