AI Tracker: How AI is transforming healthcare, in two stories

Human nurses push back against Ana, the AI nurse 

The next time you’re due for a medical exam in the US you may get a call from someone like Ana: a friendly voice that can help you prepare for your appointment and answer any pressing questions you might have.With her calm, warm demeanor, Ana has been trained to put patients at ease — like many nurses across the U.S. But unlike them, she is also available to chat 24-7, in multiple languages, from Hindi to Haitian Creole, reports AP.

That’s because Ana isn’t human, but an artificial intelligence program created by Hippocratic AI, one of a number of new companies offering ways to automate time-consuming tasks usually performed by nurses and medical assistants like monitoring patients' vital signs, flagging emergency situations and triggering step-by-step action plans for care — jobs that were all previously handled by nurses and other health professionals. Hospitals say AI is helping their nurses work more efficiently while addressing burnout and understaffing. But nursing unions argue that this poorly understood technology is overriding nurses' expertise and degrading the quality of care patients receive. Groups like National Nurses United have organized more than 20 demonstrations at hospitals across the US, pushing for the right to have say in how AI can be used — and protection from discipline if nurses decide to disregard automated advice.

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Even the most sophisticated technology will miss signs that nurses routinely pick up on, such as facial expressions and odors, notes Michelle Collins, dean of Loyola University’s College of Nursing. But people aren't perfect either. “It would be foolish to turn our back on this completely,” Collins said. “We should embrace what it can do to augment our care, but we should also be careful it doesn’t replace the human element.”

British firm ReactWise wants to transform Big Pharma with AI

Cambridge, UK-based laboratory Reactwise has secured $3.4 million in pre-seed funding to enable AI-driven robotic laboratories and speed up pharmaceutical manufacturing, it announced in a press release. The pre-seed round was backed by Y Combinator, the UK government, and leading venture capitalists and angel investors committed to advancing AI-driven, sustainable pharmaceutical manufacturing.

The discovery of novel pharmaceuticals is one of our most important weapons in fighting disease, said Reactwise. “However, the drug development pipeline is often driven by trial-and-error and held up for many months during the identification of scalable manufacturing processes, delaying clinical trials”, said Alexander Pomberger, CEO and Co-Founder of ReactWise. “Our AI-powered models learn from historical data, cutting up to 95% of experimental work and accelerating these workflows by 30x.”

The company is currently running 12 pilot studies with some of the largest pharmaceutical companies. Moreover, in their robotic laboratory they have already screened thousands of chemical reactions to build up their proprietary reactivity models. By integrating with automated lab infrastructure and electronic lab notebooks, Reactwise is positioning itself as the next-generation intelligence layer for pharmaceutical R&D.

Baidu's new, free AI model competes with DeepSeek

Chinese internet search giant Baidu released a new artificial intelligence reasoning model and made its AI chatbot services free, reports AFP. Baidu announced in a WeChat post that its latest X1 reasoning model -- which the company claims performs similarly to DeepSeek's but for lower cost -- and a new foundation model, Ernie 4.5, were available via its AI chatbot Ernie Bot.

Baidu also made the models free to use, more than two weeks ahead of schedule. Previously, users had to pay a monthly subscription to access the company's latest AI models. The Beijing-based company was one of China's first to roll out a generative AI platform publicly, in 2023, but rival chatbots from companies such as TikTok owner ByteDance and Moonshot AI have since gained more users.

Baidu faces stiff competition in the consumer-facing AI sector where startup DeepSeek shook up the industry at home and abroad with a model that performed comparably to competitors such as US-made ChatGPT, but cost much less to develop.

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