In an underground auditorium packed with thousands of health-care executives this week, Epic Systems CEO Judy Faulkner stepped on stage to deliver a keynote dressed like a swan, feathers and all.
Even by the tech industry’s more casual standards (take Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s trademark leather jacket, for instance), Faulkner’s costume may have puzzled some first-time attendees. But for many health-care industry veterans and Epic employees, it was business as usual— a sign that Epic’s annual Users Group Meeting was officially underway. And one theme stood out during the health-care company’s event on Tuesday: How new artificial intelligence features can help doctors and patients.
Epic is a health-care software giant whose technology is used in thousands of U.S. hospitals and clinics. The company houses medical records for more than 280 million individuals in the U.S., though patients often have data stored across multiple vendors.
Wizards and animals
Each year, thousands of people descend on Epic’s headquarters in Verona, Wisconsin to hear about its latest products and initiatives. UGM is one of the company’s largest annual on-campus events, and CNBC attended the festivities on Tuesday.
Epic’s 1,670-acre campus is sprinkled with farm animals, statues of wizards and buildings themed like “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Fittingly, this year’s conference is “storytime” themed, and Faulkner and other Epic executives spoke while dressed as characters inspired by various children’s books.
There was no shortage of skits and jingles as they shared updates across Epic’s major products, including its offerings like MyChart, an app patients can use to access their medical records, and Cosmos, a deidentified patient dataset clinicians can use to conduct research.
Seth Hain, senior vice president of R&D at Epic, speaking at UGM 2024.
Courtesy: Epic Systems
Epic’s Artificial Intelligence announcements
Many of Epic’s announcements centered around how the company is integrating artificial intelligence into these products. Faulkner said the company has more than 100 AI features in the works, though many of the tools are still in the early stages of development.
For instance, by the end of this year, Epic said its generative AI will help doctors revise message responses, letters and instructions into plain language that patients can understand. Doctors will be able to use AI to automatically queue up orders for prescriptions and labs, the company said.
Many physicians have to carry out time-consuming tasks like drafting insurance denial appeal letters and reviewing prior authorization requirements, so Epic said it is working to introduce AI tools that can streamline those processes this year.
By the end of 2025, Epic’s generative AI will be able to pull in the results, medications and other details that a doctor might need when responding to a patient’s message through MyChart, the company said. Other specific functions, like using AI to calculate wound measurements from images, are also coming next year.
Epic announced plans for a new staff scheduling application for physicians and nurses called “Teamwork” that’s coming soon. Additionally, Faulkner said Epic is “investigating” how it could facilitate claims submissions directly through its software, without the need for a middleman like a clearinghouse. If Epic is successful, it could mark a major change in the way that insurance claims are processed throughout the health-care industry.
Whether these features will all come to fruition — and whether health systems will actually use them — isn’t yet known. Even so, Epic closed its presentation Tuesday by showcasing a lofty demo about where the company believes its technology can go.
The future
Seth Hain, senior vice president of research and development at Epic, facilitated the demo. He spoke to an AI agent through the MyChart app about his recovery after a supposed wrist surgery and answered questions about his pain. The agent instructed Hain to open his camera and bend his wrist back so it could evaluate the progress of his healing. The agent said Hain’s wrist extension was about 60 to 75 degrees, which meant his recovery was ahead of schedule, compared to data from similar patients in Epic’s Cosmos database.
Hain asked the agent if he could start playing pickleball again, and it told him that he “should still wait a little longer” before doing so.
In a meeting with reporters after the presentation, Hain said the demo was happening in real-time without human intervention. However, that capability is so new that Epic doesn’t even have a name for it yet, and Hain said it will likely be a few years before it’s more widely available.
“It is very, very, very early in regards to how and where the community, the broader medical community, will adopt that type of thing, but it’s viable,” he said.
Packages with the logo of Amazon are transported at a packing station of a redistribution center of Amazon in Horn-Bad Meinberg, western Germany, on Dec. 9, 2024.
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Amazon is considering showing a tariff surcharge on items sold via its site for ultra-low-price items, called Haul, the company confirmed to CNBC.
“The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “This was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.”
Punchbowl News reported earlier on Tuesday that Amazon would “soon” begin displaying the cost of tariffs alongside the price of each product, citing a source familiar with the company’s plans.
The report drew the ire of the White House, which called Amazon’s reported plans a “hostile and political act.”
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Qwen3 is Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”
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Alibaba released the next generation of its open-sourced large language models, Qwen3, on Tuesday — and experts are calling it yet another breakthrough in China’s booming open-source artificial intelligence space.
In a blog post, the Chinese tech giant said Qwen3 promises improvements in reasoning, instruction following, tool usage and multilingual tasks, rivaling other top-tier models such as DeepSeek’s R1 in several industry benchmarks.
The LLM series includes eight variations that span a range of architectures and sizes, offering developers flexibility when using Qwen to build AI applications for edge devices like mobile phones.
Qwen3 is also Alibaba’s debut into so-called “hybrid reasoning models,” which it says combines traditional LLM capabilities with “advanced, dynamic reasoning.”
According to Alibaba, such models can seamlessly transition between a “thinking mode” for complex tasks such as coding and a “non-thinking mode” for faster, general-purpose responses.
“Notably, the Qwen3-235B-A22B MoE model significantly lowers deployment costs compared to other state-of-the-art models, reinforcing Alibaba’s commitment to accessible, high-performance AI,” Alibaba said.
The new models are already freely available for individual users on platforms like Hugging Face and GitHub, as well as Alibaba Cloud’s web interface. Qwen3 is also being used to power Alibaba’s AI assistant, Quark.
China’s AI advancement
AI analysts told CNBC that the Qwen3 represents a serious challenge to Alibaba’s counterparts in China, as well as industry leaders in the U.S.
In a statement to CNBC, Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, said the Qwen3 series is a “significant breakthrough—not just for its best-in-class performance” but also for several features that point to the “application potential of the models.”
Those features include Qwen3’s hybrid thinking mode, its multilingual support covering 119 languages and dialects and its open-source availability, Sun added.
Open-source software generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution. At the start of this year, DeepSeek’s open-sourced R1 model rocked the AI world and quickly became a catalyst for China’s AI space and open-source model adoption.
“Alibaba’s release of the Qwen 3 series further underscores the strong capabilities of Chinese labs to develop highly competitive, innovative, and open-source models, despite mounting pressure from tightened U.S. export controls,” said Ray Wang, a Washington-based analyst focusing on U.S.-China economic and technology competition.
According to Alibaba, Qwen has already become one of the world’s most widely adopted open-source AI model series, attracting over 300 million downloads worldwide and more than 100,000 derivative models on Hugging Face.
Wang said that this adoption could continue with Qwen3, adding that its performance claims may make it the best open-source model globally — though still behind the world’s most cutting-edge models like OpenAI’s o3 and o4-mini.
Chinese competitors like Baidu have also rushed to release new AI models after the emergence of DeepSeek, including making plans to shift toward a more open-source business model.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported in February that DeepSeek is accelerating the launch of its successor to its R1, citing anonymous sources.
“In the broader context of the U.S.-China AI race, the gap between American and Chinese labs has narrowed—likely to a few months, and some might argue, even to just weeks,” Wang said.
“With the latest release of Qwen 3 and the upcoming launch of DeepSeek’s R2, this gap is unlikely to widen—and may even continue to shrink.”
Uber on Monday informed employees, including some who had been previously approved for remote work, that it will require them to come to the office three days a week, CNBC has learned.
“Even as the external environment remains dynamic, we’re on solid footing, with a clear strategy and big plans,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in the memo, which was viewed by CNBC. “As we head into this next chapter, I want to emphasize that ‘good’ is not going to be good enough — we need to be great.”
Khosrowshahi goes on to say employees need to push themselves so the company “can move faster and take smarter risks” and outlined several changes to Uber’s work policy.
Uber in 2022 established Tuesdays and Thursdays as “anchor days” where most employees must spend at least half of their work time in the company’s office. Starting in June, employees will be required in the office Tuesday through Thursday, according to the memo.
That includes some employees who were previously approved to work remotely. The company said it had already informed impacted remote employees.
“After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”
The company also changed its one-month paid sabbatical program, according to the memo. Previously, employees were eligible for the sabbatical after five years at the company. That’s now been raised to eight years, according to the memo.
“This program was created when Uber was a much younger company, and when reaching 5 years of tenure was a rare feat,” Khosrowshahi wrote. “Back then, we were in the office five (sometimes more!) days of a week and hadn’t instituted our Work from Anywhere benefit.”
Khosrowshahi said the changes will help Uber move faster.
“Our collective view as a leadership team is that while remote work has some benefits, being in the office fuels collaboration, sparks creativity, and increases velocity,” Khosrowshahi wrote.
The changes come as more companies in the tech industry cut costs to appease investors after over-hiring during the Covid-19 pandemic. Google recently began demanding that employees who were previously-approved for remote work also return to the office if they want to keep their jobs, CNBC reported last week.
Last year, Khosrowshahi blamed remote work for the loss of its most loyal customers, who would take ride-sharing as their commute to work.
“Going forward, we’re further raising this bar,” Khosrowshahi’s Monday memo said. “After a thorough review of our existing remote approvals, we’re asking many remote employees to come into an office. In addition, we’ll hire new remote roles only very sparingly.”
Uber’s leadership team will monitor attendance “at both team and individual levels to ensure expectations are being met,” Khosrowshahi wrote.
Following the memo, Uber employees immediately swarmed the company’s internal question-and-answer forum, according to correspondence viewed by CNBC. Khosrowshahi said he and Nikki Krishnamurthy, the company’schief people officer, will hold an all-hands meeting on Tuesday to discuss the changes.
Many employees asked leadership to reconsider the sabbatical change, arguing that the company should honor the original eligibility policy.
“This isn’t ‘doing the right thing’ for your employees,” one employee commented.
Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
