This Week I Learned - Week 15 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* Potato Prompt used in Custom Instructions can make AI stop being a collaborator and start being a "Devil’s Advocate" - 

"Whenever I type the word 'Potato' followed by an idea or argument, I want you to ignore your 'helpful' persona. Instead, act as a Hostile Critic. Your only job is to find the 'holes' in my logic. Point out three specific ways my argument could fail, two assumptions I’m making without proof, and one counter-argument I haven't addressed. Do not be polite; be precise."

* Yann LeCun and his team have developed LeWorldModel, the first stable model built with his Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). Their aim is to create models that go beyond just predicting words, focusing instead on truly understanding the world and how it functions.

* Distillation is a technique where an older “teacher” AI model is used to train a newer, “student,” model that replicates the capabilities of the earlier system — often at a much lower cost than producing an original model from scratch. 

Yet distillation has been controversial when used by third parties — particularly in adversary nations like China or Russia — to replicate proprietary work without authorization. 

Last year, Anthropic blocked Chinese-controlled companies from using its Claude chatbot model, and in February it identified three Chinese AI labs — DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax — as illicitly extracting the model’s capability via distillation. 

Information-sharing by US AI companies about adversarial distillation echoes a standard practice in the cybersecurity industry, where firms regularly swap data on attacks and adversaries’ tactics as a way to strengthen network defenses. By working together, the AI firms are similarly seeking to more effectively detect the practice, identify who’s responsible and try to prevent unauthorized users from succeeding. - Businessline

*  "Today, AI is metered. You rent it by the token.

Indian companies are doing the hardest, most unglamorous work in the digital economy: acquiring price-sensitive users, navigating complex local regulations, and structuring messy domestic data. Yet the highest-margin layer of the entire value chain — the API fee for the intelligence itself — flows immediately outward. 

For three decades, India exported human talent to power the global digital economy. But in the generative AI era, selling human effort is a depreciating asset." - Nishant Sahdev

* DeepFace (22.6K Stars on GitHub) is a lightweight Python framework for face recognition and facial attribute analysis, including age, gender, emotion, and race. It’s a hybrid system that integrates state-of-the-art models.

* Gemini 3.1 Flash Live enables low-latency, real-time voice and video interactions. It processes continuous streams of audio, video, or text to deliver immediate, human-like spoken responses, creating a natural conversational experience for your users. The outputs from this model will have SynthID watermarks, which are not perceptible to human listeners. It is based on Gemini 3 Pro.

* "Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company...Google is about average." - Steve Yegge

"Over 40K SWEs use agentic coding weekly here...Google is anything but average." - Addy Osmani, Director, Google Cloud AI

* Google is sunsetting Firebase Studio on March 22, 2027. Move your code to Google AI Studio or Google Antigravity to continue building. 

* Vibe coding with Google Antigravity shifts the focus from writing syntax to directing a mission. Instead of micro-managing lines of code, you guide autonomous agents that handle the heavy lifting across your editor, terminal, and browser.

* OpenAI is now offering open source developers six months of API credits for ChatGPT.

* A.I. has “jagged intelligence”: brilliance in some areas, incompetence in others. The term “jagged intelligence” was coined by Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding researchers at OpenAI, a former head of self-driving technology at Tesla and, on social media, one of the most closely watched commentators on the rise of A.I.

*  "There is considerable evidence that demonstrates large language models bring value; there also exists considerable evidence that – when applied without human oversight or an ethical framework - large language models are excellent generators of dangerous bullshit at scale.

I find the same to be true of generative coding assistants: they greatly accelerate the generation of disposable code, but at the same time they introduce a dangerous and seductive amount of sloppy legacy that, if left unattended to fester, are a cognitive and economic ticking time bomb" - Grady Booch

* Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his start-up off the ground. 

To make sure...his A.I. customer service system stuck to the task at hand...he tested it by asking the system for lasagna recipes; it took some tweaking to get it to stop supplying them. 

At this point, I kind of want to hire people because I’m lonely,” he said. 

- How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company

* In New York City schools, teachers can use artificial intelligence to generate ideas for lesson plans. They are also encouraged to deploy it for research and drafting some documents. But it should never be used to determine disciplinary action against a student or to assign grades to homework or tests.

Those examples of how artificial intelligence should or should not be used by teachers across New York City’s nearly 1,600 public schools are laid out in an initial A.I. playbook released by the school system, which is the country’s largest.

The guidance represents the first major step in establishing ground rules and safeguards for artificial intelligence in New York City classrooms. - NYT

* "AI systems today are optimised for frictionless completion: reduced time-to-answer, higher engagement, faster resolution. Dopamine hits, like Social Media algorithms. Development requires the opposite: friction, struggle, boredom, social negotiation, the experience of being wrong in front of people you care about." - Nikhil Pahwa

* Netflix prevents screenshots and screen recordings using DRM (like Widevine on Android, FairPlay on iOS). It is enforced at the OS/browser level to protect licensed content.

The video stream stays encrypted. It's decrypted and rendered only in a secure hardware layer (Trusted Execution Environment) that the OS protects—screen capture APIs can't access it. 

Result: black video in recordings/screenshots, while UI shows normally. It's the device enforcing content protection, not Netflix "detecting" your recorder. 

* On the morning of March 31, IT firm Oracle eliminated up to 30,000 jobs — roughly 18% of its global workforce — in a single automated email with no prior conversation with HR or warning from line managers. Access to company systems was revoked the same day. In India, about 12,000 employees were let go.

The layoffs come right after Oracle closed a profitable quarter with a $6 billion bottom line — revenue of $17.2 billion, up 22% year-on-year. The company’s future looked secure with contracted future revenue at $553 billion, up 325%, almost entirely driven by AI deals.

With that kind of order book and profits, a layoff signals a strategic shift as the company liquidates its workforce to fund AI data centre infrastructure. Analysts have predicted cutting 20,000 to 30,000 employees could generate $8 to $10 billion in additional annual free cash flow. This will allow the company to reallocate payroll cost to AI infrastructure buildout. - The Hindu

* According to Conductor’s 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report, 25% of Google searches now generate an AI Overview, based on an analysis of 21.9 million queries. AI visibility is becoming a critical new currency for not only AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO success, but also long-term digital success.

AI Overviews tend to appear most often for informational and how-to queries, especially when users are looking for explanation, synthesis, or step-by-step guidance rather than a single fact.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of optimizing content to be featured in AI-driven answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. 

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) involves optimizing digital content for improved visibility and authority in generative AI engines. It ensures that AI systems can understand and process content across different languages and cultures.

*  NeophyteID is an AI-powered mobile application designed to help users identify and manage invasive plant species across Kerala. Developed by researchers from the Malabar Botanical Garden and Institute for Plant Sciences, it utilizes the YOLOv11 machine learning model for accurate image recognition. The app allows users to upload images of plants to identify their species and contributes to a real-time distribution map, supporting conservation efforts and community-based biodiversity management. The app has won the WWF National Award from the World Wide Fund for Nature.

* In a blog post on CCTV espionage, Check Point Research asked organisations to remove direct WAN (wide area network) access to cameras and place them behind a VPN or a zero-trust access (no one except the designated person) gateway. It wanted them to change default passwords and enforce unique credentials.

* The Election Commission of India (ECI)’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has been conducted in 13 States and Union Territories so far.  Under a new AI algorithm, the ECI identified five types of discrepancies: 

(a) spelling differences in names between 2002 and 2025 rolls; 

(b) cases where more than six voters linked themselves to a single ancestor; 

(c) age gaps between a voter and their parent falling beyond the 15-45 year range;

(d) cases where the differences between the grandparents’ age and the voters’ age was less than 40 years; and 

(e) instances where the voters’ gender did not align with the name provided.

* With robots on the rise, proving your humanity has almost become a daily task.

* Proxemics is the study of how physical space influences human communication, revealing relationships, comfort levels, and social dynamics. It is a key component of nonverbal communication, alongside haptics (touch), kinesics (body movement), and chronemics (time).

* The war in Sudan, between the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, is stretching into a fourth year.

* India spends roughly $130 billion a year importing oil.