Paper Trail Theory

Short, sourced films on AI, chips and the companies shaping them. Every dot checked where it was first reported. No verdict.

The latest trail

Open Models

Seven dots and one question, as they run in the film. Tap a source to read it yourself.

Jensen agreed to buy Hugging Face for 13 billion. That deal still hasn’t closed.

TechCrunch, Sep 3 TechCrunch, Nov 12
In July, his first post on X was an open-weights letter. OpenAI and Google signed. Anthropic didn’t.

Jensen Huang on X, Jul 24 State of AI, Jul 28
Nathan Lambert gave open models six months to live.

Interconnects, Jul 12
Two days after Trump lost Congress, Axios says he approved the crackdown a third time.

Axios, Nov 11
Lutnick’s answer: “I need to check with the president.”

Axios reporting, via Implicator
Three days later, the Jensen story broke. Some say it was leaked so Trump couldn’t bail him out.

CBS News timeline, Nov 8Theory, from the comments
Now, Commerce is finalizing a rule to block Chinese labs from renting Nvidia’s best chips overseas, while Sam Altman calls it “quite terrible” that RAM sits in PCs instead of data centers.

The Information, Nov 11 Tom’s Hardware, Oct 30
So is this about China? Or are they terrified of open weights?