What I Read This Week...

Anduril's new autonomous fighter, Ozempic's payments to doctors, and China's semiconductor ambitions...

Listen to my X Spaces

Watch All-In E155

Caught my eye…

• Defense-tech startup Anduril has unveiled a new mini fighter jet called “Roadrunner”, which can autonomously take off, land, and blow up enemy drones. Roadrunner is one of the first recoverable weapons to ever be fielded, and offers significant range, speed, cost, and payload advantages over legacy missile systems.

• Novo Nordisk, the drugmaker behind Ozempic, paid U.S. medical professionals at least $25.8mm over the past decade to promote its two obesity drugs, including $1.4mm for one doctor alone. Novo believes that its new class of weight-loss drugs can shake up the global obesity epidemic, which plagues >700mm people across the globe.

• Huawei, China’s leading chip designer, has secretly been lending engineering and financial support to smaller companies in strategic areas of the semiconductor supply chain to build a self-sufficient chip network without triggering U.S. restrictions. The Chinese government aims to make Huawei the epicenter of a self-sufficient domestic chip industry, which is currently dependent on the U.S. and its allies at critical steps in the supply chain.

Other reading…

• U.N. Chief Says ‘Earth’s Vital Signs Are Failing’ as Leaders Meet at COP28 (Washington Post)

• The Day Charlie Munger Was Introduced To The World (Forbes)

• The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI (New Yorker)

• How the Gaza Ceasefire Collapsed (Axios)

• The Many Legends of Henry Kissinger (FT)

• Google Can’t Catch All the AI Images. Can You? (Bloomberg)

• Intro to Large Language Models (Andrej Karpathy, YouTube)

On X…