This Week I Learned - Week 45 2025

This Week I Learned - 

* The AI boom is minting billionaires. There are around 500 AI unicorns already, and just the top four had created 15 billionaires by March. Last week added three more, an unremarkable figure when four billionaires (of all kinds) are added every week, on average. But 22-yearold Adarsh Hiremath, Surya Midha and Brendan Foody are the youngest self-made billionaires ever. By breaking Mark Zuckerberg’s 2008 record – he was 23 then – they’ve become the tech world’s equivalent of Renaud Lavillenie, who smashed Sergey Bubka’s two-decade-old pole vault record in 2014.

John Rockefeller, the first dollar billionaire, was 77 when he hit the mark in 1916. Since then, the median age at which people amass their first billion has slipped to 67. Anyone who makes it by 50 is still considered ‘young’, because only about 10% of the world’s 3,500-odd billionaires form that cohort.

Self-made tech billionaires are at greater risk because of the nature of their wealth – valuations of incipient ideas. For example, Brazilian heiress Livia Voigt joined the billionaire club as a 19-year-old student with $1.1bn early last year. She’s still there because the industrial machinery fortune backing her is intact while the tech wealth of Franceschi, Breslow, etc, has eroded, pushing them into the ranks of millionaires.

All said, there’s still no quick route to self-made billionaire status. Singing? Taylor Swift got there in Oct 2023 at the age of 33. - ToI

* Claude AI spots billing issues and reduces patient's medical bill by 83% - A patient used Anthropic's Claude AI to slash a $195,000 hospital bill down to $33,000—an 83% reduction—with just a $20/month subscription. By uploading the itemized bill to Claude, the AI identified duplicate procedure codes, illegal double billing, and charges that violated Medicare regulations. Claude then helped draft a formal dispute letter citing every violation with specific regulatory references. The hospital reviewed the documentation and dropped their demand by $162,000, demonstrating how AI tools can now provide medical billing expertise that previously required expensive consultants or lawyers.

* A CI/CD pipeline, short for continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment, automates how software changes are built, tested, and released. Developers merge code into a shared repository, triggering automatic builds and tests to catch issues early. Validated code is packaged and moved through staging to production. This process shortens release cycles, reduces manual errors, and ensures stable, high quality updates, allowing teams to innovate faster and maintain consistent software performance across multiple environments.

* Open data is the idea that some data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. 

* Zerodha was founded in 2010 as a small discount broking firm in Bangalore by two brothers and life-long traders, Nithin and Nikhil Kamath. Its tech team has 30 members while the rest of the company has grown to ~1200 people across various departments like sales, operations, support, and compliance. Their systems are FOSS-first. FOSS-only.

* Kite Connect is a set of REST-like HTTP APIs from Zerodha, India's largest stock broker, that expose many capabilities required to build a complete stock market investment and trading platform. It lets you execute orders in real time (equities, commodities, mutual funds), manage user portfolios, stream live market data over WebSockets, and more.

* Fundamentals of Computers by IIT Kanpur Professor V Rajaraman was one of the first books I read about computers. 

He has authored several other books on computer science topics. The students he taught included Faqir Chand Kohli, the first CEO or TCS, and Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy. His vision led to the creation of the master of computer applications (MCA) programme for science and commerce graduates, addressing critical human resource needs in the emerging IT industry. Prof. Vaidyeswaran Rajaraman, fondly known as the "Pitamah" of computer science education in India, has passed away at the age of 92. 

* Saikat Chakrabarti, the former chief of staff for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is planning to run for the San Francisco seat once Rep. Nancy Pelosi's term ends in early 2027. The 85-year-old Nancy Pelosi is the first and only female Speaker of the House in the United States. Chakrabarti, 39, is best known for having helped Ocasio-Cortez leap from NYC bartender to Congress member. He has hundreds of millions of dollars in personal wealth after being the third employee at Stripe, a tech company that focuses on payment processing. 

* New York City's new Mayor, Zohran Mamdani (34) is the Uganda-born Indian son of film-maker Mira Nair (born in Odisha) and academic Mahmood Mamdani (born in Mumbai). His wife, Rama Duwaji is Syrian-American.

* New York City has the most number of millionaires in the world (about 350,000) but wealth distribution is skewed, with per capita income in Manhattan (which is about 50% white) more than double that of the Bronx (only 9% white). Queens, where Mamdani lives (and also where Trump grew up before moving to Manhattan) is home to over 60% of the South Asian population in NYC, with big concentrations in neighbourhoods like Jackson Heights (dubbed Jaikishan Heights), Elmhurst, Richmond Hill, and Ozone Park. It has the world’s largest municipal budget (approximately $112 billion, larger than that of Uttar Pradesh or Maharashtra) in 2024. The city depends on state and federal funding for about 25% of its budget, with 75% coming from local taxes and revenues. 

* In a new decree approved by Pope Leo, the Vatican’s top doctrinal office instructed the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics not to refer to Mary as the “co-redeemer” of the world. Jesus alone saved the world, said the new instruction, settling an internal debate that had befuddled senior Church figures for decades. 

* About one-third of the technical workforce in the world is in India. 

* "Science and innovation requires an open mind, experimentation, piloting etc. All this requires time, money and effort. Theoretical critiques to shut down pilots reveals a mindset that isn't focussed on innovation. Imagine if Arthur Eddington didn't do the solar eclipse experiment of 1919 to verify Einstein's theory of relativity because the physics establishment wasn't convinced that the theory was sound." - Arun K 

* Growth often begins at the edge of discomfort and that’s where real transformation happens.