The resignation and the context
Jensen Huang has resigned from Nvidia, the company he had co-founded: the announcement was made by the board of directors on Thursday, according to the New York Times. The newspaper links the decision to a series of scandals involving the executive, including an extramarital affair with a woman who, according to the U.S. government, is allegedly a Chinese spy. The material does not provide further details on the allegations or any possible legal ramifications.
The bond between Huang and the company had also been cultivated on a commercial and symbolic level: this year Nvidia sold $178 sweaters featuring a pixel-art version of the co-founder, evidence of how closely his image was associated with the brand.
The wave of AI-generated memes
After the resignation, the internet began reusing Huang's image for a series of parodies. According to the New York Times's account, in many cases these are content made by artificial intelligence enthusiasts who until shortly before had admired him. The parodies reference music videos, Bollywood films, American sitcoms and the kiss-cams at Coldplay concerts.
One example is Peter Dedene, a 43-year-old Belgian software engineer, who said he made his meme from bed, using an open-source generative AI tool to replace a couple filmed at a Coldplay concert with images of Huang and Alice Huang, the woman with whom the executive has admitted having an affair. The post, he said, had already surpassed one million views by Sunday morning and nearly seven million by Thursday afternoon. “I didn't give it much thought,” Dedene said of his work.
Another piece of content, made by Thomas Unise, a 40-year-old AI consultant in Minneapolis, inserts Huang into the music video for Usher's “Confessions, Pt. II” in place of the singer. Unise said it took him five minutes to find four images of Huang on Google and insert them into an AI tool. The New York Times also cites a video that places Huang in a scene from “The Matrix,” with Donald Trump's avatar in the role of Morpheus and a cameo by Elon Musk, and an edit inspired by the documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, with Alice Huang's image in place of the Theranos founder.
The technological paradox and the limits of coverage
The story highlights a paradox emphasized by the meme creators themselves: the tools that made this creative production possible are accessible precisely thanks to chips produced by Nvidia. “It’s quite funny that, in the end, the technology that helped create this is now enabling this kind of joke,” Dedene observed. Unise, by contrast, linked the phenomenon to the speed of model development, comparing current results with those from a year and a half ago, when a generated video looked like a series of blotches on the screen.
Many videos carry labels identifying them as artificially generated, but according to Dedene, it remains surprising how many people wondered whether they were real. It should be noted that the available material does not clarify the exact nature of the accusations, does not indicate whether Huang commented publicly on the memes, nor does it specify Alice Huang’s role beyond the admitted relationship, and does not document any corporate consequences beyond the announcement of the resignation. These elements remain to be verified.
