November 8–9 put NVIDIA at the center of AI news: its board opened an independent investigation into reports that Jensen Huang was targeted by a foreign intelligence effort, and on the same day announced a sovereign AI partnership with South Korea. ByteDance's Seedream 5.5 and Baidu's ERNIE Evolve also debuted, while Anthropic was reported to be buying $3.4 billion in generators.
Seedream 5.5: 100 rounds of edits without drift, transparent assets without cutouts
ByteDance's Seed team released image model Seedream 5.5 on November 8: untouched areas stay pixel-identical, so one work can be edited for 100 straight rounds; new native RGBA transparency removes cutout work; severe text-garbling fell to 0.4%. It is live on Jimeng, Doubao and Volcano Ark.
Baidu's ERNIE Evolve: AI doing its own research, beating records on three metrics
Baidu unveiled automated research system ERNIE Evolve on November 9: given a codebase and evaluation criteria, the AI rewrites code and runs experiments itself, a step toward recursive self-improvement. It beat the best public results at the time on three metrics across NanoChat and NanoGPT Speedrun; applied to ERNIE-5.5-Flash inference, generation speed on Kunlun P800 chips reached 623.6% of baseline.
NVIDIA board opens investigation as Huang admits affair
NVIDIA's board announced an independent investigation on November 8, prompted by reports that Jensen Huang was targeted by a foreign intelligence effort and led by a committee of independent directors; the board said it has no reason to believe secrets were compromised. Huang wrote to staff the same day, admitting an affair and pledging full cooperation; three House committees have asked him to attend a closed-door briefing on November 18. The Decoder notes the affair is weakening his lobbying against tighter chip export controls.
NVIDIA teams up with South Korea: R200 chips join NVLink Fusion
NVIDIA announced an expanded partnership with South Korea at Seoul AI Day on November 9: Rebellions' R200 processors will connect to NVIDIA's platform via NVLink Fusion, in MGX rack systems SK Telecom plans to deploy in 2028; the work also covers inference optimization for Korean models such as A.X K2 and K-EXAONE 2.0.
Anthropic reportedly buys $3.4 billion in generators
The Financial Times reported on November 8 that Anthropic agreed in late September to spend about $3.4 billion taking over OnePWR's orders for 1.7 GW of Caterpillar gas generators, described as the largest single generator purchase by an AI lab; Anthropic and OnePWR declined to comment, and Reuters said it could not verify the report independently.
MIT's FLEX: robots that hear what a correction really means
MIT and New York University unveiled robot-learning system FLEX on November 9: corrected in everyday language, the robot does more than follow words literally — it infers the general rule, so "don't spill coffee on the laptop" also steers it clear of the phone beside it. Its add, generalize and mask steps scored highest on average across seven simulated navigation tasks; the paper will be presented at the Conference on Robot Learning.
