The Download: a chip talent battle, and deflating AI hype

This is today’s edition of The Download , our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

Lee, an engineer at Samsung’s semiconductor division, used to work late. But lately, he’s been clocking out on time and heading straight home to work on his job application for the chipmaker’s South Korean rival SK Hynix.

His colleagues are doing the same. They feel demoralized by the $476,000 bonus that SK Hynix is set to pay its employees, flush with record profits from making the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips that power Nvidia’s AI accelerators. The figure dwarfs what chip workers at Samsung are set to receive and is sparking an exodus.

Read our story about why this fierce talent war could help determine who dominates the next generation of AI chips.

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of what’s shaping the industry right now.

The latest edition includes Meta’s creepy glasses, doom-mongering about AI and jobs, and (to some, oddly sexy?) robotic hands. See where it all landed on this month’s index .

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 OpenAI’s rogue agent compromised another customer An unnamed client of a company that provides AI infrastructure, called Modal Labs. ( Reuters $) + OpenAI called the Hugging Face attack unprecedented. But we’ve been here before. ( MIT Technology Review )

2 Hugging Face has a nonconsensual deepfakes problem Researchers tested nine of the top image editing models it hosts, and found seven will ‘nudify’ images of women. ( Wired $) + The shock of seeing your body used in deepfake porn. ( MIT Technology Review ) 3 Investors are only getting more anxious about AI’s earnings potential The numbers don’t add up, and maybe they never will. ( The Verge $) + A global tech stock sell-off intensified yesterday. ( FT $) + Ratings agency Fitch says an AI market correction is now one of the biggest risks facing the global economy. ( The Next Web ) + New real-world data from Google shows most tasks at most jobs are unaffected by AI. ( Ars Technica )

4 Moonshot wants advanced Nvidia chips to train its next model The Chinese AI firm already got access to some of them to train its latest release, called Kimi 3. ( The Information $) + Taiwan detained an Nvidia employee as part of a probe into the alleged smuggling of AI chips into China. ( Bloomberg $) + The Trump Administration has banned Chinese humanoid robots. ( Reuters $) 5 Minnesota has been blocked from banning prediction market platforms It’s the latest skirmish in a fight between states and the Trump Administration over this issue. ( AP ) + Here’s how prediction markets incentivize weather data sabotage. ( MIT Technology Review )