This Week I Learned - Week 46 2025

* Every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers.

The foundational provider introduces continual chaos into the entire ecosystem at a rate never before seen, to a degree such that downstream providers can never get established. 

It’s not a one-time sea change, it’s continual tsunamis.

There are two ways AI application startup founders can make money:

- Make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash (my estimate is that you have about 12-18 months cashflow generation)

- Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity

Sea changes are now happening on a 9-12 month cycle. Very few startups can turn into a mature business in that timeframe - and by mature, I mean having all the boring stuff like sales relationships and brand recognition. The physical moat is the only one that's like "large rocks that can offer cover from the continually crashing waves".   

The foundational technology has not stabilized in any way whatsoever, and applications require a sufficiently stable foundation for some extended period of time in order to create value and then a system for monetizing that value (i.e. "a business").  The wholesale rate of change in the nature of the foundation is the reason why I think almost all application startups will not survive to achieve any significant scale, not because the current large players are special. As a baseline, most startups don't survive during a rapid period of change either. 

- Yishan, former CEO of Reddit 

"99% of AI startups die or get acquired. The 1% that become generational?  They’re the ones that own the atoms and feed the bits to the giants on their terms."

* Prompt to learn better prompting from AI assistants - "Reverse engineer our conversation and write the single prompt that would have produced my final response in one go."

* Starcloud, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for startups, plans to build a 5-gigawatt orbital data center with super-large solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers in width and length. 

* Story of Soumith Chintala, AI Fixer, the creator of PyTorch and ex-VP at Meta - Went to a tier 2 college. Was rejected from all Masters programs twice. Rejected from every single job except Amazon test engineering. Rejected from DeepMind thrice. Nearly had his baby project shut down. Struggled with visa issues. After 12 years of failures (2005-17), he eventually rose to became a VP at Meta one of the most influential people in AI! (via Deedy)

* "I embrace laziness. Automate everything that you don't want to do." - Soumith Chintala 

* drawRTC by Ajeet Pratap Singh, is an open-source web app that lets you both and additionally collaborate with others in real time.

* YouTube & Facebook can provide audio translations in multiple languages in the speaker's voice.

* Experienced architects usually know where cracks will appear. They design guardrails: cost controls, security measures, fallback plans. The systems may move fast, but they don’t break as easily.

* Scams are a $1 trillion-a-year global industry. Shopping fraud, where people are made to pay for stuff they never receive, is the most common. Another well-known technique is known as pig butchering, where marks are lured by small financial gains before the perpetrators whack them with a big blow that drains their accounts. Digital arrests, by contrast, deliver the knockout punch right at the beginning — by making vulnerable individuals feel the mighty boot of law enforcement on their chest. The criminals don’t ask for bribes; they insist on proof of innocence. Victims suffer from extreme fear and psychological shock, and they seek relief by voluntarily handing over huge sums to their tormentors, all via proper banking channels. India offers rich pickings for this variety of online con. A digital juggernaut is rolling through the world’s fifth-largest economy. But without sufficient guardrails for data privacy, it’s a transformation that comes with some collateral damage. Between the fear of Big Brother and the ubiquity of online misinformation, even educated, successful individuals have stopped trusting their own better judgment about what to believe. - Bloomberg

* Hitech meets low tech: Six election surveillance drones — deployed for the first time in India to track irregularities — were brought down using kites by unidentified miscreants during Tuesday’s bypoll in Jubilee Hills.

* A modern-day tech-savvy ‘pirate’ of the Caribbean, who was bleeding Tollywood by uploading pirated versions of newly-released movies on his website iBomma, has finally landed in the police dragnet. iBomma owner Emmadi Ravi, now a citizen of St Kitts, has a setup both in France and the Caribbean region to source newly-released movies and then upload them on his website. iBomma and its associated domains are hosted on Cloudflare, a content delivery network (CDN) that provides enhanced security and anonymity, making it challenging to shut them down. Alarmingly, approximately 95% of piracy websites, including iBomma, rely on Cloudflare hosting, which shields them from takedown efforts and enables continued operation. - ToI

* In 1998, lawyers Mike Weiss (1967-1999) and Paul Danzinger were approached by inventor Thomas J. Shaw, who had trouble selling an auto-retractable and single-use syringe (Safety Syringe) because Premier, Inc. and Novation, two largest healthcare group purchasing organizations (GPOs) in the United States, refused to adopt his new, more expensive, safer syringes. The inventor turned his hope toward Mike Weiss and Paul Danziger with those issues. Together, Weiss and Danziger brought a lawsuit against the GPOs, but the case never went to trial. In 2002, lawyer Mark Lanier helped Shaw settle with the two GPOs and, in 2004, settled for $100 million (equivalent to $166 million in 2024) with Becton, Dickinson and Company, the largest manufacturer of medical syringes. The movie Puncture is based on this Safety Syringe Case. 

* 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, David MacMillan believes that finding the right catalyst could make it possible to turn carbon dioxide — the most stubborn greenhouse gas — into useful compounds such as fuels, plastics or building materials. 

* There are some 250 billion American pennies in circulation. The cost to mint the penny had risen to more than three cents, a financial absurdity that doomed the coin.

* The election of Sanae Takaichi was a milestone moment. The last time a woman led Japan was in 1771, when Empress Go-Sakuramachi sat on the imperial throne.

* Anchorage, Alaska, will allow voters to cast their ballots on smartphones in upcoming local elections.

* The U.S. is the largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of natural gas. China is now making more money from exporting green technology than the U.S. makes from exporting fossil fuels. In India’s electricity sector, more than half of the generation capacity now comes from solar, wind and hydropower. - NY Times

* Delhi breathes polluted air for nearly 200 days a year.