This Week I Learned - Week 43, 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* Indra OCR 1.1 is a 1M param model from Datalab that runs on CPU, 15x faster than Tesseract and much more accurate.  1M param OCR model - runs on CPU, 15x faster than tesseract, close to 1B+ param models in accuracy 

* Coding is the mother of all AI use cases with 90% of AI spends in most enterprises going to AI coding. Via AI lets developers use what they are using but cuts the costs by 25% - 40%. - Rajan Anandan

* Via is a middleware that sits between a CLI / IDE and an LLM, installs in 10 seconds

* AI models learn patterns from data during training. Their trained parameters, called weights, are numerical values that help fix how the models process inputs and generate responses.

Think of an AI model as a chef who learnt from thousands of recipes. During training, the model learns patterns that help it decide what ingredients to combine and in what proportions to make a certain dish. Its weights shape these decisions. Making the weights available is like sharing the chef’s acquired knowledge with other chefs, who can then adapt it to their own needs and create dishes of their own.

Most people access proprietary AI models via websites or apps while developers may access them via application programming interfaces (APIs). The provider controls access and may charge for usage.

An open-weight model makes its trained parameters available for download. Developers can run it on compatible computers or servers, adapt it for particular tasks or integrate it into applications.

This can give businesses and individual users greater control over how they deploy and customise AI models, and reduce dependence on a single provider. However, open-weight does not automatically mean open-source in the fullest sense. A firm may release weights without publishing training code or sufficient information about the data used to train the model. Licences may also curb some uses.

OpenAI released GPT-2’s weights in 2019. Beam, Muse Spark Open, Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B, Timestral are non-Chinese open-weight AI models.

Open weights alone do not guarantee lower costs. Hardware, maintenance, performance and licensing still matter and organisations must assess if running a model themselves is more economical than using a hosted service. - The Hindu 

* PyTorch is an open-source machine-learning framework used to develop and train AI models. Amazon estimates 85% of AI researchers and developers use it. 

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed TorchNeuron, a tool that allows developers to run AI workloads built using PyTorch on its Trainium2 and Trainium3 chips with minimal code changes.

The move addresses a key challenge for firms developing alternatives to Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs). NVIDIA’s CUDA platform provides software tools and libraries that allow developers to run AI workloads on its GPUs. Its integration with frameworks such as PyTorch helped build a broad developer ecosystem.

* PHP powers roughly 69–70% of websites. Researchers and the PHP project disclosed two severe bugs in the core of PHP itself. The disclosure heightened concerns about A.I.’s potential to upend cybersecurity unless shortcomings are addressed. Successful exploitation lets an attacker take complete control of the web server. They could steal data, deface sites, install malware, or use the server to attack others. 

* eMudhra is an Indian company that acts as a Certificate Authority (CA). Certificate Authorities issue the digital certificates that browsers and devices use to verify websites are genuine and to enable the padlock/HTTPS encryption you see in the address bar.

In April 2025, during a key-generation process, eMudhra created eight intermediate certificates (the “middle layer” that signs actual website certificates) with extremely weak private keys. These were so weak that researchers recovered all of them from the public certificates in under a second. Major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Apple, etc.) rapidly blocked trust in the affected certificates. eMudhra revoked them and later announced it is exiting the global TLS certificate business. 

If the weak keys had been actively abused, attackers could have created fake “valid” certificates for any website, enabling highly convincing phishing or man-in-the-middle attacks. 

* SBI is India’s largest bank. 3,897 records of the bank's customers containing personally identifiable information (PII) ended up on the dark web. 

* The Indian Government operates its own cloud infrastructure, called MeghRaj, through the National Informatics Centre (NIC). In December 2025, the government reported that 2,170 ministries and departments were hosting applications on MeghRaj, but that they also depended on empanelled private cloud providers, including those based abroad.

In February, AWS and an Indian company named Yotta announced they would deploy AWS Outposts technology for MeghRaj 2.0, allowing cloud services managed by AWS to operate from within NIC data centres and thus keeping Indian data physically within India.

However, the AWS documentation says Outposts need a connection to an AWS regional control system for monitoring and software updates, meaning it’s possible the arrangement will continue to leave Indian physical infrastructure exposed to a management service controlled by foreign operators. - The Hindu

* OrganUI is a set of interface components for healthcare and life sciences: 3D anatomy, clinical charts, molecules and medical images.

* Palantir and SAP have explicit programs or pathways for hiring and supporting neurodivergent people (including those with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and related profiles) in technical roles involving data, software, systems, and related work. Both companies treat neurodivergence as a potential competitive strength for data- and systems-oriented technical work and maintain active recruitment/support mechanisms. 

Palantir CEO Alex Karp (who has spoken publicly about his own dyslexia and neurodivergence) has been involved in Neurodivergent Fellowship’s framing and final interviews. 

SAP has run its Autism at Work program since 2013. 

* Common Rabies vaccines in Europe are not US FDA-approved. 

* The Indonesian stock market saw more than 10% single‑day fall this week after MSCI announced it may remove it from the Emerging Markets category and downgrade it to a Standalone Market.

* The Taiwan and Korean stock markets show extreme single‑stock concentration — TSMC is ~50% of Taiwan’s market, and Samsung Electronics + SK Hynix together make up ~50% of Korea’s KOSPI Index.

* "Development is a byproduct of corruption" - In certain flawed political environments, the desire for personal gain (corruption) ends up leaving behind tangible physical assets or growth (development) as an accidental side effect. However, while it explains how some infrastructure gets built in high-corruption settings, it is a distorted form of growth that usually comes with severe hidden costs to society.