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Jensen Huang backtracked after declaring China the big AI winner. (0:15). ‘Godparents’ say AI already as smart as humans in some areas. (1:01) How to spot an AI bubble about to pop. (1:51)
This is an abridged transcript of the podcast:
Our top story so far, that didn’t last long.
Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang is backtracking on his bold prediction that China will beat the U.S. in the AI race.
“China is going to win the AI race,” he told the Financial Times on the sidelines of an event Wednesday evening — citing China’s lower energy costs and looser AI rules.
He added that the West was being held back by cynicism and needs more optimism.
Market watchers saw that as a plea for cheaper U.S. energy to feed datacenter demand — but an inelegant one likely to draw the attention, if not the ire, of President Donald Trump.
While the panic alarms were probably still echoing in Nvidia’s PR department, Huang was out with a clarifying statement:
“As I’ve long said, China is nanoseconds behind America in AI. It’s vital that America wins by racing ahead and winning developers worldwide.”
At the same AI event, Huang and other Godparents of AI said machines have already reached human-level intelligence in specific sectors.
Meta (META) AI’s Yann LeCun, and top computer scientists Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and Bill Dally joined Huang at the Future of AI Summit.
Huang said, “For the first time, AI is intelligence that augments people — it addresses labor, it does work.”
The concept of Artificial General Intelligence — machines with human-like cognition — remained the central theme, but the group agreed it won’t arrive in a single dramatic moment.
LeCun said, “It’s not going to be an event — capabilities will expand progressively across domains.”
Fei-Fei Li stressed that AI’s power still depends on human intellect.
Hinton predicted machines could win debates within two decades.
And Bengio added a note of caution: “Be agnostic. Don’t make big claims — there are many possible futures.”
From the market perspective, is all this too much, too fast?
T.S. Lombard’s Dario Perkins says the current investment surge carries plenty of echoes of past bubbles — and that it may be better for it to pop early, before it grows big enough to do real damage.
He argues that a short-term correction now would be far less painful than a long melt-up that ends in a financial crisis or deep recession.
What are the warning signs?
Perkins points to tighter monetary policy, with growth and possibly inflation accelerating next year, doubts about earnings potential and companies effectively funding each other’s spending to sustain the illusion of growth.
Add in falling trading volumes, plus the inevitable fraud and insider trading stories, and the pattern starts to look familiar.
For now, he says, the signals are flashing amber — not red. Nothing imminent yet, but 2026 could bring a clearer verdict.
Or, as Perkins puts it: “Even if the bubble doesn’t die of natural causes, there’s a chance the Fed—or the bond market—murders it.”
And looking to the economy, AI was also cited as a reason for a surge in layoffs last month.
For the second month in a row, the Challenger, Gray & Christmas job-cut report is filling the void left by missing government data — and, for the second month in a row, it broke its own embargo.
Employers reported 153,000 job cuts in October — up 183% from September and 175% from the same month last year. Total cuts this year are now running 44% higher than all of 2024.
Challenger says some industries are “correcting after the hiring boom of the pandemic,” but notes that AI adoption, softer spending, and higher costs are pushing companies toward belt-tightening and hiring freezes.
Among active stocks, DoorDash (DASH) is tumbling after mixed third-quarter results came alongside guidance that 2026 profitability may be hit by elevated spending on robotics, fulfillment initiatives, SmartScale and Deliveroo.
Marvell Technology (MRVL) is up on a report that SoftBank Group (OTCPK:SFTBF) (OTCPK:SFTBY) looked at buying the chipmaker earlier this year.
Also in the chip space, Arm (ARM) posted better-than-expected results and guidance that drew largely positive views from analysts.
And Qualcomm (QCOM) delivered a mixed bag — results and guidance showed progress in diversification, but handsets remain a sticking point. Citi says the loss of Apple’s (AAPL) business will continue to weigh on results, while HSBC notes that even with its data-center push, Qualcomm’s chips will likely trail those from Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD).
And hey, looks like we can’t escape AI for long, folks.
Snap (SNAP) is surging after it said it will integrate Perplexity’s AI-powered answer engine directly into Snapchat.
Stagwell (STGW) is off to the races after it announced a partnership with Palantir (PLTR) for an AI-powered platform for marketers.
And Microsoft’s (MSFT) AI team announced it’s forming a superintelligence group which will get “a lot of money” for “building a practical technology explicitly designed only to serve humanity,” than an “ill-defined and ethereal superintelligence.”
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