Welcome back to Daily Zaps, your regularly-scheduled dose of AI news ⚡️ 

Here’s what we got for ya today:

• 🚌 U.S. mandates AI education in schools

• 🐙 DeepSeek R2 reasoning AI is coming

• 🤖 China's new AI chip, seeking to match Nvidia

•  🛒 ChatGPT is getting better for shopping

Let’s get right into it!

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GOVERNMENT

U.S. mandates AI education in schools

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order, Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth, mandating AI education across all U.S. elementary and secondary schools to prepare students for an economy increasingly shaped by automation and machine learning. Andreas Horn, Head of AIOps at IBM, praised the move as essential, likening AI to a new form of literacy, while warning against overdependence on automation in education.

The order emphasizes early, hands-on, and critical engagement with AI tools, ethical considerations, and technical skills, aiming to ensure future workforce readiness as rapid technological change accelerates. This move follows China’s similar initiative and reflects a growing global focus on equipping younger generations for the future economy.

STARTUPS

DeepSeek R2 reasoning AI is coming

A few months ago, Chinese AI company DeepSeek disrupted the tech world and shook the U.S. stock market by releasing DeepSeek R1, a highly capable, low-cost reasoning model rivaling ChatGPT o1, made possible through software optimizations and training on less powerful NVIDIA GPUs; it was also open-sourced, sparking controversy over alleged data misuse and privacy concerns.

Now, rumors suggest DeepSeek is preparing to launch DeepSeek R2, a 1.2 trillion-parameter model using a hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, trained on Huawei chips with dramatically lower training and inference costs—97.3% cheaper than GPT-4—raising expectations for powerful multimodal reasoning while signaling China's growing self-reliance in AI hardware. While R2’s release, expected in early May, is unlikely to cause another market crash, it could still impact U.S. AI and chip industries, particularly if DeepSeek’s efficiency gains and local supply chain rumors prove true.

WORLD NEWS

China's new AI chip, seeking to match Nvidia

Huawei Technologies is preparing to test its most powerful AI processor yet, the Ascend 910D, aiming to replace some of Nvidia’s high-end chips like the H100, according to the Wall Street Journal. Huawei has approached Chinese tech companies to assess the new chip’s feasibility and expects to receive initial samples by late May, while mass shipments of its existing 910C AI chip are set to begin soon.

Despite past struggles to match Nvidia’s top-end chips, U.S. export restrictions have accelerated China's push to develop domestic alternatives, with Washington banning sales of Nvidia’s most advanced AI products to China to curb its technological and military advancements.

GOVERNMENT

ChatGPT is getting better for shopping

OpenAI is enhancing ChatGPT’s web search capabilities to make it more useful for shopping by adding features like product cards with images, prices, and star ratings, presented in an easy-to-read format without ads or sponsored results. These updates, which pull current pricing information from undisclosed partners, allow users to click on products for more detailed information from sites like Amazon, Best Buy, and Reddit, and to ask specific questions about items.

While the system generally works well, a demo showed it can still produce inaccurate results for unreleased products. The shopping features are rolling out to all ChatGPT users, and OpenAI is also expanding access to ChatGPT via a new WhatsApp feature tied to 1-800-CHATGPT.