AAIA's AI Beat Newsletter: Atlanta, GA and Seattle WA, USA Chapter events, this week’s handpicked stories/reports: Trump announces a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment in the US, DeepSeek claims its ‘reasoning’ model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks

AI in business and the enterprise news:

Recent AI news stories that caught our (and Perplexity AI’s!) eye over the last week:

• Trump announces a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment in the US (CNN.com, January 21, 2025)

  • “Three top tech firms on Tuesday announced that they will create a new company, called Stargate, to grow artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.”

  • “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison appeared at the White House Tuesday afternoon alongside President Donald Trump to announce the company, which Trump called the “largest AI infrastructure project in history.””

  • “The companies will invest $100 billion in the project to start, with plans to pour up to $500 billion Stargate in the coming years. The project is expected to create 100,000 US jobs, Trump said.”

• OpenAI’s Economic Blueprint (OpenAI, January 13, 2025)

  • “The Blueprint outlines policy proposals for how the US can maximize AI’s benefits, bolster national security, and drive economic growth.”

  • “The full Blueprint is available here

• Citi GPS: Global Perspectives & Solutions Report:  “Agentic AI, Finance & the ‘Do It For Me’ Economy” (Citi, January, 2025, h/t AAIA Chapter President Pablo Biggs)

  • Per Pablo Biggs: “This 2025 Report from Citi shows the amazing array of AI agents and bots use cases which will revolutionize financial services.”

  • Read the report here

• DeepMind’s Hassabis Sees AI-Designed Drug Trials This Year (Yahoo! News/Bloomberg, January 21, 2025)

  • “Google DeepMind spinoff Isomorphic Labs expects research of drugs it designed using artificial intelligence will begin this year, according to its Nobel Prize-winning chief executive officer.”

  • “Isomorphic Labs is working on shortening the drug discovery process from a decade or more to “weeks or months,” Hassabis said.”

  • “DeepMind first released AlphaFold, its tool for predicting protein patterns, in 2018. Now in its third iteration, AlphaFold can model a range of molecular structures, including DNA and RNA, and predict how they interact with one another.”

• World-leading supercomputer using AI to develop vaccines (BBC, January 19, 2025, h/t The Rundown AI)

  • “He added that the team are using the computer to develop vaccines for Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, as well as treatments for heart disease, emphysema and different types of cancers.”

  • “As Prof McKintosh-Smith explained, AI models are now capable of "simulating the way that drugs actually work inside the body, at the molecular level right down to atoms and molecules.”

• DeepSeek claims its ‘reasoning’ model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks (TechCrunch, January 20, 2025)

  • “Chinese AI lab DeepSeek has released an open version of DeepSeek-R1, its so-called reasoning model, that it claims performs as well as OpenAI’s o1 on certain AI benchmarks.”

  • “Being a reasoning model, R1 effectively fact-checks itself, which helps it to avoid some of the pitfalls that normally trip up models. Reasoning models take a little longer — usually seconds to minutes longer — to arrive at solutions compared to a typical nonreasoning model. The upside is that they tend to be more reliable in domains such as physics, science, and math.”

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