This Week I Learned - Week 16 2026
This Week I Learned -
* From The Batch -
- Alignment training teaches LLMs to behave like assistants, but it tethers them to that behavior only loosely. Beyond alignment training, system prompts act as behavioral guardrails, but motivated users can bypass them.
- The lengths of tasks completed autonomously by AI agents have doubled roughly every seven months, according to METR, an independent testing organization
- LLMs' knowledge is still relatively limited with respect to infrastructure and the complex tradeoffs good engineers must make...finding infrastructure bugs — say, a subtle network misconfiguration — can be incredibly difficult and requires deep engineering expertise.
- Research involves thinking through new ideas, formulating hypotheses, running experiments, interpreting them to potentially modify the hypotheses, and iterating until we reach conclusions. Coding agents can speed up the pace at which we can write research code.
- Meta has pivoted from its open-weights strategy to deliver a closed alternative, Muse Spark, a natively multimodal reasoning model with support for tool use and multi-agent orchestration.
* If Indian data keeps training US and Chinese models while domestic capability goes unbuilt, the IT services sector hollows out with nothing to replace it. Well-known independent equity research and brokerage firm Bernstein's ask: fund domestic foundation models, build compute capacity, and push global AI companies to list in India — sharing value with the public.
* Google’s AI writes 50% of code, trailing Anthropic’s near 100%.
* A year after its viral debut, China’s DeepSeek has rolled out its latest AI model, V4.
* Sam Altman’s OpenAI has rolled out GPT-5.5.
* Avi Kivity developed the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, which powers many production cloud environments. Following his work on KVM, Kivity developed the Seastar framework and the ScyllaDB database. He co-founded the company ScyllaDB with Dor Laor.
* Firefox stores your history and bookmarks in a single file called places.sqlite.
* Korean gaming publisher Krafton Inc's PUBG Mobile remains banned in India, but its Battlegrounds Mobile India consistently ranks among the country’s three top revenue-generating games.
* Income or consumption share of the richest 10%, 1963 to 2024
* In medicine, a differential diagnosis is the systematic process used to distinguish a particular disease or condition from others that present with similar symptoms.
Think of it as a medical "elimination round." When you tell a doctor your symptoms, they rarely have a single answer immediately. Instead, they create a list of all possible "suspects" and then work to rule them out until only the most likely cause remains.
* In the last 12 months, Hyundai & LG together took $4.7 billion out of their Indian subsidiaries and sent it to their Korean parents.
* 28% of mobiles in India are made by domestic companies.
* According to the National Sample Survey’s 80th Round Report on Household Social Consumption: Health, 15% of Telangana’s population reported some form of illness in a 15-day period, which is higher than the national average of 13.1%. The average medical expenditure per hospitalisation (excluding childbirth) (as in-patient) in TG is among highest in India at ₹52,743. The national average is comparatively lower at ₹37,858.
* Overcharged.in is a free tool for private citizens to benchmark what they pay against official Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) rates for CGHS beneficiaries.
* Jhalmuri is air-infused indigenous rice crackle with artisanal mustard oil reduction added with some hand-crushed chillies and cloudy coconut chunks.
Comments
Post a Comment