Does AI have a role in education?
May 15, 2025
Good morning. Earnings report season is among us. CoreWeave smashed Q1 earnings with $982M in revenue (wall street expected $853 M), causing an 11% after-hours jump, quickly followed by a cool off after announcing plans to invest up to $23B into AI data centers.
— The Deep View Crew
In today’s newsletter:
🔬 AI for Good: AI is speeding up drug development
Source: ChatGPT 4o
AI is helping pharmaceutical researchers find new treatments faster and cheaper by surfacing promising compounds buried deep in massive datasets. Dotmatics, a R&D software company, recently acquired by Siemens for $5.1B, is applying AI to identify potential drug candidates in a fraction of the time it used to take.
Phil Mounteney, VP of Science and Technology at Dotmatics, explains it like this: “The art of drug discovery is really finding drugs in these massive haystacks of data. AI is like a supercharged magnet that helps us sort through those haystacks and find the needle way more efficiently than before.”
Why it matters: Drug development is notoriously long and expensive. It can take up to 10 years and cost between $2 and $6 billion to bring a single drug to market. Of that, roughly six years are spent on early discovery—just identifying the compound that might work. Dotmatics is using AI to cut that phase down to as little as two years.
Faster discovery means earlier trials, quicker regulatory paths and lower costs for companies and patients alike. The company believes that AI could reduce the full research and clinical timeline by as much as 50 percent.
How it works: Dotmatics combines AI with scientific data platforms to accelerate each step of the R&D process:
It scans huge chemical libraries to identify overlooked or repurposable compounds.
It models how drug candidates interact with target proteins or diseases.
It automates lab workflows that used to take researchers weeks.
It pulls from historic datasets to inform present-day projects.
Mounteney says AI played a key role in accelerating the COVID mRNA vaccine rollout by leveraging years of stored research and rapidly analyzing it to guide development.
Big picture: Drug discovery may be one of the most direct ways AI can improve human health. Tools like Dotmatics are not replacing scientists but instead giving them the speed and precision to find answers faster. With over $300 million in projected revenue for 2025, the company is betting that faster cures can also mean a stronger business case.
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✈️ Air Force opens AI Center of Excellence
Source: ChatGPT 4o
The Air Force just gave its scattered AI projects a home address. Announced by outgoing CIO Venice Goodwine at AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber on May 7, the new Department of the Air Force “Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence” will expand on existing partnerships with MIT, Stanford and Microsoft.
Chief Data and AI Officer Susan Davenport will run the show, expanding on the service’s MIT accelerator and Stanford AI studio that recently put test pilots through an autonomous-systems boot camp. The center’s built on Microsoft’s secure Innovation Landing Zone, already field-tested by Air Force Cyberworx for rapid prototyping. Translation: teams can push an idea from laptop to live mission network without the usual procurement drag.
Why it matters: The Air Force bankrolls dozens of AI skunkworks – from predictive-maintenance bots to dogfighting algorithms – but commanders still complain they can’t find, scale or accredit finished tools. Centralising budgets, data and cloud access is meant to clear that bottleneck and prove AI actually moves sorties, satellites and supply chains.
How it works: The center will serve as a hub for AI collaboration, resource-sharing and deployment.
It connects academic partners with military use cases, like autonomous aircraft and satellite operations.
It gives contractors a clear entry point to test and scale AI tools within Air Force infrastructure.
It consolidates current investments in AI and DevSecOps through Microsoft’s cloud systems.
It supports applied training, such as Stanford’s 10-day course for AI test pilots.
Goodwine, delivering her valedictory, challenged contractors to ditch one-off demos and practice “extreme teaming” across land, sea, air and space. With budgets tightening, only tech that ships fleet-wide will survive.
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The best part?
AI models are starting to talk like humans without being told how
The Turing test might be broken and no one knows what to do next
Harvey AI is chasing a $5 billion valuation to take over legal work
Scientists may have actually turned lead into gold by accident
US close to letting UAE import millions of Nvidia's AI chips
The trade war is delaying the future of humanoid robot workers
🧠 Does AI have a place in education?
Source: ChatGPT 4o
Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates walked out of a Newark, N.J., classroom piloting Khanmigo and said the experience felt like “catching a glimpse of the future.” Across town, Northeastern senior Ella Stapleton demanded an $8,000 refund after spotting AI-written lecture notes, even as her professor banned students from using the same technology. One scene brims with optimism, the other with outrage, and together they capture the crossroads facing U.S. education as AI moves from novelty to necessity.
On April 23, President Donald Trump signed Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth, an executive order that mandates the "appropriate integration of AI into education" to ensure the U.S. remains a global leader in the technology revolution. Its primary goals: teach K-12 students about AI and train teachers to use AI tools to boost educational outcomes.
What’s new: A White House Task Force on AI Education will launch public-private partnerships with tech companies to develop free online AI learning resources for schools. The Education Department is directed to reallocate funding toward AI-driven educational projects, from creating teaching materials to scaling "high-impact tutoring" programs using AI tutors.
While some educators applaud the focus, questions remain about implementation. As Beth Rabbitt, CEO of an education nonprofit, noted, the dawn of generative AI is "a bit like the arrival of electricity" – it could transform the world for the better, but "if we're not careful... it could spark fires."
Many schools began experimenting with AI before any executive orders. In some districts, AI-powered tutoring and writing assistants already supplement daily lessons.
Go deeper: Public-private partnerships are driving K-12 AI integration. The AI Education Project (aiEDU), backed by AT&T, Google, OpenAI and Microsoft, offers free AI curricula to public schools. It has partnered with districts serving 1.5 million low-income students, reaching 100,000 kids with introductory AI lessons.
Some educators have replaced take-home essays with in-class writing to prevent AI copying. As of January 2025, 25 states have issued official guidance on using AI in K-12 school, most stress protecting student data privacy, promoting equity, and ensuring AI assists rather than replaces teachers.
In higher education, students have embraced AI at remarkable rates. Estimates suggest over four-fifths of university students use some form of AI for schoolwork – from brainstorming to essay drafting.
Yes, but: Pushback is emerging, especially when educators over-rely on AI while restricting student use. The Northeastern case exemplifies this tension. Business major Ella Stapleton filed a formal complaint after discovering her professor used ChatGPT to generate class materials while the syllabus banned students from using AI. She spotted telltale signs:
Oddly worded paragraphs
AI-generated images with extra limbs
An unedited AI prompt reading "expand on all areas. Be more detailed and specific."
"He's telling us not to use it and then he's using it himself," Stapleton told The New York Times. Though the university denied her refund request, the incident sparked nationwide debate about consistency in AI policies.
A recent study found college students who used ChatGPT heavily for assignments ended up procrastinating more, remembering less, and earning lower grades on average. Yet 51% of college students say using AI on assignments is cheating, while about 1 in 5 admit they've done it anyway.
In the big picture, the turbulent introduction of AI into American education may prove to be a historic turning point – perhaps even more impactful than the arrival of computers or the internet in the classroom. Yes, the past two years have seen plenty of missteps and valid concerns: cheating facilitated on an unprecedented scale, teachers and students alike occasionally abdicating effort to an automated helper and institutions caught flat-footed without policies in place.
However, it would be a profound mistake to focus only on the downsides and lose sight of the enormous opportunity at hand. I’d argue that education is not just another sector that AI will disrupt – it is possibly the most promising and crucial application of AI in the long run.
Why such optimism? Well, consider the challenge of providing truly personalized learning; human teachers, as dedicated as they are, can only do so much in a class of 25 or a lecture hall of 200. AI tutors offer the tantalizing prospect of 1-on-1 instruction for every student, anytime and on any subject – essentially democratizing the luxury of a personal tutor that was once available only to the wealthy.
The students in school today will graduate into a world pervaded by AI – in their workplaces, civic and personal lives. It is in our collective interest to ensure the next generation is AI-literate and AI-savvy.
The lesson plan for all of us is clear: proceed with care, but keep our minds – and classroom doors – open to the potential of AI.
Which video is real? |
🤔 Your thought process:
Selected Image 1 (Left):
“It has that “film look” of 35mm color negative (Kodak process C-41) camera film; and the resolution is too low to be medium format (120/220) film.”
“This was mostly a guess, but the water movement in the fake one seemed off and the extended arm too long.”
Selected Image 2 (Right):
“The water droplets in [the other image] seemed like something AI would add for realism. Give my regards to the photographer!”
“I thought the water spray would put the position of the camera at an impossible position between the boat and surfer.”
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