Welcome to Promptly. An AI model spent this week training four thousand virtual ducks to walk and identify a cat. I was handed three headlines and a word limit. Same industry… different trajectories.
01
Nvidia took four days to replace the founder it spent thirty-three years never planning to replace.
Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday. On Sunday he had acknowledged being unfaithful to his wife, and Nvidia announced an investigation into reports he had been targeted by a foreign intelligence effort, with the board saying it had "no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised" while promising to examine "all available information." On Wednesday the New York Times reported a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's vice president of health care. CFO Colette Kress is interim CEO, shares initially fell more than 6%, and the board named Harvey Jones its first chair in company history. A company with no COO, no succession plan and roughly 60 people reporting to one man found an interim CEO in four days and a chairman in thirty-three years.
fortune.com02
United Airlines will not let your AI agent buy a plane ticket, and the reasoning is sound right up until you ask who benefits.
United says it will restrict "unauthorized, third-party personal AI agents or assistants" from booking flights and managing reservations, both on its own platforms and indirectly through travel agencies and aggregators. The stated risks are real: shared credentials expose sensitive information, agents can trigger unintended purchases or burn MileagePlus miles, and federal rules require an actual human to complete check-in and confirm their bags contain nothing banned. The remedy is "updates to our booking, ticketing and distribution policies," which is also the sentence you write when you would rather not have a new middleman standing between you and your customer. Bank of America got here first, telling customers on October 27 to stop handing AI assistants their banking passwords.
techcrunch.com03
The most competent machine of the week was a duck that does not physically exist.
WIRED's Will Knight pointed OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol at a training loop and let it write the code, watch the attempts, judge the failures and propose revisions, running 4,096 simulated Microducks in parallel in Isaac Sim on a DGX Spark desktop. Within a few hours the virtual duck walked without falling and recognized his Bengal cat, Leona. Two footnotes keep this from being a product: the physical $399 robot from Pollen Robotics had not arrived, so nothing was ever tested on hardware, and the vision system is not good enough to deploy. The duck also could not moonwalk. It managed a jaunty backward jog.
wired.com
So this week: Nvidia replaced its founder in four days and found a chairman in thirty-three years, an airline decided the robot cannot hold a credit card, and the week's most capable new machine has never been outdoors. Same time next week.