This Week I Learned - Week 37 2025

This Week I Learned - 

* Skills Andrew Ng looks for while interviewing AI engineers:

• Use AI assistance to rapidly engineer software systems
• Use AI building blocks like prompting, RAG, evals, agentic workflows, and machine learning to build applications
• Prototype and iterate rapidly

* The most productive programmers today are individuals who deeply understand computers, how to architect software, and how to make complex tradeoffs — and who additionally are familiar with cutting-edge AI tools. 

* As users increasingly turn to chatbots as companions and counselors, they sometimes express a sycophantic attitude that may reinforce a user’s subjective perspective or even delusional perceptions.

* Keeping track of very long inputs remains a challenge for most LLMs, and processing more than 2 million tokens — the current limit of Google Gemini 2.5 Pro — is a wild frontier. - The Batch 

* Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutoring program developed by Khan Academy. Based on GPT-4, the program answers student questions with further questions meant to encourage critical thinking.

* Apertus is Switzerland’s fully open source national LLM

* LlamaFirewall, an open-source system designed to mitigate three lines of attack: (i) jailbreaking (prompts that bypass an LLM’s built-in safeguards), (ii) goal hijacking (inputs that aim to change an LLM’s prompted goal), and (iii) exploiting vulnerabilities in generated code. The code and models are freely available for projects that have up to 700 million monthly active users. The rise of agentic systems is opening new vectors of cyberattack, and security risks are likely to rise as agents operate with greater autonomy and perform more critical tasks. LlamaFirewall addresses a wide range of potential security issues in an open-source tool kit.

* Elon Musk, 54, became the world’s richest person for the first time in 2021 before losing the title to Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos and LVMH’s Bernard Arnault. He reclaimed it last year and has held it for just over 300 days. Ellison, 81, who co-founded Oracle and is now chairman and chief technology officer, has the bulk of his net worth tied up in the database software company. Oracle’s shares, which had already gained 45% this year surged 36% this week after the company posted a major increase in bookings and gave an aggressive outlook for its cloud infrastructure business and Larry Ellison briefly surpassed Elon Musk to become the world’s richest person. It’s the company’s largest single-day gain since 1992. 

* Shenzhen and Beijing have been called “China’s Silicon Valley,” but lately Hangzhou has started to eclipse them, largely by providing startups with tax breaks and subsidies, maintaining talent pipelines, encouraging collaboration between private and public sectors, and spending on computing resources and other infrastructure. The rise of DeepSeek and other AI companies that are among the “6 little dragons of Hangzhou” has raised the eastern Chinese city’s profile as a technology hotbed.  The 6 little dragons include five AI companies: BrainCo, Deep Robotics, DeepSeek, ManyCore, and Unitree Robotics. The sixth is the hit game developer Game Science. Hangzhou’s ability to produce AI leaders — not only the dragons but also Alibaba, Hikvision, NetEase, and Rokid — has generated headlines. Hangzhou benefits from the presence of Zhejiang University, which feeds talent to local companies. Zhejiang alumni founded 4 of the 6 dragons. 

* Founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek is an independent subsidiary of the AI-powered investment firm High-Flyer Capital Management. The company has focused on building open-weights models, including DeepSeek-R1, that famously rival top closed models but cost much less to develop.

* Coursera has 183M registered learners to date

* Moonlighting to the Red Carpet - Filmmaker Anuparna Roy became the first Indian to win the Best Director Award in the Orizzonti (Horizons) section the at 82nd Venice Film Festival for her debut feature ‘Songs of Forgotten Trees’ (SOFT). Without formal film school training, Roy funded her projects by juggling IT and call-centre jobs. In fact, her remote IT role even came in handy during the shoot of SOFT: "It was work from home. I would log in and then go off to shoot. I even received a message from my ex-manager saying he was proud of me. It was generous of him not to mention the kind of activities I used to do while ‘working.’ I was pathetic at that job!"

* iPhone gets costlier...duh! - Apple has raised iPhone prices in India for the first time in five years. Apple's base model price has risen by 28% since 2019. But despite this increase, the price hike still trails the 36% rise in consumer inflation. - MoneyControl

* Indian IT companies have reduced their reliance on H-1B visas by 56% over the past eight years. The top seven Indian IT firms saw approved H-1B petitions fall to 6,700 in FY2023 from 15,100 in FY2015. Meanwhile, US-based companies have emerged as the largest users of the visa programme.

* About 5 percent of children take medication for A.D.H.D.

* Doctors used to think that peptic ulcers — open sores in the stomach’s lining or the first section of the small intestine — were caused by stress or other lifestyle factors, like eating spicy foods. That thinking was overturned in the 1980s, when scientists discovered that Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that bores into the protective lining of the stomach, caused many peptic ulcers. Frequent use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin, ibuprofen and naproxen can also cause them. Failing to treat the “root cause” of ulcers — with antibiotics if they’re caused by H. pylori or by reducing the use of NSAIDS if they’re the culprit - NY Times

*  The average giraffe neck measures about 6 feet (1.8 meters), with maximum reported lengths of up to 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) in exceptional individuals. Despite its length, a giraffe's neck has only seven cervical vertebrae, the same number as a human's, though each one is significantly elongated.

* Anime has grown from a niche Japanese export to a defining visual language of animation. Its unique appearance arose, in part, from a cost-effective animation method. But that style can also evoke more emotion than the same images might in Western animation.

* Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People told readers in the 1910s to smile more, dole out compliments and placate people. Carnegie’s book, for all its promises to democratize the tools of influence, credited charm for the ascent of the powerful.

* Breaking Bad in Bowenpally - A school owner in Hyderabad was arrested for allegedly manufacturing Alprazolam on school premises where around 110 children were studying while keeping the illegal activity under the wraps.