People familiar with the matter told The Information that SpaceX’s AI group laid off about 60 employees from the Grok Imagine video and image team in the past week, leaving a small crew to keep the product running as the company shifts toward coding tools and Grok Bot.
After Jensen Huang resigned on Nov. 12, NBC News reported that Nvidia’s independent directors plan to keep investigating him. House committees asked him to appear for a closed-door interview on Dec. 1, and the Senate Banking Committee asked him to testify on Dec. 3, with subpoena threats if he does not. The board told CNBC it has not yet selected a search firm or formally engaged candidates.
OpenAI has disbanded its stand-alone robotics team, Fortune reported and OpenAI confirmed. Researchers move under Chief Research Officer Mark Chen, and applied robotics and hardware staff move to Greg Brockman's Applied organization. OpenAI says general models like GPT-6 Astra can now handle some robot tasks directly, so it no longer needs a separate robot brain.
NVIDIA's board said on Nov. 12 that co-founder Jensen Huang has resigned as president, CEO and director, effective immediately. CFO Colette Kress will serve as interim CEO while remaining CFO, and Harvey C. Jones becomes the company's first board chair. The official statement gives no reason. IT Home reported the stock once fell about 14% during U.S. trading.
Alibaba told the Hong Kong stock exchange on Nov. 10 that it plans to spin off its wholly owned chip subsidiary T-Head for a standalone Main Board listing; T-Head filed confidentially on Sept. 11. Size, structure and Alibaba's remaining stake are undecided, and the deal still needs exchange approval and a filing with China's securities regulator.
On Nov. 12, Baidu's Robin Li unveiled Token Exchange at Baidu World 2026, a marketplace listing many AI models and providers, including rivals DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM. It uses entry tests, model fingerprinting and ongoing monitoring to catch swapped models and inflated specs, and gives providers credit ratings. Baidu says that a month in, it has over 100 supply sources and handles more than 700 billion tokens a day. The platform had quietly gone live earlier.
Chip research firm SemiAnalysis said on X on Nov. 11 that SpaceX is developing "Kessel," a custom version of Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack. It replaces internal NVLink copper cables with an 84-layer passive circuit board, and SpaceX would buy only chip packages from Nvidia, skipping Nvidia's L6 compute boards and sourcing the rest itself, for data centers on the ground and in orbit. Neither company has commented publicly.
South Korea's Financial News on Nov. 11 published what it said was the Q&A from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's Oct. 31 session with Samsung executives. Altman reportedly said the coming AI companion device will be "the next version of the smartphone," with AI rather than apps proactively managing people's lives, and that he'd like to work closely with Samsung on a joint device. Neither company has announced any partnership.
ByteDance plans to release an AI assistant similar to Meta's Muse in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported Nov. 11, citing people familiar with the matter. At an all-hands meeting of the AI team, co-founder Zhang Yiming reportedly said ByteDance can compete with Anthropic and OpenAI at the frontier, but not until at least 2029 or 2030, conceded that its Seed models are pretrained on datasets orders of magnitude smaller than U.S. rivals', and said the company should not lean on distillation. Bloomberg also reported a plan to spend up to $70 billion to make Seedance China's top video AI platform. ByteDance did not respond to a request for comment; none of this is an official company announcement.