UK company Basecamp Research has developed AI models together with researchers from Nvidia and Microsoft that generate potential new therapies against cancer and multidrug-resistant bacteria from a database of over one million species.
OpenAI is buying health app Torch for around 100 million dollars. The deal includes 60 million upfront and the rest in retention shares, The Information reports. Torch unifies scattered health records into what the founders call a "medical memory for AI", "a context engine that helps you see the full picture, connect the dots, and make sure nothing important gets lost." The app runs on OpenAI models. All four employees, including CEO Ilya Abyzov, are joining OpenAI.
The deal signals OpenAI's push toward a personalized health assistant in ChatGPT. Last week, the company launched a ChatGPT Health section and an offering for healthcare companies. Anthropic recently added health features to Claude as well. The moves reflect a shared bet on a massive market: hundreds of millions of weekly chatbot conversations already focus on health.
Apple will use Google's Gemini models for its AI features, including a revamped version of Siri. The multi-year partnership means Apple will rely on Google's Gemini and cloud technology for its upcoming products, according to CNBC. The new features are expected to roll out later this year.
In a statement, Apple said that after careful evaluation, Google's technology offers the most capable foundation for its applications. Rumors about talks between the two tech giants first surfaced in March of last year. Later reports suggested the switch would cost Apple more than one billion dollars annually.
The move comes as Apple continues to struggle with Siri's underlying architecture. Internal reports describe Siri as a technically fragmented system built from old rule-based components and newer generative models - a combination that makes updates difficult and leads to frequent errors. Apple is also working on an entirely new in-house LLM architecture and a model with roughly one trillion parameters, aiming to eventually break free from external providers. Google faced similar challenges early on keeping pace with OpenAI's rapid progress but managed to catch up.
British media regulator Ofcom has opened an investigation into X over the AI chatbot Grok. The probe follows reports in recent weeks that Elon Musk's chatbot and social media platform were increasingly being used to create and share non-consensual intimate images and even sexualized images of children.
Ofcom is now examining whether X violated the UK's Online Safety Act. The regulator contacted X on January 5, 2025, demanding a response by January 9. The investigation aims to determine whether X took adequate steps to protect British users from illegal content. Violations could result in fines of up to 18 million pounds or 10 percent of global revenue. In severe cases, a court could even order X blocked in the UK.
Ofcom is also looking into whether xAI, the AI company behind Grok, broke any regulations. Last week, the EU Commission ordered X to preserve all internal documents and data related to the Grok AI chatbot through the end of 2026.
The search engine company introduces personalized discount ads in its AI mode and presents an open protocol to bind retailers more closely to the Google ecosystem.
Chinese researchers have developed UniCorn, a framework designed to teach multimodal AI models to recognize and fix their own weaknesses.
Leading figures in China's AI industry are tempering expectations: China won't overtake the US in the AI race anytime soon. Justin Lin, head of Alibaba's Qwen model series, puts the odds of a Chinese company surpassing OpenAI or Anthropic in the next three to five years at less than 20 percent. Tang Jie from Zhipu AI warned at the AGI Next Summit in Beijing that the gap with the US may actually be widening, though recent open-source releases suggest otherwise.
At the conference, executives cited limited computing capacity and US export controls on advanced chips as key hurdles. US infrastructure is one to two orders of magnitude larger, forcing Chinese companies to focus resources on current projects.
Yao Shunyu, a former OpenAI researcher and now Tencent's AI chief scientist, was more optimistic. He cited three to five years as a realistic timeframe for China to catch up but said the lack of advanced chipmaking machines was the main technical hurdle.
The cautious outlook follows a strong week on the stock market. Startups Zhipu AI and MiniMax Group together raised over one billion dollars in Hong Kong, with MiniMax shares doubling on their first day of trading.
Researchers at Princeton University, UCLA, and the University of Pennsylvania have developed an approach that gives AI agents persistent worlds to explore. Standard web code defines the rules, while a language model fills these worlds with stories and descriptions.
