Drone wars The war in Ukraine has been a 'Cambrian Explosion' for militarised drones, and this week Ukraine proved the point, destroying (it appears) a significant portion of Russia's entire strategic bomber force. They hid squadrons of quad-copters in the roofs of trucks, parked the trucks near airfields a thousand or more miles from Ukraine, and then at the right moment panels in the roofs slid open by remote control and the drones swarmed off to bomb the bombers, remote-piloted over Russian cellular networks. Stuff like this inverts a lot of asymmetry calculations. Drones with the range to do this by themselves are easy to spot, and not exactly consumer purchases: loading quad-copters into a truck looks very different. If you were head of security at Whiteman Air Force base in Missouri, where America's fleet of 19 B2 bombers (price: $2bn each) are parked outdoors, your threat model now looks very different. And remember that in 1941 very few people believed that aircraft could sink capital ships. LINK, BACKGROUND This, of course, is part of the story behind the emergence of a new defence-tech startup field, and this week Meta partnered with Palmer Luckey (who it fired, mostly by mistake) to link his weapons company Anduril with the VR they bought from him. LINK China's EV market follows the pattern BYD cut EV prices by up to a third, with its cheapest model now at under $8k. Some analysts say only three of China's dozens of EV makers are profitable. This is a familiar pattern, which we also saw in smartphones: a firehose of cash is pointed at a sector, dozens or hundreds of players have a go, and then there is a brutal winnowing, with a handful of world-class players emerging from the heap and going on to take over the world. Samsung is now the only non-Chinese Android player of any significance (and Apple's share is slipping in China as it lags on cool new AI features that Chinese tech companies are spraying everywhere). LINK, MARGINS The export restriction swirl The FT reports that Trump has ordered US chip design software vendors to stop supplying Chinese chip-makers, as part of the broader project to slow down Chinese access to cutting-edge tech. Debate about this in Silicon Valley is increasing: Nvidia and others argue that these measures may weaken China in the short term but in the longer term are a forcing function to drive more Chinese AI development within China that will then take share from US companies globally. This is obviously a self-serving view, but that doesn't make it wrong. On the other hand, if you're concerned that China will start a war within the foreseeable future (sadly not an irrational thesis), then why is 'forcing China to catch up by limiting access to tech' worse than 'letting China catch up by selling them all our best stuff to copy?' Either way, of course, you probably shouldn't be crippling US science education and R&D. (Meanwhile, there's a whole other semis-analyst debate about how effective any of these restrictions will be anyway.) LINK The week in AI Finding a Linux vulnerability with ChatGPT. LINK Deepseek is back with another model that gets great benchmark scores. As I wrote six months ago, I think Deepseek is best understood as a demonstration that these models are commodities (and note that something can be hard and expensive to build and still a commodity). LINK Elon Musk's xAI did a distribution deal with Telegram (the largest consumer messaging app that isn't affiliated with a big tech company). When the models are commodities, distribution is everything. LINK Remember the oil-money-for-datacentre deals that OpenAI did in the Gulf a few weeks ago? The WSJ says that Elon Musk told Abu Dhabi officials that he would get Trump to block the deal if they didn't also do a deal with his xAI. LINK Apparently, Anthropic has reached $3bn in run-rate revenue (OpenAI is apparently on track for $12-13bn this year). LINK | 
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