Wall Street Lunch: OpenAI's JalapeñO Tops Nvidia's Blackwell In Some Inference Tests

Wall Street Breakfast 5.74M Followers Subscribe Summary OpenAI's in-house inference chip, Jalapeño, developed with Broadcom, outperformed Nvidia's Blackwell on perf/W in multiple scenarios per SemiAnalysis benchmarks. Dick's Sporting Goods stock plunged after Q2 earnings miss and a cautious full-year outlook, citing increased promotional activity in athletic footwear and apparel. Disney is offering voluntary early retirement to senior executives as part of broader cost-cutting and workforce reshaping initiatives. United Airlines (UAL) is adding 10 new nonstop flights to cities across the globe, building on its lead as the legacy carrier with the most international destinations. Getty Images Listen below or on the go on Apple Podcasts and Spotify OpenAI's Jalapeño chip outperforms Nvidia's Blackwell in key tests. (0:14) Dick's Sporting Goods plunges . (1:28) Druckenmiller blasts Treasury's buybacks — with an AI assist. (2:27). This is an abridged transcript of the podcast: Our top story so far, OpenAI's ( OPENAI ) in-house inference chip, Jalapeño, which it created through a partnership with Broadcom ( AVGO ), outperformed Nvidia's ( NVDA ) Blackwell in some scenarios, according to testing results from the company. "OpenAI models also accelerated Jalapeño's development," OpenAI said in a post. "Earlier generations helped the team design and bring up the chip, while our latest models are accelerating how we optimize and program it." The company tested the chips on InferenceX, a public benchmark from SemiAnalysis that measures the entire process of completing an AI request. "Jalapeño beats Blackwell on perf/W across almost all scenarios without being tuned for any specific point in the curve," according to SemiAnalysis. "It excels not only in low-latency scenarios but also in high-throughput scenarios. A more apples-to-apples comparison is against single token prediction results; it knocks every competitor out of the water." However, SemiAnalysis acknowledged that the comparison with Blackwell is "somewhat incomplete and unfair," as Jalapeño is really competing against Nvidia's latest accelerator, Rubin, which uses HBM4. Blackwell uses HBM3e. "Vera Rubin systems are starting to ship to customers right now, while it will still be some time before OpenAI has anything beyond engineering samples of Jalapeño," SemiAnalysis added. Among other stocks, Dick's Sporting Goods ( DKS ) is plunging after missing estimates with its Q2 earnings report and setting a cautious full-year outlook. Chairman Ed Stack said, "conditions across portions of the athletic footwear and apparel marketplace became increasingly promotional, and we took action to remain competitively priced to protect and grow our leadership position." "This environment had a more significant impact on the Foot Locker business given its greater exposure to legacy footwear silhouettes and greater dependence on footwear launch and retro product." Walt Disney ( DIS ) is offering voluntary early retirement packages to eligible senior executives as the entertainment company steps up efforts to lower costs and reshape its workforce. The time-limited program is open to employees at the director level and above. The offer covers qualifying U.S.-based executives in Disney Entertainment, ESPN and corporate functions. And AMD ( AMD ) is up after Raymond James boosted the stock to Strong Buy from Outperform , pointing to agentic AI as the "principal new growth engine for the CPU market." Looking to the markets, Stanley Druckenmiller, the billionaire investor who once mentored Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, has criticized the Treasury Department's plan to double the size of its long-dated bond buybacks. "Governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose," Druckenmiller wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. "The only variable is how much they spend before conceding." He pointed out that bond buybacks have been used as a routine tool for liquidity and cash management. But "routine operations aren't announced off-cycle, at double size, on the heels of the long bond's hitting a two-decade high, with a signal that they can grow without limit." "Every basis point of artificial yield suppression is a subsidy to procrastination," Druckenmiller said. "Suppressed long rates sugarcoat the interest-cost projections, shrink the apparent urgency, and let incumbents assure voters the debt is someone else's problem." Oh, and Druckenmiller confirmed to NOTUS that his op-ed was written by AI. “There’s a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major,” he said. “I’m not embarrassed by it … I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.” And in other news of note, United Airlines ( UAL ) is adding 10 new nonstop flights to cities across the globe, building on its lead as the legacy carrier with the most international destinations. Most of the flights will depart from United's hub at Newark Liberty, alo