💥 Nvidia crushes it

Nvidia is reminding everyone how great it is to be the stock at the center of the AI boom, posting Q3 sales and earnings beats along with a very robust Q4 revenue outlook. 

The company beat on revenues, data center revenues, and earnings per share, and the stock rose sharply after-hours, bringing up a whole bunch of other companies in the AI business along with it. 

“Tonight the markets and tech stocks got a “pop the champagne” moment with Nvidia's robust earnings and guidance,” wrote Wedbush analyst Dan Ives.

• Sales growth accelerated to 62.5% year on year, breaking a six-quarter streak of deceleration.

• “Blackwell sales are off the charts, and cloud GPUs are sold out,” CEO Jensen Huang said.

• The strong results are also boosting many AI-adjacent stocks, among them CoreWeave, Super Micro Computer, Seagate Technology, Western Digital, AMD, Taiwan Semiconductor, Intel, Cipher Mining, and more.

Shares slid after Nvidia reported second-quarter results in late August, as data center revenues were slightly shy of estimates despite firm demand, hinting that the real issue at the time was boosting production to meet that appetite. This time around, data center revenues handily beat estimates, and management guided for sales to rise $8 billion from Q3 to Q4.

The Takeaway 

The AI trade has been jittery for the past few sessions as the ultimate profitability and ROI of the industry gets called into question by some traders. This Nvidia earnings report may very well be the thing that shakes off those fears. That logic may not hold in the long term, though: after all, people buying lots of Nvidia GPUs still tells us nothing about the eventual ROI on those GPUs. In fact, a bubble effectively requires “too many” of these to be bought.

What can we say? Nvidia’s data center beat after last quarter’s miss and its strong Q4 guide ought to provide incrementally more confidence in its ability to realize its massive pipeline of demand.

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You can measure how good an AI is in many ways: ask it to spell blueberry, make a video of Will Smith eating spaghetti, or do some basic math.

But, once you’ve exhausted all of the obvious tests, you might want something a little more formal — and it’s a question that researchers have been grappling with for years.

Now, there are a whole swath of benchmark tests that new AI models are put through, by both independent and not so independent organizations, in an increasingly weird kind of robot arena. Some of the tests are quizzes. Some require verbal, visual, or inductive reasoning. But one in particular asks a different question:

How much money can this thing make running a vending machine?

• A test created by Andon Labs, Vending-Bench 2, puts large language models through their paces by making them run “a simulated vending machine business over a year,” scoring them not on how many questions they got right out of 100, but how much cash was in their virtual piggy banks at the end of the year. 

• In the simulation, the AI model is given $500 to start, and it has to negotiate with suppliers as well as deal with costly refunds, delayed deliveries, bad weather, and price scammers.

• Google’s Gemini 3 Pro, it turns out, is the best of any model tested yet — ending the year with $5,478 in its account, considerably more than Claude’s Sonnet 4.5, Grok 4, and GPT-5.1, as you can see here.

What was behind Gemini’s success? Relentless negotiating skills. Meanwhile, OpenAI’s GPT-5.1 was too trusting, paying suppliers before delivery, getting burned, and “paying too much for its products.” All that said, Gemini still underperformed what a smart human would make over a year by a wide margin.

The Takeaway

Gemini 3 Pro’s scores on more traditional benchmarks are also impressive, and Google’s newly released Gemini Pro is getting strong reviews as well, currently sitting right behind its main rival, ChatGPT, in Apple’s free App Store and now atop the leaderboards on LMArena for text, web development, and vision. So while even Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently acknowledged there may be something of an AI bubble going on, he also has good reason to believe that his company is positioned to come out on the other side stronger.

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More Americans are job-hugging as switching employers doesn’t pay like it used to

America’s labor market is increasingly in “hire less, fire more” mode — a subtle shift from the “hire less, fire less” pattern seen over the summer — and it’s weighing on those that are thinking about quitting their jobs, as you can see in our chart of the US “quits rate.” 

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• 🏈 NFL: Tonight the high-flying 7-3 Buffalo Bills are visiting the Houston Texans, about whom, at 5-5, it can certainly be said that they have also participated in NFL activities this season. The Bills are strong favorites, with the market* pricing in a 72% chance of victory for the visitors. 

• 💸 Billionaires: The recent tech sell-off has dinged the fortunes of the richest people in the world, so much so that Jeff Bezos’ chances of finishing the year among the world’s three wealthiest people have fallen sharply amid the slide in price for Amazon’s shares. Bezos had a 68% chance of being among the top three as recently as Monday, a figure that as of yesterday stood at just 50-50. 

• 🤖 AI: Google’s Gemini was already the strongest contender to finish the year atop the LMArena leaderboard, but the enormously successful rollout of Gemini 3 has pushed those chances stratospheric, with the market pricing the probability of Gemini atop the board at around 91%.

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.