We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.
Do subscribe for our weekly updates through the orange box in the blog (it’s on the side if you’re using a computer, and all the way at the bottom if you’re using mobile) – it’s free!
But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.
Here are the articles for the week ending 16 March 2025:
1. Want even tinier chips? Use a particle accelerator – The Economist
A more radical solution is to use a free-electron laser (FEL), where electrons travelling near the speed of light are manipulated to emit EUV radiation. The FEL process begins with a powerful electron gun that injects a beam of the particles into a miniature racetrack. The electrons then pass through a linear accelerator, which propels them to nearly the speed of light. Once accelerated, they enter a roughly 200-metre-long structure called an undulator, where a series of magnets generate a field whose polarity flips periodically. This wiggles the electrons, causing them to emit a beam of EUV photons with a specific wavelength.
Nicholas Kelez, the boss of xLight, a Silicon Valley startup developing FEL-based lithography, described the technology as a more powerful and tuneable “new light bulb” that he believes can be swapped into existing optical lithography machines. xLight expects to deliver the first commercial system within four years…
…Generating light using a FEL has some advantages over using lasers. The first is power: a lithography machine based on a FEL-based light source can be around six times more energy-efficient than a laser-plasma tool. Dispensing with molten-tin droplets also reduces the risk of contamination. Tuning such a machine for smaller wavelengths is also, at least theoretically, much easier: all that needs doing is tweaking the settings on the electron gun and the undulator. It would also be cheaper. A single FEL system can be repurposed to provide light for multiple lithography machines, allowing its operator to distribute the fixed costs across multiple chip-etching tools. Nakamura Norio from KEK estimates that the construction cost is around half that of a laser-based EUV tool and the running costs are around a fifteenth.
2. Is Manus a technological breakthrough or a marketing bubble? – Yuan Gan and Robert Wu
So, is Manus an empty marketing frenzy or a technological breakthrough comparable to DeepSeek? To answer this question, I reviewed every official example provided by Manus, the GAIA benchmark paper with its 467 questions, compared Manus’ performance with competitors on GAIA, and looked at the code of the “open-source versions of Manus.” Here are my findings:
- Is Manus an empty marketing frenzy or a technological breakthrough comparable to DeepSeek? Neither. Manus is not a marketing gimmick nor a fundamental technological revolution; it represents a breakthrough at the product level. Unlike DeepSeek, which focuses on a fundamental breakthrough in foundational model capabilities, Manus has made significant achievements in the direction of AI agents—reaching SOTA (State of the Art) levels on the authoritative evaluation metric GAIA, significantly ahead of peer products.
- Can the various open-source alternatives emerging these past few days replace Manus? No. The current open-source alternatives have a clear gap compared to Manus. Actual testing and data metrics show that Manus’ success rate in executing complex tasks far exceeds that of various open-source versions, by several times. Moreover, Manus has been specifically optimized for specific application scenarios, a fine-tuning that simple open-source replication cannot achieve.
- Is Manus a mature universal agent? No, Manus has not yet become a truly universal agent. To achieve this goal, it still needs to overcome three “major mountains”: a fundamental improvement in foundational model capabilities, a rich and diverse ecosystem of partners, and a solid and scalable engineering infrastructure…
…Whether it’s from the test experiences of netizens over the past few days or from the scores Manus has obtained on the GAIA benchmark, we can see that Manus and other universal AI agents are not yet mature.
So, how far away is a universal agent from being mature and commercially available?
I believe that to be mature and usable, it still needs to overcome three major challenges: foundational model capabilities, partner ecosystems, and engineering infrastructure.Currently, universal agents still rely on foundational large language models for task decomposition and execution, especially in the execution phase. In this phase, large language models face significant challenges in utilizing web information and computer operations…
…In the actual experience of OpenAI Operator, a significant issue is the restricted interaction between agents and external services. For example, when Operator accesses Reddit, GitHub, or other websites to complete tasks, it is often identified as abnormal traffic and blocked.
Currently, most agents access network services anonymously or with a generic identity, lacking a clear identity marker, leading to:
- Being identified and blocked by websites’ anti-crawling mechanisms, including search engines like Google.
- Inability to access services that require account login, such as obtaining information from Twitter and Facebook.
- Inability to access personalized content and services, such as letting the agent view one’s own email…
…Unlike traditional internet services, which can often abstract services into “calling a microservice” as an instantaneous stateless operation, agent services are almost all long-duration, multi-state conversational interactions. After the product capabilities reach maturity, how to efficiently provide agent services to millions, or even tens of millions, of users is a significant engineering challenge.
3. ‘Project Osprey:’ How Nvidia Seeded CoreWeave’s Rise – By Cory Weinberg and Anissa Gardizy
Then Nvidia made a curious move: It agreed to spend $1.3 billion over four years to rent its own chips from CoreWeave, an upstart cloud computing firm trying to take on the giants. The deal, which CoreWeave dubbed “Project Osprey,” made Nvidia its second-largest customer last year after Microsoft, documents show, a detail not disclosed in CoreWeave’s filing last week for an initial public offering.
The deal shows how crucial Nvidia’s support has been to CoreWeave. The chip giant invested $100 million in the startup in early 2023. It funneled hundreds of thousands of high-end graphics processing units to CoreWeave. And it agreed to rent back its chips from CoreWeave through August 2027. Revenue from the deal represented 15% of CoreWeave’s sales last year…
…Prospective investors have been grappling with how long they can count on CoreWeave to sustain such big customers. Contracts with Microsoft and Nvidia, which together made up more than three-quarters of the company’s sales last year, expire between 2027 and 2029.
CoreWeave, meanwhile, has fueled its expansion with $8 billion in debt and $15 billion of long-term leases for data centers and office buildings, making it essential to attract new customers to supplement its original deals…
…It’s unclear exactly why Nvidia wanted to rent its own chips, but the company had several reasons to be interested in CoreWeave. Nvidia rents servers from cloud providers—including from CoreWeave—for its internal research and development teams.
Nvidia also rents servers from cloud providers for its DGX cloud computing service, which re-rents the servers to Nvidia cloud computing customers. CoreWeave has told investors it supports DGX…
…CoreWeave, in turn, purchased $380 million in chips and other hardware from Nvidia in 2023, documents shared with investors last year show. That spending total likely grew significantly last year. The company wrote in the prospectus that it purchases all of its chips from Nvidia, without specifying the total…
…The money Nvidia paid CoreWeave last year—in excess of $25 million a month, according to sales projections—was far more than what some of the other customers CoreWeave displayed in its IPO prospectus were spending. For example, CoreWeave cited model fine-tuning startup Replicate and quant trading firm Jane Street, which expected to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month with CoreWeave last year, internal materials show.
4. Twitter thread on Diamond Online’s interview of Tatsuro Kiyohara – Japan Stock Feed
Interviewer: The Japanese stock market has been experiencing sharp declines. What’s your outlook for the next year?
Kiyohara: First and foremost, let me be clear—I don’t claim to have an accurate read on the market. The only time my predictions have been right is when investors lose their composure and panic. Over the past five years, I’ve only “gotten it right” twice—once during the COVID-19 crash in March 2020 and again on August 5, 2024. Those were the only times I felt truly confident and decided to aggressively buy Japanese stocks. Given how often I’ve been wrong, asking me for a market outlook is, quite frankly, insane…
…Interviewer: I see… but despite that, many individual investors would still love to hear your insights. After all, you’re the legendary salaryman investor who built an ¥80 billion fortune. Could you at least offer some guidance?
Kiyohara: If I told you, “The Nikkei will hit 42,000 by year-end,” what meaning would that have? That kind of prediction is pointless. But since that’s not a very helpful answer, let’s take a different approach. If I were still actively managing money today, what kind of portfolio would I hold? Let’s imagine what my positioning would look like…
…Kiyohara: If I were managing ¥10 billion ($66 million) today, my portfolio would be structured as follows:
▶️80% Long (¥8 billion in buy positions)
– ¥5 billion in small-cap stocks
– ¥2 billion in large-cap or mid-cap stocks
– ¥1 billion in REITs (Real Estate Investment Trusts)
▶️20% Short (¥2 billion in sell positions)
– Short positions in four highly liquid large-cap stocks
– (At the time of this interview, the market is already declining, so these aren’t necessarily the best picks, but as an example, I’d consider names like Advantest, Fujikura, Sanrio, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries.)…
….Kiyohara: If you buy during a crash and think, “What if the market drops even further?”—you’re doing it wrong. “But that’s easier said than done,” you might say. Fair enough. So here’s how I train my mindset during downturns: “If I don’t buy today, then when?”…
…Interviewer: For more advanced investors, is an 80% long / 20% short portfolio a bullish position?
Kiyohara: Not necessarily.
– My core holdings are in net-cash-rich small-cap stocks, which means they are largely immune to overall market movements
– Higher interest rates are actually a positive for these companies, since they have strong balance sheets.
– In my view, this portfolio is neutral, reflecting a stance of “There could be a market drop, but it’s not a certainty.”…
…Kiyohara: I’ve said before that I’m terrible at predicting markets, but if we zoom out, I’m bullish on Japan. For years, Japan’s stock market was trapped in a box. Foreigners would buy, the market would rise. They’d sell, and the market would drop. It was a simple cycle. It was like a lottery—you had to ‘buy a ticket’ (stocks) to have a chance, but ultimately, you were at the mercy of foreign investors’ flows…
…For the first time, Japanese companies truly belong to their shareholders. That’s a massive structural shift—a revolution. Yes, risks remain. But this governance transformation is so significant that it outweighs them. That’s why, even if a crash comes, I focus on making money from the rebound rather than betting on the decline. Put simply: If share buybacks and dividend hikes continue, stock prices will rise.
5. What it will really take to feed the world – Bill Gates
Many discussions about feeding the world focus on increasing agricultural productivity through improved seeds, healthier soils, better farming practices, and more productive livestock (all priorities for the Gates Foundation). Vaclav, however, insists we already produce more than enough food to feed the world. The real challenge, he says, is what happens after the food is grown…
…Some of the world’s biggest food producers have the highest rates of undernourishment. Globally, we produce around 3,000 calories per person per day—more than enough to feed everyone—but a staggering one-third of all food is wasted. (In some rich countries, that figure climbs to 45 percent.) Distribution systems fail, economic policies backfire, and food doesn’t always go where it’s needed.
I’ve seen this firsthand through the Gates Foundation’s work in sub-Saharan Africa, where food insecurity is driven by low agricultural productivity and weak infrastructure. Yields in the region remain far lower than in Asia or Latin America, in part because farmers rely on rain-fed agriculture rather than irrigation and have limited access to fertilizers, quality seeds, and digital farming tools. But even when food is grown, getting it to market is another challenge. Poor roads drive up transport costs, inadequate storage leads to food going bad, and weak trade networks make nutritious food unaffordable for many families…
…While severe hunger has declined globally, micronutrient deficiencies remain stubbornly common, even in wealthy countries. One of the most effective solutions has been around for nearly a century: food fortification. In the U.S., flour has been fortified with iron and vitamin B since the 1940s. This simple step has helped prevent conditions like anemia and neural tube defects and improve public health at scale—close to vaccines in terms of lives improved per dollar spent…
…CRISPR gene editing, for instance, could help develop crops that are more resilient to drought, disease, and pests—critical for farmers facing the pressures of climate change. Vaclav warns that we can’t count on technological miracles alone, and I agree. But I also believe that breakthroughs like CRISPR could be game-changing, just as the Green Revolution once was…
…And some of these solutions aren’t about producing more food at all—they’re about wasting less of what we already have. Better storage and packaging, smarter supply chains, and flexible pricing models could significantly reduce spoilage and excess inventory. In a conversation we had about the book, Vaclav pointed out that Costco (which might seem like the pinnacle of U.S. consumption) stocks fewer than 4,000 items, compared to 40,000-plus in a typical North American supermarket.
That kind of efficiency—focusing on fewer, high-turnover products—reduces waste, lowers costs, and ultimately eases pressure on global food supply, helping make food more affordable where it is needed most.
Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life. We currently have a vested interest in Costco and Microsoft. Holdings are subject to change at any time.