This Week I Learned - Week #33 2025

This Week I Learned - 

* Google Cloud Generative AI Leader certification exam is meant for anyone in any job role, with or without hands-on technical experience. The exam is MCQ type and has a validity period of 3 years.

* Comet is an AI-native browser launched by Perplexity in July this year. It combines traditional web browsing with real-time AI assistance that can read, summarise and act on live data. Currently, Comet is available to Perplexity Max customers on an invite-only basis.

* Perplexity offered to buy Chrome, Google’s web browser, for $34.5 billion.

* Humanize AI can transform your AI-generated content into natural, human-like text. This AI-to-human text converter converts output from ChatGPT, Bard, Jasper, Grammarly, GPT4, and other AI text generators into text indistinguishable from human writing.

* Like a human brain, artificial neural networks take some kind of input (words, say) and produce outputs (other words). For the human brain, what happens in the middle is something of a black box, but we know that words we hear are translated into neural activity that represents meaning, then decoded into other words....artificial neural networks do something similar, only using numbers...LLMs encode syntax and words in a similar way as the brain but unlike with a brain, you can directly examine these encoding processes in a large language model just by looking at the code. So the A.I. can act as a pseudo brain to test hypotheses about language that are hard to test in real brains. - "21 Ways People Are Using A.I. at Work", NYT 

* Founded in 2022, Perplexity has quickly grown into an $18 billion company backed by tech leaders like Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and AI experts from Google and Meta. Its platform already handles over a billion monthly queries and has distribution partnerships with Motorola and Airtel.

* Check the Gemini Drops page to see the latest releases, feature announcements and product tips.

* Suricata is an open-source Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). This cybersecurity tool analyzes network traffic and sniffs out threats.

* Microsoft has announced that its Lens app will be retired from iOS and Android devices starting September 15, 2025. Launched in 2015 (it was originally called Office Lens), the app began as an application on Windows Phone devices. Unlike many scanning apps, it didn’t charge extra for features or push users into paid subscriptions.

* The Digital India Bhashini Division has called on agencies to annotate and label datasets in 22 Indian languages to train artificial intelligence models. The initiative aims to support five core tasks, including automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech, with strict quality benchmarks.

* The Canva teacher training programme will be made available on DIKSHA, the Ministry of Education’s digital platform for school education. 

* An annual traffic index released by TomTom NV, a Dutch multinational developer of location technology, for 2024 shows that on average, a person living in urban India spends close to 94 hours a year for a 10 km one-way journey within the city centre, and 75.6 hours for the same journey in the metro region. Three Indian cities — Kolkata, Bengaluru and Pune — feature among the top five in the list of slowest cities in the world on the index.

* Kolkata leads the mega cities with 36.8 per cent dependence on public transport. The dependence is 14 per cent of all the trips made in Hyderabad, 23.5 per cent in Delhi-NCR, 28 per cent in Chennai, 31.7 per cent in Mumbai and 32 per cent in Bengaluru. - Down to Earth

* BSNL blocks bit.ly links.  If a bit.ly link directs to a blocked website, it will be inaccessible for BSNL users. 

* D’yavol Spirits, founded by Shah Rukh Khan and his son Aryan Khan, entered the premium spirits market in 2022, launching products like D’yavol single estate vodka, Inception blended malt Scotch whisky, and Vortex Scotch whisky. Radico Khaitan, India’s fourth-largest liquor company led by Abhishek Khaitan, has acquired a 47.5% stake in D’yavol for Rs 40 crore, becoming its largest shareholder.

* Theobroma, a bakery brand founded by sisters Kainaz Messman Harchandrai and Tina Messman Wykes in 2004, has expanded from a single cafe to a nationwide business with over 250 outlets offering cakes, desserts, and chocolates. ChrysCapital has acquired approximately an 85% stake in the company in a deal reportedly valued at over Rs 2,000 crore.

* Elon Musk owns nearly 16 percent of Tesla.

* Rare earth magnets can be 15 times as powerful as iron magnets of the same weight.

* In the 1950s, a sweeping Soviet-inspired project sorted China’s population into 56 officially recognised ethnic groups. - ToI

* Eight years after the launch of goods and services tax, the Centre has circulated the blueprint for GST 2.0, with two main slabs of 5% for common use items and 18% for other goods as it seeks to make life simpler and less taxing for citizens and businesses.

Currently there are 5 slabs. Image source - Times of India

*  Over 60% of e-challans issued so far, with a cumulative penalty of around Rs 34,200 crore, for violation of traffic and transport rules remain unpaid across states

* Jeju Air Flight 2216 made an emergency landing in Muan, South Korea, on Dec. 29 after both of its engines were struck by birds.

* "Bad people will find a way around the laws" - Plato