AAIA's AI Beat Newsletter: Portland and San Diego Chapter events this Thursday, India Chapter event this Friday, and this week’s handpicked stories/reports: Why AI Spending Isn’t Slowing Down, Chegg sues Google for hurting traffic with AI, Generative AI tool marks a milestone in biology, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Pumps the Brakes on AI Hype

AI in business and the enterprise news:

Here’s news that caught our and Perplexity’s attention as notable stories over the last week:

• Why AI Spending Isn’t Slowing Down (MSN/Wall Street Journal, February 21, 2025)

  • “Despite a brief period of investor doubt, money is pouring into artificial intelligence from big tech companies, national governments and venture capitalists at unprecedented levels. To understand why, it helps to appreciate the way that AI itself is changing.”

  • “As businesses are discovering that the new AI models are more capable, they’re calling on them more and more often. This is shifting demand for computing capacity from training models toward using them—or what’s called “inference” in the AI industry.”

• DeepSeek: The Most Disruptive AI Contender You’ve Never Heard Of (Bay Area Founders Club, February 21, 2025)

  • Fascinating backstory on DeepSeek

• Generative AI tool marks a milestone in biology (Stanford Report, February 19, 2025)

  • …”scientists have developed a generative AI tool that can predict the form and function of proteins coded in the DNA of all domains of life, identify molecules that could be useful for bioengineering and medicine, and allow labs to run dozens of other standard experiments with a virtual query – in minutes or hours instead of years (or millennia).”

  • “Evo 2 was trained on a dataset that includes all known living species, including humans, plants, bacteria, amoebas, and even a few extinct species.”

  • “Evo 2 could help predict which mutations lead to pathogenicity and disease. Everyone has random mutations in their DNA and, mostly, they’re harmless. But on rare occasions, they’ll cause cancer or other disease. The model is actually very good at distinguishing which mutations are just random, harmless variations and which cause disease.”

• Chegg sues Google for hurting traffic with AI as it considers strategic alternatives (CNBC, February 24, 2025)

  • “Chegg on Monday filed suit in federal district court against Google, claiming that artificial intelligence summaries of search results have hurt the online education company’s traffic and revenue.”

  • “Google forces companies like Chegg to “supply our proprietary content in order to be included in Google’s search function,” said Schultz, adding that the search company uses its monopoly power, “reaping the financial benefits of Chegg’s content without having to spend a dime.””

  • “AI Overviews, as Google’s artificial intelligence summaries are called, are available in the company’s search engine in more than 100 countries, with over 1 billion users, the company said in October. They show up above links to other pages in search results.”

• Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Pumps the Brakes on AI Hype (Gizmodo, February 20, 2005)

  • “The world has yet to turn any of today’s AI hype and spending into a meaningful lift in the actual economy, says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.”

  • “Success will be measured through tangible, global economic growth rather than arbitrary benchmarks of how well AI programs can complete challenges like obscure math puzzles. Those are interesting in isolation but do not have practical utility.”

• Outlining the Impact of AI on Multidisciplinary Oncology Practice (CancerNetwork, February 19, 2205)

  • …”his practice has adapted precision medicine in clinical trials and used AI to summarize patient notes, test for biomarkers, identify practice optimization, and reduce documentation burden, the latter of which he expresses may serve to alleviate physician burnout.”

  • “He further emphasized a need to establish and maintain trust with emerging AI tools so that providers can spend more time engaging with patients and ultimately serve as better physicians and more empathetic human beings. Ethically trusting AI technologies, he expressed, will help healthcare professionals in optimizing their daily practice.”

• Student Generative AI Survey 2025 (HEPI, February 26, 2025)

  • “In 2025, we find that the student use of AI has surged in the last year, with almost all students (92%) now using AI in some form, up from 66% in 2024, and some 88% having used GenAI for assessments, up from 53% in 2024. The main uses of GenAI are explaining concepts, summarising articles and suggesting research ideas, but a significant number of students – 18% – have included AI-generated text directly in their work.”

  • Report here

• Overview of AI policy in 15 jurisdictions (GIP Digital Watch, February 24, 2025)

  • A comprehensive report with detailed references on how 15 countries are setting their AI policies

  • “These approaches illustrate a global shift towards embracing AI’s transformative potential while considering the ethical and societal implications, fostering international cooperation to future-proof technological advancements.”

Have a newsworthy story or industry report/insight to share with AAIA members and community? Email details to [email protected].