Tech Brew Ride Home - Nvidia Back In China… Maybe

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

Trump says Nvidia and others can ship chips to China, but the question is, will China take delivery. OpenAI is ending the code red in about a month, after getting a new model out the door. Meta wants a new Llama model, maybe in a month. And a new smart ring that is pretty intriguing… Trump greenlights Nvidia H200 AI chip sales to China if U.S. gets 25% cut, says Xi responded positively (CNBC) China set to limit access to Nvidia’s H200 chips despite Trump export approval (FT) Sam Altman’s Sprint to Correct OpenAI’s Direction and Fend Off Google (WSJ) From Llamas to Avocados: Meta’s shifting AI strategy is causing internal confusion (CNBC) Pebble Is Making a $75 Smart Ring (Wired) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride Home for Tuesday, December 9th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today. Trump says Nvidia and others can ship chips to China, but the question is, will China take delivery? Open AI is ending the code read in about a month after getting a new model out the door. Meta wants a new llama model, maybe in a month as well, and a new smart ring that is pretty intriguing. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. You may have noticed that your customers love webinar and video content, but if you've ever put together a webinar or video, then you know that it can eat up a lot of your time and budget. Now, however, thankfully, there's a single tool that can streamline your team's video and webinar workflows. Wistia. Wistia can scale your content output with AI-powered tools that help you create, edit, and repurpose videos and webinars fast.

And speaking of webinars, you can host engaging, easy-to-set-up webinars in Wistia to complete with built-in analytics. With Wistia, you don't have to pay for multiple video tools, hop between platforms, or constantly re-uploved files. Create, edit, collaborate, and publish all in one place. Head to wistia.com slash brew to learn more. That's WISTIA.com slash brew. With Wistia, you can expect less work and more plays. President Trump said the U.S. will let Nvidia ship its H-200 chips to approved customers in China and elsewhere on the condition that the U.S. gets a 25% cut. The president also said the Commerce Department is working on the same approach for, quote, AMD, Intel and other great American

companies as Nvidia, which, okay, good day for Jensen at all, right? Except sources are also telling the FT that Beijing is set to limit access to Nvidia's H-200 chips in its push for chip self-sufficiency. Quoting CNBC, Chinese President Xi Jinping, quote, responded positively to the proposal Trump wrote in a truth social post. The policy, quote, will support American jobs, strengthen U.S. manufacturing, and benefit American taxpayers, Trump wrote. The Department of Commerce is finalizing the details, and the same approach will apply to AMD, Intel and other great American companies he added in the post. Both Nvidia and chip rival AMD, short for advanced microdevices, agreed in August to share 15% of the revenue from China chip sales with the U.S. government. But around that same time,

China reportedly warned companies against using the H20 AI chip that Nvidia is. designed especially for the country. The H-200 is a higher-grade chip than the H-20, but not the company's top-of-the-line product. NVIDIA shares climbed earlier Monday on news that the Commerce Department was set to approve the China sales, but later paired those gains. The stock rose about 2% after hours. We applaud President Trump's decision to allow America's chip industry to compete, to support high-paying jobs in manufacturing in America, a spokesman for NVIDIA, told CNBC in a statement. Offering H-200 to approved commercial customers vetted by the Department of Commerce strikes a thoughtful balance that is great for America, the spokesman said, end quote.

And quoting the FT. Beijing is set to limit access to Nvidia's advance H-200 chips despite Donald Trump's decision to allow the export of the technology to China as it pushes to achieve self-sufficiency in semiconductor production. According to two people with knowledge of the matter, regulators in Beijing have been discussing ways to permit limited access. to the H-200, NVIDIA's second-best generation of artificial intelligence chips. Buyers would probably be required to go through an approval process, the people said, submitting requests to purchase the chips and explaining why domestic providers were unable to meet their needs.

No final decision has been made yet, the people added. China has used various bands to push domestic chipmakers to develop products to compete with Nvidia. Moves include stepping up customs checks of chip imports and offering energy subsidies to data centers using domestic chips. The two regulators in charge of Beijing's years-long semiconductor independence campaign, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, could apply other measures to ensure the competitiveness of domestic chips, the people said, including banning China's public sector from buying the H-200.

The return of Nvidia's advanced chips would be welcomed by tech giants such as Alibaba, bite-dance, and Tencent, which have been using more Chinese chips for some basic AI functions, but still prefer Nvidia's products because of their higher performance and easier maintenance. Many of them are training their AI models abroad to access Nvidia chips banned at home. While Trump has signaled his approval for the export of Nvidia's advanced chips to China, he faces opposition in Congress. A group of U.S. senators has introduced legislation that would prevent the administration from approving exports of chips, including the H-200 to China for 30 months.

Washington might also adopt an approval process that allows sales of H-200 chips only to companies it considers safe, said the people familiar with the matter. NVIDIA has already been approved to export the H20, a watered-down version of the H-200 made specifically for China after the company in August agreed to pay the U.S. government 15% of its revenues from chip sales in China. Beijing, however, has restricted tech companies access to the H20, arguing that chip's performance is not significantly better than Chinese alternatives, end quote. sources say that Sam Altman plans to end OpenAI so-called Code Red after releasing a model next month in January with improved image generation speed and personality, quoting the journal.

With the code read, Altman instructed employees to boost chat GPT in a specific way through better use of user signals he wrote in his memo. With that directive, Altman was calling for turning up the crank on a controversial source of training data, including signals based on one-click feedback from users. users rather than evaluations from professionals of the chatbot's responses. An internal shift to rely on that user feedback had helped make chat GPT's 4-0 model so synchophantic earlier this year that it has been accused of exacerbating severe mental health issues for some users. Now, Altman thinks the company has mitigated the worst aspects of that approach, but is poised to capture the upside. It's significantly boosted engagement as measured by performance on internal dashboards, tracking daily active users. It was not a small statistically significant bump,

like a wow bump, said one person who worked on the model. Behind Altman's Code Red Declaration, however, are tensions between camps inside the company that have been festering for years, according to people familiar with the matter. A group including Fiji Simo, a former Meta Platforms executive who leads OpenAI's product efforts and chief financial officer Sarah Friar have pushed the company to pour more resources into ChatGPT. Seymot has also told staff that OpenAI needs to do a better job of making sure its users discover the value of ChatGPTs, existing features before the company goes on to build new ones and also wants to improve the chatbot's speed and reliability. Researchers, meanwhile, have prioritized state-of-the-art technology that could

lead to artificial general intelligence or AGI, but don't do as much to improve the basic chatbot experience. Open AI is set to release a new model called 5.2 this week that executives hope will give it new momentum, particularly among coding and business customers. They overruled some employees who asked to push back the model's release so the company could have more time to make it better, according to people familiar with the matter. The company also plans to release another model in January with better images, improve speed and a better personality, and to end the code red after that, Altman said. An open AI spokeswoman says, there's no conflict between the two philosophies and that broad adoption of AI tools is how the company plans to distribute

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I know it's hard to keep track of the various players in the AI horse race, but that's kind of what I get paid to do, so here's me telling you, don't forget about meta. Remember, Zuck spent an absolute metric ton of money to hire people, to reorganize meta's AI efforts, and at some point, they are going to come back out swinging probably in a big way. Sources have told CNBC that meta is pursuing a new Lama successor and frontier AI model, codenamed avocado set for release in Q1 of 2026, and it could be a proprietary model. Quote, as 2025 comes to a close, meta strategy remains scattershot, according to insiders and industry experts, feeding the perception that the company has,

has fallen further behind its top AI rivals, whose models are rapidly gaining adoption in the consumer and enterprise markets. Meta is pursuing a new Lama successor and Frontier AI model codenamed avocado. CNBC has learned. People with knowledge of the matter said many within the company were expecting the model to be released before the end of this year, but that the plan now is for that to happen in the first quarter of 2026. The model is wrestling with various training-related performance testing intended to ensure the system is well received when it eventually debuts, said the people who asked not to be named because they weren't authorized to speak on the matter. Our model training efforts are going according to plan and have had no meaningful

timing changes, a meta-spokesperson said in a statement. With its stock underperforming the broader tech sector this year and badly trailing Google parent alphabet, Wall Street is looking for a sense of direction and a path to a return on investment after Meta spent $14.3 billion in June to higher-scale AI founder Alexander Wang and a handful of his top engineers and researchers. Four months after that announcement, which included meta purchasing a big stake in scale. The social media company raised its 2025 guidance for capital expenditures to between $70 and $72 billion from a prior range of $66 to $72 billion. In many ways, meta has been the opposite of Alphabet where it entered the year as an AI winner and now faces more questions around investment levels and ROI. Analysts at Key Bank

Capital Markets wrote in a November note to clients, the firm recommends buying both stocks. Avocado, when it's eventually made available, could be a proprietary model, according to people familiar with the matter. That means outside developers wouldn't be able to freely download its so-called weights and related software components. Some at Meta were upset that the R1 model released by Chinese AI Lab Deepseek earlier this year incorporated pieces of Lama's architecture, the people said, further underscoring the risks of open source and hammering home the idea that the company should overhaul its strategy. The company's high-priced AI hires and leaders of the recently launched Meta Super Intelligence Lab or MSL have questioned the open source strategy and favored

creating a more powerful proprietary AI model, CNBC reported in July. Wang is now under pressure to deliver a top-tier AI model that helps the company regain momentum against rivals like OpenAI Anthropic and Google, the people said. That pressure has only increased as competitors stepped up their game. Google's Gemini 3 unveiled last month has drawn solid reviews from users and analysts. OpenAI recently announced new updates to its GPT5 AI model while Anthropic debuted its Claude Opus 4.5 model in November shortly after releasing two other major models. Wang isn't the only meta-exec feeling the heat. Nat Friedman has also been tasked with producing a breakout AI product. The people said he was responsible for meta's September launch of Vibs, a feed of AI

generated short videos, which is widely viewed as inferior to OpenAI Sora 2, they said. Former employees and creators told CNBC that the product was rushed to market and lacked key features like the ability to generate realistic lip-synced audio. Friedman has called for MSL to use newer tools that have been calibrated to incorporate multiple AI models and various kinds of coding automation software, often called AI agents, the people said. They have this mantra now saying, Demo Don't Memo, Lovable CEO Anton Oseka said in a October at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco about Meta's new development process, end quote. Finally today, some very interesting new hardware, or at least interesting to me,

Pebble has unveiled the Pebble Index O-1, a $99 smart ring with an on-device LLM for processing voice notes, shipping in March of 26 initially for just $75. Quoting Wired, unlike every other Pebble product, this isn't a watch. but a smart ring. And unlike most other smart rings, the pebble index doesn't measure your heart rate or track your sleep. Its purpose revolves around memory. It's a tool to remember things. There's a physical button on the ring. Wear it on your index finger, then use your thumb to press and hold the button as you speak to it. The index can remember an important tidbit, save a reminder, start a timer, or create a calendar event. Pre-orders start today with the index priced at $75, and it's expected to ship in March.

Another company very recently announced a similar gadget, Whisper into Sandbar's Stream Ring to have it record your stream of consciousness musings. But where Sandbar's product leans heavily on AI processing and requires a subscription, the Pebble Index veers in the opposite direction. I'm not as interested in the AI Persona Pebble founder Eric Mijikovsky tells Wired. The hardware is simple because Mijikovsky wanted to ensure it works 100% of the time. There are no haptics or vibration motors. It's just a physical button and a microphone, one that Mijikovsky assures, will be able to pick up your voice even in loud environments.

The stainless steel ring comes in three colors, matte black, polished silver, and polished gold, and eight sizes. Plus, it's water resistant. It has some internal memory to save your audio clips, even offline. But when your phone is in range, it'll sync the files to the Pebble app. The index works with both Android and iOS. There's no way to recharge the ring. Mijikovsky said he didn't want yet another gadget to charge every day, so instead the Pebble Index has non-rechargeable silver oxide hearing aid batteries designed to last two years with average use. Once the device's battery is nearly dead, users will receive a notification in the app, and the idea is you'll buy a new Pebble Index, an idea that's easier to get behind, knowing the ring costs just $75 of the price will jump to $99 after the first batch.

You'll also be able to send your old index to the company for recycling. When your audio is sent to your phone, an open-source speech-to-text AI model processes it locally to convert your voice notes to text. Then an on-device large language model will categorize the audio deciding whether it's a reminder, a timer, or a general note. A feed shows all your memory logs and you scroll through it to find and listen to each clip. None of this data is ever sent to the cloud. It all stays on your phone. These are your innermost thoughts, Midgikovsky says. You don't want to send them anywhere. By default, all your musings with the ring are handled by the Pebble app. So if you had it set a reminder, you'll get one from the Pebble app. However, you can customize the destination if you prefer to use your own service. If you use the Notion app for notes and tasks, for example, you can set it up so that your reminders and thoughts will be sent there. The open source nature of the Pebble app means there's no limit to customization. You press and hold the button,

to log a note, but you can have a single press trigger and action. Mijikovsky says he set his to play or pause music, and a double press switches tracks. But you can set it to take a photo remotely or activate a smart home routine. There will be an actions category in the Pebble App Store where folks can publish their custom actions. With a double press and hold, you can go a step further with a secondary suite of actions. These actions are sent to a chat GPT-like bot to help you answer basic everyday questions like, what's the weather or something you type into Google Search.

These more open-ended results naturally will require an internet connection. Majikovsky says they won't work all the time, and this capability is unavailable by default. People will be able to write and publish their own model context protocol actions, expanding the use of the ring. As for the output, if you have earbuds, you'll be able to hear the results of your queries. If you have a Pebble Smartwatch, you may be able to see those weather results populate on the watch face, end quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.

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