⚙️ Trump seeks to bring AI to classrooms with latest executive order

Good morning, and happy Friday.

Spring is in the air (and so is pollen), and we’re taking a deep dive into AI and education, specifically, Trump’s latest executive order.

— Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View

In today’s newsletter:

📊 Google beats earnings, says AI is ‘central’ to growth

📱 Trump seeks to bring AI to classrooms with latest executive order

Shares of Google-parent Alphabet rose nearly 5% in extended trading Thursday night after the tech giant reported a healthy earnings beat.

Here’s how they did: Alphabet reported earnings of $2.81 per share, well above expectations of $2.01 per share, on revenue of $90.23 billion, above expectations of $89.12 billion.

Google Cloud — a key AI-related figure — brought in $12.6 billion, roughly in line with expectations.

Alphabet’s “other bets” unit, which importantly includes Waymo, brought in $450 million in revenue, a 9% reduction from last year’s numbers. The unit’s losses also grew to $1.23 billion, up from $1.02 billion last year.

Details around Waymo’s finances remain unclear, but Alphabet said that the company is providing 250,000 paid autonomous trips each week, up from 200,000 in February. The company also noted that 1.5 billion users now use AI Overviews each month.

Acknowledging that the company is “not immune to the macro environment,” Alphabet still affirmed that it plans to spend $75 billion on AI-related capital expenditures this year, a positive note for the ongoing health of the AI trade.

CEO Sundar Pichai said that Alphabet’s “differentiated, full stack approach to AI continues to be central to our growth.”

DeepWater’s Gene Munster called the results “good but not great,” saying that the “ChatGPT overhang isn't going away — and there’s nothing Google can say to change that in the short term.”

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Stock rally? Propelled by Big Tech, stocks notched their third consecutive day of gains on Thursday, despite ongoing uncertainty regarding tariffs and trade deals. Baird analyst Ross Mayfield said he doesn’t “trust the move.”

IBM doesn’t dazzle: IBM reported stronger-than-expected Q1 earnings Wednesday, importantly maintaining its full-year guidance despite the current economic environment. Still, the stock tumbled around 7% Thursday, primarily on the news that DOGE axed about 15 IBM consulting contracts, worth, in total, around $100 million. IBM is not alone in losing government contracts. SpaceX’s contracts, meanwhile, have remained untouched.

Brazil’s AI-powered social security app is wrongly rejecting claims (Rest of World).

Intel forecasts weak revenue amid trade tensions, shares fall (Reuters).

Adobe’s new app helps credit creators and fight AI fakery (The Verge).

Amazon and Nvidia say AI data center demand is not slowing down (CNBC).

Here’s all the health and human services data DOGE has access to (Wired).

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President Donald Trump this week signed an executive order that aims to integrate artificial intelligence deeply into K-12 schools across the country.

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s start by breaking down the contents of the order itself.

The details: The order, titled “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” aims to “ensure the United States remains a global leader in this technological revolution” by, in short, giving both teachers and students plenty of access to the tech.

The focus is on early learning and early exposure with the goal of “preparing students to become active and responsible participants in the workforce of the future.” It’s a push that will involve, not just students using the tech, but teachers using it, as well, both in the classroom and for administrative work.

To achieve these goals, the order established an AI education task force, which will be helmed by the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Its members will include the director of the National Science Foundation and the secretaries of agriculture, labor, energy and education.

The task force’s work will center around building “public-private partnerships with leading AI industry organizations, academic institutions, nonprofit entities and other organizations with expertise in AI and computer science education.”

Together, they will develop online resources to teach students “foundational AI literacy and critical thinking skills.”

The order says that the task force will work to identify areas of federal funding that can be leveraged to enable these public-private partnerships.

The teacher training will include “professional development … so they can integrate the fundamentals of AI into all subject areas.” It will also include education in “foundational computer science and AI, preparing educators to effectively teach AI in stand-alone computer science and other relevant courses.”

As if they didn’t have enough to be getting on with already.

Details on this are all quite unclear.

It’s unclear which companies will be involved in this, what, exactly, they’re developing, what role the individual schools will be asked to play in this integration, how much of the program here will be paid for by federal funding and how much individual schools will have to chip in.

This integration comes amid a messy backdrop, one that, in the two short years since ChatGPT first went live, has featured steadily rising instances of AI-enabled harassment, bullying and cheating. Beyond that, the psychological impacts of interacting with these systems — especially among young people — remain largely unknown, though there are already too many known instances of young kids developing dangerous, destabilizing attachments with chatbots.

Early research, meanwhile, has found that generative AI degrades critical thinking skills.

Asked about this environment, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said that “you’re gonna always see things that are being taken advantage of.”

“We have to expect that,” she said, adding: “I have visited now a couple of schools and seen the positive impact that AI can have. If it’s one-on-one tutoring, students can learn much faster.”

She told a story of a classroom filled with 25 students. Each student was working with their own AI tutor. The teacher was simply overseeing it all.

“It’s imperative to keep the teacher in the classroom,” McMahon added. “It’s just an incredible tool to be able to have. We have to be competitive in the world and we have to utilize this incredible technology.”

What’s going on with schools: Schools across the U.S. have been dealing with teacher shortages for around 20 years, now. But the problem got a lot worse in the aftermath of the pandemic. Now, 86% of school districts struggle to fill open positions. 60% struggle to find substitute teachers. 57% of schools in impoverished neighborhoods are understaffed.

In aggregate, schools across the country are underfunded by about $150 billion each year, according to this report from the Century Foundation think tank.

A separate report from 2024 found that “39 states devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 public schools than they did in 2006,” a reduction that has cost schools more than $360 billion between 2016 and 2021.

Bruce Baker, one of the report’s co-authors, called it a “permanent disinvestment” in public schooling, adding: “in the decade and a half since the height of the so-called ‘Great Recession,’ most states have increased their expectations for the performance of schools, teachers, and students, but they have refused to make their districts whole after the disastrous cuts during that recession.”

In short, schools have less money. Fewer resources mean fewer teachers, larger class sizes and more burnout, which means even fewer teachers.

The landscape: In addition to gutting the Department of Education, Trump — in partnership with OpenAI, Softbank, Microsoft and Nvidia, among others — somewhat recently unveiled Project Stargate, an effort that will purportedly drive a minimum of $500 billion worth of investment in AI infrastructure over the next four years.

In their proposals to the federal government, just about all of the Big Tech AI players have advocated for the sweeping adoption of their technology by the federal government.

I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day that painted a vision of a world where generative AI saves us so much time and money that we can reinvest all those resources into a workforce of people who are trained to do all those wonderful things algorithms can’t.

It’s a world, according to this post, that would have smaller class sizes because we’d have more teachers, teachers who’d be able to focus on working closely with each individual student.

And it sounds great.

But I’m a cynic and this somewhat forcible integration concerns me in a number of ways.

For starters, I don’t know that this is a worthy priority. Teachers are already overworked, stretched too thin and underpaid. Schools are already underfunded and short-staffed. And students are overwhelmed.

I don’t know that AI integration should be a number one priority in this environment.

Going further, it becomes difficult even to marshal my thoughts on the scope of the damage that could be wrought here.

Let’s start with a simple fact. Generative AI systems are unreliable. We’ve talked about that quite a bit. They are also plagued by issues of algorithmic bias. For these two reasons alone, students — especially young students — should not be using generative AI as a tutor in an unstructured environment. Misinformation, once learned, becomes difficult to unlearn.

Then, questions of data privacy, security and surveillance are of enormous significance, here, especially given the sources of these products (corporations eager to entrench themselves early in a young, impressionable userbase).

I don’t think it’s possible to separate the perils of corporate influence among young kids, here.

Those points were all raised by the National Education Policy Center in a brief last year that called for a pause in the rollout of AI in schools until there is adequate public oversight.

This order does not establish that oversight.

K-12 teachers have one of the hardest jobs out there: corralling kids and teaching them how to learn. The details of the subjects matter less than that core function of a classroom.

I would love to see massive AI literacy initiatives. I would love to see students taught about the massive hardware pipeline that makes the cloud possible; I would love to see students taught about the inner workings of algorithms and transformers, the real risks of hallucination and bias, the real cost in energy and carbon emissions of building and deploying artificial intelligence.

I’d love to see students taught, not to uncritically use generative AI, but to think critically about generative AI.

And I’d also love to see students taught to read, and write, and collaborate, and challenge themselves and be creative, in an environment unslicked by artificial efficiencies.

I worry that the nuance around the technology will not be properly captured or disseminated.

I worry that, in this context, AI education will amount to AI adoption, which is primarily great news for Big Tech.

I worry that the next generation will be taught to walk with a crutch that they don’t need, and in doing so, will find themselves crippled without it.

I worry that moving fast and breaking things, to borrow the Valley’s unofficial slogan, will not work in schools.

🤔 Your thought process: Selected Image 2 (Left): “Realistic detail in the background for image 2 vs. mushy background in image 1.”

Selected Image 1 (Right): “The upside-down harp being supported by a foam pad seems like a detail that an AI would miss. The forceps threw me at first, they don't seem like a tool a harpist would use but they might be helpful to re-string?”

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