UC San Diego AI Weekly · August 24, 2026

What's New in Your AI Tools

Zoom retires the "AI Companion" name — Zoom has dropped the "AI Companion" branding across its apps and settings. The features themselves (meeting summaries, chat compose, smart recording, etc.) are all still available — they're now labeled simply as "AI" throughout Zoom Workplace. If you look for the old settings page, it's been renamed accordingly. No action needed on your part.

Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot rolled back — Microsoft has temporarily rolled back the Domain Exclusion feature, which let admins block specific websites from appearing in Copilot responses. If you were planning to configure domain exclusions for your department, hold off — Microsoft says it's evaluating next steps and will share updates when ready.

Copilot Notebooks now accepts Markdown, plain-text, and rich-text files — You can now add .md, .txt, and .rtf files as references in Copilot Notebooks, alongside the document types already supported. That means READMEs, wiki exports, system logs, meeting transcripts, and plain text files can be dropped directly into a notebook and queried without reformatting. Useful for pulling together project context that lives outside of polished Word docs.

Google introduces Gemini 3.7 Flash — Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash, a faster model with stronger coding, document comprehension, and workflow automation than its predecessor (3.6 Flash). For everyday Gemini users, expect more accurate responses on complex documents and better follow-through on multi-step requests. The model is already powering Gemini Spark, Google's personal agent, for Pro and Ultra subscribers.

No live trainings are scheduled in the next 14 days, but you can:

Take the self-paced AI Foundations course to learn core AI concepts and UC policies on AI tools.
Watch the AI Webinar #6 recording — a practical walkthrough of TritonGPT's first year, including MyDocuments, model switching, and chat sharing.
Explore the Everyday I AI video series for short, practical prompting tips that work across TritonGPT and other AI tools.

UC San Diego Receives Department of Energy Genesis Mission Award to Fund New Scientific AI Tools — UC San Diego researchers will lead a DOE Genesis Mission project deploying intelligent AI agents to accelerate fundamental physics and quantum computing research. The team is building SIDERIUS, an LLM agent system designed to translate scientific challenges into AI-ready tasks.

Researchers Use AI to Decode Key DNA Sequence in Gene Activation — A UC San Diego lab used machine learning on 500,000 DNA sequences to crack the "initiator" — the DNA pattern that kickstarts gene activation. The finding could help researchers predict disease-causing mutations and design synthetic gene controls.

The New Frontier of Emotional Support: Artificial Intelligence — UC San Diego researchers examine the rise of AI chatbots for youth mental health and propose a five-pillar framework for the responsible evolution of AI-based emotional support, published in Nature Human Behaviour.

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