Beeline Uzbekistan has signed two MoUs with DataVolt to strengthen the country’s digital infrastructure, including becoming a major tenant at the TAS-1 data center in Tashkent and exploring further expansion in Bukhara. This collaboration aims to expand in-country data capacity, enabling faster, more resilient digital services while advancing cloud, AI and data localization capabilities for Uzbekistan. It underscores VEON’s strategy to utilize advanced infrastructure to power its digital ecosystems, enabling scalable, next-generation services and accelerating Uzbekistan’s emergence as a leading digital hub in the region. 🔗 Read more at @beeline_uz @DataVolt_KSA

At the Tashkent International Investment Forum, the @beeline_uz team won an ESG award for offering free AI courses to 1,000 computer science teachers, in partnership with the Tashkent International University of Education (TIUE). This reflects VEON’s AI1440 strategy in action: treating AI as augmented intelligence that helps people become better versions of themselves, helping teachers become the best teachers by giving them access to tools that enable them to do even more for their students. Congratulations to the Beeline Uzbekistan team 👏

For the first time, Uzbekistan's national team will play at the FIFA World Cup 2026 🇺🇿!! For millions of fans, that changes everything. VEON’s @beeline_uz will bring the matches to fans across the country through its digital services: Kinom, hambi and OQ. Watch on your phone, tablet, laptop or Smart TV. Beeline Uzbekistan joins Toffee in Bangladesh in bringing the World Cup to fans across VEON markets. A World Cup is more than football. It brings a country together around one dream, and we are proud to help fans live it.

Harvard University just voted to limit the number of A grades given in undergraduate classes to about 20% of the class. I’m not in favor of this. It deeply runs counter to how I believe education should be. We should hold a high bar, but also work mightily to support the success of 100% of learners, rather than a fraction. Harvard’s administration took this step — over the objections of a large fraction of the student body — to counter grade inflation. Grade inflation is real: Many universities have been awarding A and B grades to ever larger fractions of students, and this has caused grade point averages (GPAs) to become less useful as signals of student skill. At the same time, we want students to succeed. The heart of the question is the role of educational institutions. Should our goal be: - To help students succeed? - To judge students? Both of these have value. But my focus when working in education is almost entirely helping students succeed. To me, it is clear that many people want to learn, to be empowered, to build skills that let them do new things! This is what we focus on at DeepLearningAI. This philosophy is also why my online courses (going back to my early online Stanford courses on Coursera) permitted an unlimited number of retries for graded assignments. I believe in letting — and even encouraging — someone to redo something until they succeed. This is as opposed to standing in judgement of the fact they didn’t get it right the first time. Further, I want homework assignments to be designed primarily to help people practice and learn, rather than to judge their skill level. This is why I prefer to create “Practice Problems” and “Practice Labs” — questions that, when you think through them, help you to gain practice and reinforce what you know. As opposed to “Assessment Problems” designed primarily to judge skill. But won’t Harvard’s move make GPAs more meaningful and help prospective employers identify strong candidates? Having hired a large number of people from Harvard and other institutions, I can say confidently that GPA is not an important signal. We have screening and interviewing processes that give far more accurate ways to figure out if someone is truly skilled. I do not need a wider spread in applicant GPA scores to figure out who's really good! To be clear, there is also value in assessment. Even though standardized testing is much hated, high-quality tests like the SAT, ACT, GRE, TOEFL, etc. provide objective measures of ability in a domain. I find that most people want to learn and succeed. There are also people who want rigorous assessment (for example, to apply for school admissions), but this is a lesser need, and is not my focus when building educational products. Harvard is often described as an “elite” educational institution. There are two ways to be elite: One option involves limiting enrollments, and then even among admitted students, cap the number of people that do well at 20%. I would rather pursue a different path: Set a high bar and teach elite, cutting-edge skills, but strive relentlessly to help everyone succeed. This way, eliteness is defined not by excluding people but by helping as many people as possible to be excellent. [Original text: The Batch newsletter]

Look, I’m not gonna roast you like everyone else because you haven’t even played for us yet, and we all know England’s style is nothing like Barcelona’s. But can you explain something to me? Harry Kane scored. Bellingham scored. Saka got an assist. Anderson got an assist. Rice got an assist. Even Rashford scored. I’m not asking you to dribble past five players or be elite one-on-one. All I want is one scrappy deflected goal so I can shamelessly flex on my friends. 😭

JUST IN: Stanley Druckenmiller just updated his portfolio This is everything Duquesne Family and Stanley Druckenmiller owned as of the end of Q1 Natera $NTRA: $576.7M Taiwan Semiconductor $TSM: $201.2M STMicroelectronics $STM: $161.1M YPF Sociedad Anonima $YPF: $142.0M Insmed $INSM: $126.3M Brazil ETF $EWZ: $124.6M BBB Foods $TBBB: $113.6M NewAmsterdam Pharma $NAMS: $109.2M Sea Limited $SE: $96.8M Roku $ROKU: $93.2M Alcoa $AA: $92.9M Broadcom $AVGO: $83.7M Teva Pharmaceutical $TEVA: $82.1M Woodward $WWD: $73.6M Sandisk $SNDK: $54.1M Figure Technology $FIGR: $51.2M Revolution Medicines $RVMD: $46.0M Intel $INTC: $44.9M Coupang $CPNG: $43.5M Humana $HUM: $42.1M Seagate $STX: $40.6M CRH $CRH: $39.0M Lattice Semiconductor $LSCC: $39.0M Bloom Energy $BE: $38.6M Option Care Health $OPCH: $36.5M Twilio $TWLO: $36.0M Restaurant Brands $QSR: $34.6M Global X MSCI Argentina ETF $ARGT: $33.7M Jabil $JBL: $28.2M Caris Life Sciences $CAI: $28.1M Wabtec $WAB: $25.0M United Airlines $UAL: $24.6M Cleveland-Cliffs $CLF: $23.8M Arm Holdings $ARM: $22.5M iShares GSCI Commodity $GSG: $22.0M Southern Copper $SCCO: $21.7M Linde $LIN: $20.9M Unity Software $U: $20.4M Nuvation Bio $NUVB: $20.1M Qnity Electronics $Q: $19.8M Micron Technology $MU: $17.2M Protagonist Therapeutics $PTGX: $16.4M Coherent $COHR: $15.8M Belite Bio $BLTE: $15.2M Olema Pharmaceuticals $OLMA: $13.4M Xenon Pharmaceuticals $XENE: $13.0M ADMA Biologics $ADMA: $12.8M StubHub Holdings $STUB: $12.2M PureCycle Technologies $PCT: $12.1M Amazon $AMZN: $12.1M Celestica CLS: $12.0M Daktronics DAKT: $10.7M Cloudflare NET: $10.4M Twist Bioscience TWST: $10.1M LyondellBasell LYB: $9.9M Vista Energy VIST: $9.8M JBS JBS: $8.9M EchoStar SATS: $8.3M Almonty Industries ALM: $8.2M DBV Technologies DBVT: $7.5M Lumentum LITE: $6.8M Solstice Advanced Materials SOLS: $5.3M MercadoLibre MELI: $4.3M Westlake WLK: $1.9M Wave Life Sciences WVE: $1.2M