Nvidia Has a Plan to Stop Rogue AI

Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zayd Admani and today is Monday, September 28th. In today's episode, we'll tell you about NVIDIA's plan to stop AI agents from going rogue and why they just announced the biggest stock buyback in history. We'll also tell you about the new AI division that Meta just launched and who they poached to run it. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out what SpaceX's massive Starship rocket just did for the first time ever. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks are coming off a winning week despite all the chaos. Last week, the S&P 500 gained 1.2% while the NASDAQ added more than 2%. So stocks keep moving higher despite elevated oil prices and the bond market getting smoked. The 10-year treasury yield finished Friday at 5.18%, which is its highest close since 2007, while the 30-year finished around 5.5%. Now, what's interesting is that historically, surging yields haven't always been bad for stocks. It really depends on why yields are going up. If you look back to 1994, a surprise Fed hiking cycle sent yields flying and the S&P 500 fell as much as 8%. And then in 2022, the Fed started aggressively hiking and the S&P fell nearly 20%. But if you look at 2016, both stocks and yields went up together because the economy was finally getting healthier. Now, in 2016, yields didn't go all the way up to 5%, so we'll have to see how the market responds this time. So far, strong economic growth and corporate profits have been enough to offset the pains from higher rates. In fact, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ closed within 1% of record highs last week. The wild card here is going to be oil prices. There was some optimism last week about a potential deal with Iran that would have opened up the Strait of Hormuz, but over the weekend, President Trump rejected Iran's latest proposal, so oil prices are ripping this morning. Brent crude is up around 4% to around $108 a barrel at the time of this recording. And as I record this in the pre-market, stock futures of the NASDAQ and S&P are also in the red. Now, as you guys know, higher oil prices makes everything more expensive, which keeps the pressure on inflation, which strengthens the case for more rate hikes by the Fed. In fact, traders are already pricing in a 70% chance of a rate hike at the October Fed meeting. Now, looking ahead to this week, we are getting some data that could impact the Fed's decision. The PCE inflation report comes out on Wednesday. The PCE inflation report is the Fed's preferred inflation gauge. They like it more than the CPI. So this report matters, although this report covers the month of August, so it's a little bit dated at this point. But on Friday, we get the September jobs report, which will tell us how the labor market is holding up. If the labor market continues to be strong like it has, I think the Fed will keep hiking rates. So we'll continue to stay on top of that along with everything else happening in the market. So definitely get subscribed to the podcast if you haven't already, especially with everything going on right now, and tune in every day to stay in the loop. Let's run through some headlines. And we're talking NVIDIA because they just made two pretty big announcements this morning. NVIDIA just launched something called the Open Agent Safety Platform, which is designed to stop autonomous AI agents from going rogue. AI safety has become a major talking point these days, especially after Anthropic CEO, Dario Amadei, and other AI CEOs like Sam Altman and Elon Musk call for a industry-wide slowdown in AI development. Not to mention there's been a few AI researchers that have even said that there's a 10% chance that humans would get wiped out by AI. A lot of these researchers and executives point to the Hugging Face incident earlier this year. A few months ago, OpenAI's agents escaped containment and got on the open internet and hacked the AI company Hugging Face. That freaked out a lot of people that AI agents could go rogue. Well, now NVIDIA has come out and said that their new system would have stopped that from happening. Basically, NVIDIA's new system is a software that sets rules for what AI agents are allowed to access. And if an AI agent starts acting suspiciously, it can quarantine it within milliseconds. Jensen compared the whole thing to a browser for AI agents. Now, speaking of Jensen, he's pushed back hard on this whole AI doomerism narrative. Obviously, NVIDIA has a very strong financial incentive to keep AI development going. Slowing down AI is probably not great for a company selling everybody AI chips. So yeah, NVIDIA is leading the path when it comes to AI safety. By the way, if you wanna hear more about the AI safety debate, go check out my interview with tech journalist, Kevin Ruse. We posted that interview yesterday. Kevin provides a perspective that is much different than mine. So definitely check that out if you wanna learn more. Now, the other big NVIDIA related news this morning was their buyback announcement. NVIDIA is adding a record $150 billion to their stock buyback, bringing the total to $235 billion. That is the largest buyback authorization in US history, beating the $110 billion that Apple announced back in 2024. Now, just because NVIDIA announced this buyback doesn't mean that NVIDIA is buying back these shares today. The board is just giving the company permission to buy that much stock over time. And a quick refresher here, a buyback basically means that NVIDIA will use their cash to purchase their own shares, which reduces the number of shares outstanding, making each existing share a larger ownership of the company. Essentially, a buyback is a way for the company to return money to shareholders. And NVIDIA definitely has the cash to do it. They reported nearly $60 billion in net income in each of the last two quarters, and management expects revenues to keep growing by at least 70% next fiscal year. NVIDIA's stock is up about 2% this morning at the time of this recording, and within 2% of record highs. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Shares of MongoDB are tanking this morning following news that their CEO just got poached by Meta. CJ Desai, who has been CEO of MongoDB for less than a year, is stepping down effective immediately, and will now run the brand new enterprise AI division for Meta, and report directly to Mark Zuckerberg. Meta says they created this new division to focus on building and selling AI tools to companies and enterprises, things like Muse, AI agents, and coding tools. This news really caught MongoDB investors off guard because shares are down about 25% at the time of this recording, and it leaves the company scrambling for a new CEO. For now, the former CEO that Desai replaced will return an interim role. So yeah, Desai really blindsided MongoDB here. I mean, he must have gotten a massive bag from Meta. By the way, other software stocks are also taking a hit this morning. Salesforce and ServiceNow are both down 3%, so I think the market might be worried that Meta could come for the enterprise software business. Sticking with the losers this morning, shares of Roblox are down after Jeffries downgraded the stock from a hold to underperform. The Roblox stock has quietly been on a tear. It was up more than 40% following earnings in late August, and Jeffries thinks investors got ahead of themselves here. The main issue here is that bookings were only up 8% last quarter, and Roblox forecast that this quarter bookings had dropped 14% to 18%. So Jeffries thinks the rally has gone too far. They've downgraded the stock, and that's sending Roblox shares lower by 7% this morning at the time of this recording. Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. SpaceX just sent their massive Starship rocket into orbit this morning for the first time ever. The rocket was launched out of Starbase, which is down here in South Texas, and about a half hour later, SpaceX confirmed the ship was in fact in orbit. This was the 14th test flight for Starship. The first 13 were intentionally kept below orbit while SpaceX worked through all the testing and safety issues. And even this 14th one wasn't perfectly smooth. One of the ship's engines shut off early on the way up, but the ship did make it up to orbit and finished the job anyways. So for a Monday, I'd call that a win. Also, something that I found interesting is that even though this is a test flight, it's still carrying SpaceX's new V3 Starlink satellites. Starship is the only SpaceX rocket big enough to actually carry these V3 satellites. So SpaceX's CFO actually called this test flight a revenue-generating flight. Big picture, the success of the Starship rocket is very important for the future of SpaceX. This bigger rocket allows them to carry much bigger payloads and to do things like sending data centers to space and maybe even astronauts one day. If you look at SpaceX's stock this morning, it's not really doing much. It's up less than 1%, but the stock is up more than 30% from its lows back in August. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. If you did and you have like five extra seconds, consider giving us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen to your podcasts. You know, all that engagement really does help us out and it helps other people find the show. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching, and commenting. Shout out to Mike and V for all the work behind the scenes. And we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.