AI Transformation Brief – September 2025

The latest AI announcements from the European Union, Stanford University, Microsoft, DeepSeek, and Intel.

AI Transformation Brief - September

INFO-TECH AI INSIGHTS

AI Transformation Brief

VOL 2 NO 9 | SEPTEMBER 2025

Featuring AI best practices and insights to enable our members to strategize, plan, develop, deploy, manage, and govern AI-based technologies and solutions.

In This Issue → AI in the News | AI Research Highlights | Vendor Spotlight | Upcoming Events & Resources

AI IN THE NEWS

Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, JUPITER, goes live

Read the JUPITER announcement

On September 5, 2025, the JUPITER (Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research) supercomputer became operational at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. This system represents Europe’s fastest supercomputer, ranks fourth globally, and is the world’s most energy-efficient supercomputer in its performance class.

ANALYST ANALYSIS

JUPITER is the first European system to reach the exascale threshold – performing more than one quintillion (10¹⁸) operations per second and built with the latest GPU chip technology, approximately 24,000 NVIDIA GH200 Superchips.

JUPITER extends traditional high-performance computing architecture to address AI workloads. This system will support research and innovation in the areas of LLM model training, climate science, neuroscience, and quantum simulation, among other disciplines.

In addition, JUPITER is an important contributor to Europe’s technological sovereignty.

Stanford University study reveals who’s losing jobs to AI

Read the Stanford paper

On August 26, 2025, Stanford University released its latest study on the impact of AI on employment. The study draws six conclusions:

Entry-level workers are hit hardest.
Hiring rates for young workers have been stagnant since 2022.
AI for automation is more disruptive than augmentation.
Young workers saw a decline in relative employment.
AI is reducing employment, not wages.
AI is shifting job opportunities away from entry-level workers.

ANALYST ANALYSIS

This study leveraged data from ADP, the largest payroll software provider in the US, with records spanning millions of workers across tens of thousands of firms.

Entry-level workers are defined as workers aged 22 to 25. This group experienced significant declines in employment in occupations that have been most exposed to AI, which includes software developers and customer service representatives. Overall, this group experienced a 13 percent decline in employment. Workers in fields less exposed to AI and more experienced workers in the same occupations saw their employment remain the same or continue to grow.

As a result, the researchers suggest that AI is less able to replace older workers with experience and tacit knowledge.

Microsoft enables Office 365 users to use Anthropic over OpenAI and introduces its own AI models

Read the Microsoft announcement Read the Microsoft MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview announcements

On September 9, 2025, Microsoft announced that 365 Copilot customers will have the option of using Anthropic’s Claude AI model as well as OpenAI’s GPT-5.

This announcement is a further sign that Microsoft is developing a roadmap that will provide it with independence from OpenAI going forward.

On August 28, 2025, Microsoft announced two new foundation models, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview.

MAI-Voice-1 is Microsoft’s first AI model to generate natural speech, and is available in Copilot Daily and Podcasts.
MAI-1-preview is an LLM developed with a mixture-of-experts architecture to make it more efficient to use.

ANALYST ANALYSIS

This addition of Anthropic’s Claude will result in the unusual situation where Microsoft will need to pay AWS, a cloud and AI competitor, for access to the models, because that is where the Anthropic models are hosted. This will add to the cost of 365 Copilot for Microsoft, but Microsoft stated that Copilot pricing would remain the same at $30 per user per month.

In January this year, Google reduced the price of its Gemini AI model for Workspace users to $2 per user per month. Given that, Microsoft users should be able to negotiate significant price reductions for 365 Copilot.

While Microsoft is enjoying a partnership with the market leader today with OpenAI, this arrangement is not ideal for Microsoft going forward. The foundation model is too important and too integral to the AI solution stack not to have a control point or its own offering here. Going forward, Microsoft will continue to become more independent of the OpenAI models, building its own foundation models and partnering with other foundation model providers.

DeepSeek V3.1 announced

Read DeepSeek announcement

On August 21, 2025, DeepSeek announced the release of its latest AI model, DeepSeek V3.1. While the first release of DeepSeek was received as disruptive and triggered a massive drop in the stock market earlier this year, this release represents an incremental improvement over its predecessor.

The new release has improved in:

Complex reasoning
Code generation
AI agent and tool support
Multimodal support

ANALYST ANALYSIS

DeepSeek V3.1 continues to develop and improve its AI model’s reasoning capabilities by introducing hybrid inference, which combines a thinking mode and a nonthinking mode.

The thinking mode addresses tasks requiring complex multiple-step reasoning. This mode is recommended for agentic AI applications. Its performance is comparable to DeepSeek-R1-0528, its previous reasoning-focused model.
The nonthinking mode is recommended for simple prompts that do not require extensive reasoning, multistep planning, or fact-checking.

The two modes attempt to provide users more control and improved efficiency and lower cost of computing for user prompts.

Intel announces $8.9 billion investment from the US government, which will own 9.9% of chipmaker

Read the Yahoo Finance story

On August 22, 2025, the US government announced it was converting existing grants into an equity investment of 10% into Intel, Intel said in a statement. Intel indicated the government’s investment represents passive ownership, with no board representation.

ANALYST ANALYSIS

Direct government involvement into a private commercial organization surprised many on Wall Street, especially considering Intel’s track record:

Losing CPU market share to AMD
Nonexistent market presence in chip technology for AI applications
A history of missing entering markets (e.g. mobile, AI)

Many will question the wisdom of investing $8.9 billion of taxpayer funds in probably the worst chipmaker in the AI market today, believing the market should decide whether Intel is a viable company for the future.