Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, is laying off its Washington, D.C.-based policy team and shuttering its office there, just as some tech-related companies try to increase their visibility in the U.S. capital after President Trump’s re-election.

The changes will take effect at the end of March and impact three full-time employees as well as policy fellows who worked with the firm. Sequoia confirmed the layoff while two sources familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because the topic is sensitive, said that the firm would close its Washington office. 

Sequoia says it had set up its small policy team five years ago—during the first Trump Administration—to advise its investment team and portfolio companies on regulatory issues, deepen its knowledge of the policy landscape, and strengthen its connections with global policymakers, experts, and think tanks. Don Vieira, who had held senior national security positions at the Department of Justice and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, opened the office, according to his LinkedIn. Vieria will leave the firm as part of the changes. He did not respond to requests for comment.

“Thanks to [the policy group’s] strategic guidance and efforts, Sequoia is now well-positioned to carry these relationships in the U.S. and Europe forward,” a Sequoia spokesperson said. “To that end, we are sunsetting the dedicated policy function and closing our D.C. office at the end of March. We are grateful to the team for their contributions and impact.”

The changes at Sequoia are in contrast to tech companies that have been increasing their visibility in Washington, D.C. since President Trump’s re-election. Meta in January hired Joel Kaplan, former deputy chief of staff to former President George W. Bush, to head its global policy team and CEO Mark Zuckerburg has visited Trump at the White House and Mar-a-Lago.

Some other venture capital firms have been beefing up their presence in Washington, D.C. to help portfolio companies that operate in highly regulated or political industries like defense, crypto, or AI. Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, for example, which has had several of its partners take official or advisory positions in the White House, recently hired Patrick McHenry, the former North Carolina congressman, and Matt Cronin, former Chief Investigative Counsel and Deputy General Counsel for the U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition, as senior advisors to the firm. Last fall, before the election, General Catalyst launched what it calls the “General Catalyst Institute” to influence AI, healthcare, defense and intelligence, manufacturing, and energy policy.

Sequoia Capital has historically remained politically neutral as a firm, even though many of its partners individually express political views or make large donations to presidential candidates. Top partner Roelof Botha said last summer that he is not registered with either political party, but that he is “more focused on the policies that will drive entrepreneurship, job creation, and making sure that the United States stays ahead.” 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• Jensen Huang reaffirmed Nvidia’s starring role in the AI industry during a keynote address at Nvidia’s annual GTC conference on Tuesday. Through its new open-source software, Huang showed how Nvidia can ramp up DeepSeek R1’s efficiency 30-fold. Yet, while he spoke, Nvidia’s stock price dropped more than 3%—after the company announced its GPU timelines.

Clad in his signature black leather, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took center stage at Nvidia GTC on Tuesday, defending the chip maker’s dominance in the industry and touting the impact it could have on DeepSeek. 

The event drew more than 25,000 people to the SAP Center’s National Hockey League arena, and Huang opened the keynote by launching t-shirts into the crowd and coronating this year’s GTC the “Super Bowl of AI.”

“The only difference is everybody wins at this Super Bowl, everybody’s a winner,” he joked. And like the Super Bowl, there were GTC watch parties and packed crowds to get a glimpse of Huang on stage. 

With his address, Huang sought to dispel any uneasiness around AI investment, and said discussion about lower spending does not concern Nvidia. In January, apprehension engulfed the chip maker after it lost $589 billion in market cap in a single day after Chinese AI reasoning model Deepseek R1 claimed to operate at a fraction of the cost. 

While large language models offer foundational knowledge, reasoning models offer more complex, analytical responses. Using the company’s new open source software Nvidia Dynamo, Huang said the tech giant’s Blackwell chips will be able to make DeepSeek R1 30 times faster. He then played a video demonstrating for the crowd how it could be done.

“Dynamo can capture that benefit and deliver 30 times more performance in the same number of GPUs in the same architecture for reasoning models like DeepSeek,” said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager of Nvidia’s hyperscale and HPC computing business.

From there, Huang’s keynote covered everything from the chip maker’s plans to roll out its newest chips— Blackwell Ultra later this year, Vera Rubin in 2026, and Feynman in 2027.

“We have an annual rhythm of roadmaps that has been laid out for you,” Huang said.

While Nvidia’s announced its strategic runway for years to come, that wasn’t enough to stop the stock’s slide. The chip maker’s share price tumbled 3.4% Tuesday.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition…The news media grapples with AI; Trump orders U.S. AI Safety efforts to refocus on combating ‘ideological bias’; distributed training is gaining increasing traction; increasingly powerful AI could tip the scales toward totalitarianism.

AI is potentially disruptive to many organizations’ business models. In few sectors, however, is the threat as seemingly existential as the news business. That happens to be the business I’m in, so I hope you will forgive a somewhat self-indulgent newsletter. But news ought to matter to all of us since a functioning free press performs an essential role in democracy—informing the public and helping to hold power to account. And, there are some similarities between how news executives are—and critically, are not—addressing the challenges and opportunities AI presents that business leaders in other sectors can learn from, too.

Last week, I spent a day at an Aspen Institute conference entitled “AI & News: Charting the Course,” that was hosted at Reuters’ headquarters in London. The conference was attended by top executives from a number of U.K. and European news organizations. It was held under Chatham House Rules so I can’t tell you who exactly said what, but I can relay what was said.

Tools for journalists and editors

News executives spoke about using AI primarily in internally-facing products to make their teams more efficient. AI is helping write search engine-optimized headlines and translate content—potentially letting organizations reach new audiences in places they haven’t traditionally served, though most emphasized keeping humans in the loop to monitor accuracy.

One editor described using AI to automatically produce short articles from press releases, freeing journalists for more original reporting, while maintaining human editors for quality control. Journalists are also using AI to summarize documents and analyze large datasets—like government document dumps and satellite imagery—enabling investigative journalism that would be difficult without these tools. These are good use cases, but they result in modest impact—mostly around making existing workflows more efficient.

Bottom-up or top-down?

There was active debate among the newsroom leaders and techies present about whether news organizations should take a bottom-up approach—putting generative AI tools in the hands of every journalist and editor, allowing these folks to run their own data analysis or “vibe code” AI-powered widgets to help them in their jobs, or whether efforts should be top-down, with the management prioritizing projects.

The bottom-up approach has merits—it democratizes access to AI, empowers frontline employees who often know the pain points and can often spot good use cases before high-level execs can, and frees limited AI developer talent to be spent only on projects that are bigger, more complex, and potentially more strategically important.

The downside of the bottom-up approach is that it can be chaotic, making it hard for the organization to ensure compliance with ethical and legal policies. It can create technical debt, with tools being built on the fly that can’t be easily maintained or updated. One editor worried about creating a two-tiered newsroom, with some editors embracing the new tech, and others falling behind. Bottom-up also doesn’t ensure that solutions generate the best return on investment—a key consideration as AI models can quickly get expensive. Many called for a balanced approach, though there was no consensus on how to achieve it. From conversations I’ve had with execs in other sectors, this dilemma is familiar across industries.

Caution about jeopardizing trust

News outfits are also being cautious about building audience-facing AI tools. Many have begun using AI to produce bullet-point summaries of articles that can help busy and increasingly impatient readers. Some have built AI chatbots that can answer questions about a particular, narrow subset of their coverage—like stories about the Olympics or climate change—but they have tended to label these as “experiments” in order to help flag to readers that the answers may not always be accurate. Few have gone further in terms of AI-generated content. They worry that gen AI-produced hallucinations will undercut trust in the accuracy of their journalism. Their brands and their businesses ultimately depend on that trust.

Those who hesitate will be lost?

This caution, while understandable, is itself a colossal risk. If news organizations themselves aren’t using AI to summarize the news and make it more interactive, technology companies are. People are increasingly turning to AI search engines and chatbots, including Perplexity, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Google’s Gemini and the “AI Overviews” Google now provides in response to many searches, and many others. Several news executives at the conference said “disintermediation”—the loss of a direct connection with their audience—was their biggest fear. 

They have cause to be worried. Many news organizations (including Fortune) are at least partly dependent on Google search to bring in audiences. A recent study by Tollbit—which sells software that helps protect websites from web crawlers—found that clickthrough rates for Google AI Overviews were 91% lower than from a traditional Google Search. (Google has not yet used AI overviews for news queries, although many think it is only a matter of time.) Other studies of click through rates from chatbot conversations are equally abysmal. Cloudflare, which is also offering to help protect news publishers from web scraping, found that OpenAI scraped a news site 250 times for every one referral page view it sent that site.

So far, news organizations have responded to this potentially existential threat through a mix of legal pushback—the New York Times has sued OpenAI for copyright violations, while Dow Jones and the New York Post have sued Perplexity—and partnerships. Those partnerships have involved multiyear, seven-figure licensing deals for news content. (Fortune has a partnership with both Perplexity and ProRata.) Many of the execs at the conference said the licensing deals were a way to make revenue from content the tech companies had most likely already “stolen” anyway. They also saw the partnerships as a way to build relationships with the tech companies and tap their expertise to help them build AI products or train their staffs. None saw the relationships as particularly stable. They were all aware of the risk of becoming overly reliant on AI licensing revenue, having been burned previously when the media industry let Facebook become a major driver of traffic and ad revenue. Later, that money vanished practically overnight when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided, after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, to de-emphasize news in people’s feeds.

An AI-powered Ferrari yoked to a horse cart

Executives acknowledged needing to build direct audience relationships that can’t be disintermediated by AI companies, but few had clear strategies for doing so. One expert at the conference said bluntly that “the news industry is not taking AI seriously,” focusing on “incremental adaptation rather than structural transformation.” He likened current approaches to a three-step process that had “an AI-powered Ferrari” at both ends, but “a horse and cart in the middle.”

He and another media industry advisor urged news organizations to get away from organizing their approach to news around “articles,” and instead think about ways in which source material (public data, interview transcripts, documents obtained from sources, raw video footage, audio recordings, and archival news stories) could be turned into a variety of outputs—podcasts, short form video, bullet-point summaries, or yes, a traditional news article—to suit audience tastes on the fly by generative AI technology. They also urged news organizations to stop thinking of the production of news as a linear process, and begin thinking about it more as a circular loop, perhaps one in which there was no human in the middle.

One person at the conference said that news organizations needed to become less insular and look more closely at insights and lessons from other industries and how they were adapting to AI. Others said that it might require startups—perhaps incubated by the news organizations themselves—to pioneer new business models for the AI age.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. While AI poses existential challenges to traditional journalism, it also offers unprecedented opportunities to expand reach and potentially reconnect with audiences who have “turned off news”—if leaders are bold enough to reimagine what news can be in the AI era.

With that, here’s more AI news. 

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

Correction: Last week’s Tuesday edition of Eye on AI misidentified the country where Trustpilot is headquartered. It is Denmark. Also, a news item in that edition misidentified the name of the Chinese startup behind the viral AI model Manus. The name of the startup is Butterfly Effect.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com