Less than three months into 2025 and the year is already a major one for AI in general, and AI in education, in particular.
Since December 2024, it seems like a dizzying amount of new and newly powerful AI tools have emerged from a variety of tech companies that can do things previous models simply couldn't. As Andrew Maynard, a professor at Arizona State University’s School for the Future of Innovation in Society, told me recently, “We've seen another step change in capabilities.”
Here are just a few of the ones I’ve had a chance to play around with or have noticed a great deal of chatter about from fellow educators. While these are not the only new AI models making waves in education, each of these is certainly making a splash and are worth being aware of as an educator.
DeepSeek
DeepSeekR1 was developed in China and launched in January, and has made no shortage of headlines. The tool is important because it is an open-source reasoning model that is free to use. This is significant for a few reasons.
First, reasoning models represent the cutting edge of AI technology, providing more detailed and better responses that can help with a wider range of tasks. Second, DeepSeek is an open-source platform, so developers can use the reasoning model to create their own specific uses with the technology, which can have big implications for education and other fields. Finally, because DeepSeek is free, it has made reasoning models more accessible overall and has seemingly prompted big tech companies to make their reasoning models available for free or at reduced rates.
DeepResearch
Announced at the beginning of February, DeepResearch is built upon OpenAI’s reasoning models. It can search the web and summarize and compile data into a research summary or paper. Some who have used it say it can create research papers as good as a graduate student in certain topics; others insist it’s not quite there yet.
I haven’t had the chance to experiment with DeepResearch, but my impression from reading the work of others is that it’s shockingly good at summarizing existing research but is not yet at the point where it is going to forge new ground in a field, which the best research papers do, of course. Either way, the fact that there is an AI tool that even arguably produces graduate-level research in some fields is both disturbing and important.
Perplexity and Google have also released similar research tools, so odds are your students will have access to these types of tools soon if they don’t already. Learning how to harness these virtual research assistants is something educators may want to start thinking about, particularly those working with more advanced students.
LearnLM
This new AI tool from Google specifically designed for learning hasn’t gotten the same level of mainstream attention as some other AI tools that were released or upgraded in 2025, but I find it one of the best AI teaching tools available.
As I recently wrote, LearnLM is built upon Google’s Gemini 1.5 but trained with learning science's best practices in mind. It’s been tested and fine-tuned after being deployed with real students and hundreds of education experts. I not only think it can help students learn subjects I teach, such as journalism and writing, but I've also used it to learn more about topics I’m exploring, including hard-to-visualize concepts from physics and game theory.
Sora AI
When it’s working well, this video-generation platform from OpenAI operates like a tool from science fiction. You put in a few lines of text, and a few minutes later a short video is produced from that.
While I didn’t really enjoy the user experience when I recently reviewed Sora AI, I was still impressed by its capabilities. Yes, prompting for Sora is still a little too complicated, and beyond sharing its wow factor with students, there’s not a huge number of direct teaching applications right now. But this is technology to watch and potentially explore with students going forward. The technology is only going to get better, and I’ve got a feeling people will come up with ways to use this I haven’t even imagined.
Like the other tools mentioned here it has the potential to change things in the classroom and beyond.
