This Week I Learned - Week 25 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* Vertex AI has been rebranded and evolved. Google officially replaced and expanded it under the name Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.  This change marks a major structural shift for Google Cloud, moving away from a traditional MLOps platform (focused on training and deploying standalone models) toward an "Agentic AI" ecosystem.  

* Turkey based HubX Studios used Gemma 4 to build BetterSpeak, an AI English tutoring platform that uses the Gemma 4 E2B model as the reasoning engine for its on-device pipeline — enabling private, low-latency tutoring without the need for an internet connection. HubX deployed the 4-bit quantized version of the model to handle tasks like grammar explanations and progress monitoring across languages. By using Gemma 4’s native audio input capabilities, HubX’s app is able to support direct speech-to-speech learning, while reducing costs and ensuring privacy.

* Midjourney, the AI lab best known for image generation, has announced an unexpected healthcare project: an underwater, full-body scanner.

* Fresh funding has propelled Sarvam AI into the unicorn club.

* Indian laws do not guarantee any ownership to AI generated music. The Indian copyright law, like its counterparts, expects the author to be a human to qualify for authorship of the work. It is based on the logic that copyright law was created to promote and incentivise human creativity. - Sundar Athreya

* DB-Engines is an initiative to collect and present information on database management systems (DBMS). The DB-Engines Ranking is a list of DBMS ranked by their current popularity. The list is updated monthly.

* OpenRefine is a powerful tool for cleaning and transforming data. It allows users to clean messy data, transform it from one format to another, and extend it with web services and external data. It can be used to standardize and clean data across various file formats, including TSV, CSV, ODS, XLS, XLSX, JSON, RDF, and XML. OpenRefine supports various operations such as clustering, faceting, and data reconciliation, making it a versatile tool for data cleaning.

* GeoLibre is a free and open-source, lightweight, cloud-native GIS platform for visualizing, exploring, and analyzing geospatial data. 

* You can now draw arrows in Datawrapper locator maps.

* Mahesh Shantaram's Traffic Monitor Lizard is a system to monitor and analyse road traffic flow on pre-determined routes within a city. It is designed for civic technologists, urban planners, data journalists, and researchers who want a transparent, reproducible pipeline for understanding how a city moves, how traffic patterns evolve, what factors influence travel times, and the characteristics of roads and routes.

* IIT Madras Director Prof. V. Kamakoti demonstrated a vulnerability in Telegram that lets users replace attached files like PDFs in messages while the original timestamp stays unchanged for up to 48 hours. 

* The National Testing Agency (NTA) was concerned about the modus operandi used by bad actors on Telegram to trigger mass panic by fabricating evidence of question paper leaks. Cheating syndicates have been systematically exploiting a specific loophole in Telegram’s group and channel synchronisation features.

For instance, a bad actor can create a public Telegram channel and link it to an associated group. Days before an exam, the administrator can upload a random PDF file on the channel, name it provocatively such as “NEET Question Paper Leaked”. The day after the actual exam, the operator then can use Telegram’s edit feature to replace the dummy PDF with the actual question paper. While the post inside the channel shows an ‘edited’ tag, the linked group retains the timestamp of the original post. This creates a highly convincing illusion that the actual question paper was available on the platform before the exam began, sparking panic.

After the ban on Telegram, its founder Pavel Durov said they are making the ‘edited’ label more visible to prevent backdating scams. 

* Razorpay processes about $180 billion in payments annually and is pushing harder into higher-margin segments such as cross-border payments and business banking via RazorpayX. 

Razorpay joins several new-age companies – including Swiggy, Groww, Meesho, and Zepto – that have used the confidential IPO filing route in recent years.

* Traditional weather models, based on physics, don't avoid anticipating unusually extreme events. AI models are trained to look for patterns based on historical weather data so when weather does something completely unprecedented AI models have no basis to anticipate it. This is an extrapolation problem: that is, AI is great at interpolating, or predicting things within the range of what it has seen, but it struggles to predict things far outside of its training data.

* Consumer tech repurposed for military apps - 

At the heart of Ukraine’s drone revolution is the First-Person View (FPV) system — an inexpensive, commercially available platform originally designed for recreational racing and aerial photography. Controlled through a live video feed transmitted from an onboard camera to virtual-reality-style goggles worn by their operators, FPV systems offer exceptional precision, manoeuvrability, and responsiveness.

Also included within Ukraine’s expanding drone inventory are bomber drones — largely adapted from commercial DJI Mavic 3 and DJI Matrice 300 RTK quadcopter platforms originally designed for aerial photography, surveying and industrial applications — which carry and release grenades, anti-tank mines and improvised munitions.

Commercially derived drones — mass-produced at scale, rapidly reconfigured for multiple operational roles, and widely deployed — have become a defining feature of contemporary warfare. Performing functions ranging from intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and target acquisition to precision strikes, artillery spotting, electronic warfare, and logistics support, they have evolved from auxiliary assets into central instruments of military operations.

Ukraine’s most significant innovation has been the emergence of fibre-optic FPV drones, an electronic warfare (EW)-resistant class of systems. Unlike conventional drones, which rely on radio-frequency links vulnerable to jamming, these platforms transmit commands and video through ultra-thin fibre-optic cables that spool out during flight, rendering electronic interference largely ineffective.

Israel's AI-enabled Iron Drone Raider is...designed to neutralise low-altitude UAVs through kinetic, non-explosive interception methods such as net capture — by which a physical net is deployed to entangle and disable an incoming drone mid-air — or direct collision, rather than costly missile engagements.

Warfare is increasingly becoming a test of industrial endurance and relentless technological adaptation, where success depends on the ability to build, deploy, and counter fast-evolving, continuously reconfigured drone systems. - Rahul Bedi

* Colombia is now the epicenter of unmanned aerial vehicle warfare in the Americas.  Weaponised drone attacks by armed groups here now outnumber those anywhere else in the region. - WSJ

* Fashion is one of the world's most polluting industries, responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions and 20% of industrial water pollution. 92 million tons of textile waste generated globally annually of which India produces 7.8 million tonnes of textile waste. Less than 10% of India's textile waste is recycled.- NoKasa

The clothes you wear come from three families of fibre. Cotton from a plant, polyester from petroleum, and a third group made from wood pulp that Europe is now building its new textile rules around.

Lyocell is the newest and cleanest of that wood pulp group, with the wood drawn from sustainably grown forests. The fibre itself is biodegradable. Over 99 per cent of the chemicals used to make it are recovered and reused. Older fibres in this family, like viscose, still dump carbon disulphide into the air and water. - Swarajya

* 9 equity mutual funds crossed Rs 70,000 crore AUM while the top 3 funds - Parag Parikh Flexi Cap Fund, HDFC Balanced Advantage Fund and HDFC Flexi Cap Fund now manage over Rs 1 lakh crore each.

* Delhi's population is 2.3 crores or 23 million, up 37.5 percent in 15 years.

* The Kerala government will create a calendar to map seasonal and regional patterns of disease outbreaks in the State. The “outbreak calendar” would give the public health system greater predictive accuracy and help it calibrate disease prevention and response.

* The markets have...moved from pricing catastrophe to pricing uncertainty, which is a kind of progress. - MoneyControl

* When Andrew Stanton was hired in 1990 as Pixar’s ninth employee and second animator, he had never made a movie. Today, he’s written or directed ten of the company’s most beloved animated films, including the “Toy Story” franchise, “Finding Nemo,” and “WALL-E.” - WSJ

* “Conscience only exists when there’s job security” - Arjun Sinha in Brown, a streaming series inspired by City of Death, a novel by former HDFC Bank Chief Economist Abheek Barua.

* "We grow too soon old and too late smart" - Traditional Pennsylvania Dutch proverb