This Week I Learned - Week #32 2025

This Week I Learned - 

* OpenAI's open weight models gpt-oss 20B and gpt-oss 120B support advanced reasoning and tool use. Open models are more easily customizable to build AI that can reason over your enterprise data and domains, providing a powerful option alongside proprietary models. gpt-oss can be used alone or alongside models like GPT-4o, Claude, or Llama. Built with a Mixture of Experts architecture gpt-oss delivers low-latency performance for use cases like search, chat, and real-time decisioning. It features a 131k context for long documents and RAG and it is provided under an Apache 2.0 license.

* A typical software-application startup that’s not involved in training foundation models might spend 70-80% of its dollars on salaries, 5-10% on rent, and 10-25% on other operating expenses (cloud hosting, software licenses, marketing, legal/accounting, etc.).  

Many of Meta’s properties rely on user-generated content (UGC) to attract attention, which is then monetized through advertising. 

The pattern of capital-intensive businesses compensating employees extraordinarily well is not new. For example, Netflix expects to spend a huge $18B this year on content. This makes the salary expense of paying its 14,000 employees a small fraction of the total expense, which allows the company to routinely pay above-market salaries. Its ability to spend this way also shapes a distinctive culture that includes elements of “we’re a sports team, not a family” (which seems to work for Netflix but isn’t right for everyone). In contrast, a labor-intensive manufacturing business like Foxconn, which employs over 1 million people globally, has to be much more price-sensitive in what it pays people. - The Batch, Andrew Ng

* BharatGen AI plans to support all 22 listed languages by June 2026.

* Penpot is the web-based open-source design tool that bridges the gap between designers and developers.

* Gradio can be used to demo your machine learning model with a friendly web interface.  This open-source Python library was created by Abubakar Abid during his PhD at Stanford in applied machine learning. Gradio was acquired by Hugging Face

* Hugging Face Spaces are one of the most popular ways to share ML applications and demos with the world. It provides a 2 vCPU, 16 GB machine for free but higher configurations have an hourly price. Hugging Face Spaces (especially free CPU/ZeroGPU) block outbound access to some domains like www.youtube.com for security reasons.

* As the Taliban restricts education, Afghan women are turning to online courses. Afghan Geeks, founded by 25-year-old Murtaza Jafari, who arrived in Greece as a teenage refugee from Turkiye, offers courses in Dari. Jafari launched these online programs to support women in his homeland and to show gratitude for the help he once received as a young refugee in a foreign land. - AP

* Cambodia-based cybercrime syndicates have adopted a new tactic to evade Indian authorities — using SIM boxes installed in India to make VoIP calls and carry out “digital arrest” scams. The racket surfaced after the Department of Telecom (DoPT), along with Telangana police, raided a building in Jannaram, Mancherial district.SIM box is a device that holds multiple SIM cards—hundreds at once—and is used to make large volumes of phone calls using VoIP tech. When call is made from abroad, scammer sends call over VoIP to SIM box installed in India. SIM box then uses a local Indian SIM card to call the victim,tricking both victims and law enforcement. One SIM box had 230 SIMs. Over 50,000 seconds of calls were made in just two hours—suggesting high-volume scam.

* Indian generics make up nearly half of all drugs covered by US Medicare and commercial insurance plans.

A data visualization showing tariff status in August 2025

* An intensivist is a doctor specializing in critical care. 

* IRDAI has imposed a record penalty of Rs 5 crore on Policybazaar for several violations found during a remote inspection conducted in June 2020. The breaches include conflict of interest, biased product promotion, irregular outsourcing payments, failure to map telemarketing sales to authorised verifiers, and delays in premium remittance. The company was fined Rs 1 crore for allowing its principal officer and other key managerial personnel to hold directorships in other firms without prior approval, which the regulator said posed a conflict of interest. Another Rs 1-crore penalty was imposed for promoting select insurance products as “best” or “top” on its website without using independent third-party data. 

* "War and politics are closely related. Wars are often fought to achieve political purposes" - Anil Chauhan, Chief of Defence Staff