This Week I Learned - Week 23 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* Anthropic and OpenAI have launched their own services companies, challenging traditional IT firms and service providers. Anthropic's joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman is valued at $1.5 billion, while OpenAI's venture, The Development Company, is valued at $4 billion. 

* "Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn.

Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together. 

It’s a wake up call to all companies  to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe." - Uday Kotak

* "One reason that the atrophy of coding skills is concerning is the “paradox of supervision” ... effectively using Claude requires supervision, and supervising Claude requires the very coding skills that may atrophy from AI overuse." - Anthropic

* “People who go all in on AI agents now are guaranteeing their obsolescence. If you outsource all your thinking to computers, you stop upskilling, learning, and becoming more competent.” - Jeremy Howard, creator of fast.ai

* " I use LLMs to help generate specs and plans, while I facilitate the implementation. This is an inversion of the "orchestration" workflow...I never generate more than I can review in a sitting." - Lars Faye

* "when you use these fully agentic workflows, the model providers essentially own you". - Primeagen

* Box, a Silicon Valley software maker, expects to have more employees, not fewer, as it hires A.I. architects, A.I. solutions managers and other new A.I.-related positions.

Aaron Levie helped found Box in 2005. The company’s software, which is often deployed behind the scenes, helps companies store and work on documents and other data. The company has more than 100,000 customers, including federal agencies and Morgan Stanley, and went public in 2015.

Box has infused its software with A.I., adding features where the technology performs tasks like drafting documents.

Mr. Levie has said he believes companies will continue buying software, rather than making their own with A.I., since third-party software is likely to be more secure and reliable.

Among the jobs that Box is adding are “forward deployed engineers,” who will help customers that may want to use A.I. but do not have the technical know-how. Another is “A.I. business automation engineers,” who are part of the I.T. department and help colleagues use A.I. to be more productive and to remove drudgery from their jobs. - NY Times

* The industries that have adopted AI with fervor (Technology, Legal, Healthcare) so far have a few similarities: they are text-based, involve rote and repetitive work, have natural human-in-the-loop involvement to inject human judgment, limited regulation, and have clearly verifiable end outputs (e.g., code that runs, a resolved support ticket). Serving tech, legal and healthcare buyers is clearly fertile ground right now...

* Pangram, Quillbot, ZeroGPT, Grammarly and Turnitin are popular AI text detection tools.

Pangram admits that for text under 75 words, the results might not be as accurate.

* Codex discovered a hidden HTTP/2 Bomb, a remote denial-of-service exploit against most major web servers.

* Chart by Arnaud Leene (@aleene on GitHub & Open Food Facts) showing nutrient attribution by ingredients in MTR Ready to Eat Alu Methi

* Mendeley Data is a free and secure cloud-based communal repository where you can store your data, ensuring it is easyto share, access and cite, wherever you are.

* The state animal of Maharashtra is the Indian giant squirrel, popularly known as Shekaru (in Marathi)

* Only 8% of India's population has access to air conditioning.

* While winter pollution is dominated by finer PM2.5 particles, summer air pollution is driven by the coarser PM10 and ozone.

Vehicles, industries, waste burning, agricultural residue burning, construction sites, and broken roads remain year-round sources of pollution. Winter adds biomass burning for heating. Summer brings in dust storms that hike PM10 levels, while heat and sunlight catalyse ozone formation.

Ozone is not emitted directly from a tailpipe or chimney. It forms when nitrogen oxides (NOx), largely from vehicles and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from industrial emissions, vehicle exhaust, paints, and other sources, react under strong sunlight. Hotter, sunnier days therefore create favourable conditions for ozone formation, which, along with particulate matter, could cause respiratory illnesses. Ozone thus rises in hot weather. 

* Air Quality Early Warning System (AQEWS) bulletin provides detailed weather information for Delhi and three-day Air Quality Index forecasts for 140 Indian cities.

* Phenylketonuria is a condition in which the body cannot process a common amino acid, phenylalanine

* At the core of our efforts to understand and explain the extraordinary diversity of forms and functions of life lies one molecule: deoxyribonucleic acid, popularly known by its abbreviation, DNA. DNA resides in cells, the unit of construction of our bodies — indeed of any organism — and we humans are made up of trillions of cells.

The DNA in a cell is called its genome. The linear thread of DNA that makes up the genome has an alphabet of four molecules, denoted by the letters ‘A’, ‘T’, ‘G’, and ‘C’. A genome can have thousands of genes, and through the specific ordering of these letters, each gene can encode a specific protein. Proteins in their various forms make up, or help manufacture, all that is needed for each cell to perform its unique function.

...the commonly studied bacterium Escherichia coli has about 4,300 genes. The fruit fly, about 17,000. The mouse, about 21,000. And the human, about 22,000. There is only a fivefold difference in gene number between a bacterium and a human. The mouse has more protein-coding genes than us, and a water flea, Daphnia, has about 31,000 genes, more than either us or the mouse.

At the start of the Human Genome Project, sequencing a human genome took more than a decade, cost close to $3 billion, and involved thousands of scientists across about 20 countries. Today this is possible in a few hours, at a cost of a few hundred dollars, in a small laboratory. 

...genome sequences taken together give us a history of life on the planet, the relatedness of organisms, and how the tree of life branched in different ways. 

...when we examine genomes in the context of how an organism (bacterium, plant or animal) functions in its environment, we learn how they are adapted. Genes, famously described as selfish, ensure their own propagation by using their host organism’s survival as a vehicle for their transmission. By studying variations in genes, we learn how mutations are selected as organisms adapt to their environments. 

Replacing the genome of a cell with one designed and manufactured by humans is now feasible for small genomes and will soon be possible for larger ones. - K. VijayRaghavan

* India is widely identified as the ‘Thalassemia Capital of the World’ today and is estimated to have nearly 40 million carriers of the defective gene.

Around 10,000 to 15,000 children are born annually with Thalassemia Major, a severe genetic disorder that affects the body’s ability to produce haemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells responsible for carrying oxygen throughout the body. Those born with this condition suffer from chronic anaemia and require lifelong medical support. They often require blood transfusions every two weeks along with iron chelation therapy, nutritional support and continuous medical monitoring. The cost of treatment can reach approximately ₹2.5 lakh per child annually, placing a considerable burden on many families.

* In 1856, English chemist William Henry Perkin, while trying to synthesize quinine, ended up creating a purple residue that dyed silk with striking intensity. The compound, later marketed as mauveine, inaugurated the modern synthetic dye industry. Within a few decades, chemists learned to reproduce the molecular structures responsible for many natural colours. In 1869, industrial chemists succeeded in synthesising alizarin, which is the key red component of madder, making centuries of agricultural cultivation suddenly unnecessary.

The implications were profound. Madder fields, once the source of alizarin compounds across Europe, vanished almost overnight. Cochineal plantations faced competition from cheaper laboratory pigments. What had once required soil, insects, seasons and skilled cultivation could now be produced in factories wherever coal, glassware and chemical knowledge were available. - Satwik Gade

* Moors was a European designation for Urdu

* Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (1912 – 1990) was an Emirati royal, politician and one of the Founding Fathers of the United Arab Emirates. Sheikh Rashid was responsible for the transformation of Dubai from a small settlement around Dubai Creek to a modern port city, regional commercial hub and entrepôt.

* By 1966 Dubai was the third largest export market for gold from London, receiving some 4 million ounces. In 1967, gold traded in the souks of Dubai at thirty-five dollars an ounce sold in India for sixty-eight dollars an ounce. The gold was packaged in ten tola bars, a tola being a little over 11.66 grams. Dubai's mercantile traders had found a lucrative source of revenue in providing gold to India. The Indian government controlled gold imports and imposed tariffs, so merchants in Dubai, funded by British banks, shipped gold in large quantities from London by air and then sent it by dhow to India's three-mile limit where the bullion would be handed over to Indian traders who carried out the 'actual' smuggling.

* The 66-berth Jebel Ali Port was, when it opened in 1983, the world's largest man-made harbour and remains so today.

* Emirates Flight 521 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Thiruvananthapuram, India, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, operated by Emirates using a Boeing 777. On 3 August 2016, the aircraft, carrying 282 passengers and 18 crew, crashed while landing at Dubai International Airport. All 300 people on board survived the accident. Videos from inside the aircraft, taken on passengers' cellphone cameras, showed the passengers failing to evacuate, instead giving priority to carry-on luggage, resulting in an overly long evacuation and heavy criticism.

Cause of the first hull loss (an aviation accident that damages the aircraft beyond economic repair, resulting in a total loss) involving an Emirates aircraft - The flight crew reliance on automation and lack of training in flying go-arounds from close to the runway significantly affected the flight crew performance in a critical flight situation which was different to that experienced by them during their simulated training flights.

* Epistemic caution means resisting narratives unsupported by authoritative consensus. Epistemic caution might frustrate, but it's precisely to avoid replacing one contested narrative with another. 

*  "See things not as they are, but as they might be." -  J. Robert Oppenheimer