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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle on Oct. 5, 2021.

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Amazon has discontinued a secretive effort to develop an at-home fertility tracker, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter.

The company had been working to launch a fertility monitoring device and companion smartphone app for the past four years as part of a project codenamed “Encore,” said the people, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press. The team sat within Amazon’s Grand Challenge, also known as its Special Projects division, the sources said.

Last month, Amazon told people working on the tracker that it was disbanding the team. Those being laid off will remain on Amazon’s payroll until Dec. 27, but won’t be expected to work during that time, according to documents reviewed by CNBC.

If staffers don’t secure another job by that date, Amazon will provide them with a “lump sum” severance payment equal to one week of salary for every six months of tenure at the company, the documents said.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has been reeling in costs companywide since late 2022, when inflationary pressures and rising interest rates led to a slowdown across the tech and consumer markets. In addition to slashing more than 27,000 jobs, Jassy has shuttered several projects, ranging from a roving sidewalk robot to a telehealth offering and a rapid delivery service.

The wave of frugality marks a distinct departure from the approach taken by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Jassy’s predecessor, who was known for greenlighting experimental projects and giving employees extended runway to develop them, even if they burned cash along the way. Grand Challenge was one of the hallmarks of that era.

Bezos launched Grand Challenge in 2014 as a way for Amazon to tinker with riskier projects that may or may not see the light of day. Grand Challenge was the brains behind a pair of connected eyeglasses equipped with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant and a machine learning tool for analyzing medical records.

Other Grand Challenge projects, like the Amazon Care telehealth service, a video-calling device for kids, a virtual tours service and an augmented reality headset for meetings were discontinued.

On the morning of Oct. 28, employees working on the fertility tracker were told to join a videoconference where a director of the team informed them that the project was ending. The call lasted about two minutes, one of the people said.

Amazon CEO says layoffs will continue into 2023

A layoff notice viewed by CNBC was signed by Doug Weibel, who took over as the head of Grand Challenge after its founding leader, Babak Parviz, left in 2022 and joined Madrona Venture Group.

Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, confirmed the layoffs and the existence of the project in a statement to CNBC. Roughly 100 employees will be laid off, Callahan confirmed.

“Following a recent review, we’ve decided to discontinue this project within Grand Challenge, and we’re working directly with employees whose roles are impacted to support them through the transition and help them find other opportunities within Amazon,” Callahan said.

Predicting fertility with saliva

The project was born out of the company’s 2020 acquisition of Wisconsin-based startup bluDiagnostics, the sources said.

BluDiagnostics was founded in 2015 by Weibel, Katie Brenner and Jodi Schroll, all of whom joined Grand Challenge following the purchase. The startup had developed a thermometer-like device, called FertilityFinder, to help women track their fertility from home by testing their saliva and measuring two key hormones, estradiol and progesterone. The results of the test were viewable through a corresponding app.

Business Insider reported on aspects of the fertility device in 2022, when its codename was Project Tiberius.

The team was working to develop its own saliva collection device and mobile app, which could predict when a user might be in the fertile window. Users could also log their period symptoms, sexual activity and other data to assist with tracking their fertility. There are similar offerings on the market from companies including Inne, Oova, Ava and Mira, along with fertility and ovulation tracking apps like Flo, Clue and Max Levchin’s Glow.

Amazon initially aimed to release the product this year, but the timing was pushed out after the team encountered technical issues with the device, one of the people said. It was a costly endeavor and required significant upfront investments for lab research and development, in addition to the high salaries for scientists and engineers, the sources said, adding that the team’s weekly overhead was roughly $1.5 million. Amazon didn’t comment on the figure.

Only one project now remains active within Grand Challenge. Its focus is on health tech, the people said.

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Trump announces $100 billion investment in U.S. from TSMC, calls it ‘most powerful company’ in world

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Trump announces 0 billion investment in U.S. from TSMC, calls it 'most powerful company' in world

C.C. Wei, TSMC Group CEO, stands on the future site of a chip factory under the name European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) during a symbolic ground-breaking ceremony. 

Sebastian Kahnert | Picture Alliance | Getty Images

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing will pour $100 billion into bolstering chip manufacturing in the U.S., President Donald Trump announced Monday.

The president called the investment a “tremendous move by the most powerful company in the world.” The new capital brings TSMC’s total investment in the U.S. to $165 billion and will go toward building five new fabrication facilities in Arizona.

The announcement from TSMC, which supplies semiconductors to the likes of Nvidia and Apple for artificial intelligence use, supports the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to make the U.S. an artificial intelligence hub.

Last month, Trump announced a multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure project with Oracle, OpenAI and Softbank. He’s also made numerous calls to bring semiconductor production back to the U.S. after much of the manufacturing industry moved abroad. Advancing semiconductor production in the U.S. is a matter of economic and national security, Trump said Monday.

Trump has repeatedly called out and accused Taiwan of stealing the U.S. chip manufacturing business and touted tariffs on semiconductor imports. The company’s finance chief, Wendell Huang, told CNBC in January that he was confident the new White House administration would continue funding the company’s U.S. ambitions.

TSMC has already made strides to expand its footprint in the U.S prior to Monday’s announcement. The company committed $12 billion in 2020 to build its first U.S. chip factory in Arizona, later raising that investment to $65 billion with a third factory. It has also gained U.S. government support through a $6.6 billion subsidy from the U.S. Commerce Department.

WATCH: Broadcom and TSMC exploring deals for parts of Intel, according to WSJ

Broadcom and TSMC exploring deals for parts of Intel, according to WSJ

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Microsoft unveils new voice-activated AI assistant for doctors

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Microsoft unveils new voice-activated AI assistant for doctors

Microsoft is giving its health-care artificial intelligence tools a makeover. 

The company on Monday unveiled a new voice-activated AI assistant that combines capabilities from its dictation solution, Dragon Medical One, and ambient listening solution, DAX Copilot, into one tool.

“Dragon Copilot” will be able to help doctors quickly pull information from medical sources and automatically draft clinical notes, referral letters, post-visit summaries and more, according to the company. It’s Microsoft’s latest effort to help health-care workers cut down their daunting clerical workloads, which are a major source of burnout in the industry.

Clinicians spend nearly 28 hours a week on administrative tasks like documentation, for instance, according to an October study from Google Cloud.

“Through this technology, clinicians will have the ability to focus on the patient rather than the computer, and this is going to lead to better outcomes and ultimately better health care for all,” Dr. David Rhew, global chief medical officer at Microsoft, said Thursday in a briefing with reporters.

Microsoft acquired Nuance Communications, the company behind Dragon Medical One and DAX Copilot, for about $16 billion in 2021. As a result, Microsoft has become a major player in the fiercely competitive AI scribing market, which has exploded in popularity as health systems have been looking for tools to help address burnout. 

AI scribes like DAX Copilot allow doctors to draft clinical notes in real time as they consensually record their visits with patients. DAX Copilot has been used in more than 3 million patient visits across 600 health-care organizations in the last month, Microsoft said.   

Other companies like Abridge, which has raised more than $460 million according to PitchBook, and Suki, which has raised nearly $170 million, have developed similar scribing tools. Microsoft’s updated interface could help it stand out from its competitors. 

Dragon Copilot is accessible through a mobile app, browser or desktop, and it integrates directly with several different electronic health records, the company said. 

Clinicians will still be able to draft clinical notes with the assistant like they could with DAX Copilot, but they’ll be able to use natural language to edit their documentation and prompt it further, Kenn Harper, general manager of Dragon products at Microsoft, told reporters on the call.

For instance, a doctor could ask questions like, “Was the patient experiencing ear pain?” or “Can you add the ICD-10 codes to the assessment and plan?” Physicians can also ask broader treatment-related queries such as, “Should this patient be screened for lung cancer?” and get an answer with links to resources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

WellSpan Health, which treats patients across 250 locations and nine hospitals throughout central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland, has been testing out Dragon Copilot with a group of clinicians in recent months. 

One of those clinicians is Dr. David Gasperack, chief medical officer of primary care services at WellSpan. It’s still early days, but Gasperack told CNBC the assistant is easy to use and has been more accurate than Microsoft’s existing offerings. 

“We’ve been asked more and more over time to do more administrative tasks that pull us away from the patient relationship and medical decision making,” Gasperack said. “This allows us to get back to that so we can focus on the patient, truly think about what’s needed.”

Microsoft declined to share the cost of Dragon Copilot but said the pricing structure is “competitive.” It will be easy for existing customers to upgrade to the new offering, the company added.   

Dragon Copilot will be generally available in the U.S. and Canada starting in May, Microsoft said. The roll out will expand to the U.K., the Netherlands, France and Germany in the months following.

“Our goal remains to restore the joy of practicing medicine for clinicians and provide a better experience for patients globally,” Rhew said.

Watch: What it’s like to have a doctor visit with AI

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Amazon-backed AI firm Anthropic valued at $61.5 billion after latest round

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Amazon-backed AI firm Anthropic valued at .5 billion after latest round

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Anthropic on Monday closed its latest funding round at a $61.5 billion post-money valuation, the company confirmed to CNBC.

The $3.5 billion round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and other investors included Salesforce Ventures, Cisco Investments, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, D1 Capital Partners and Jane Street, among others.

Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup backed heavily by Amazon, was founded by former OpenAI research executives. It launched Claude in March 2023, and like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, Claude has exploded in popularity as businesses incorporate generative AI chatbots across sales, marketing and customer service functions.

The startup plans to use the latest funding to advance its development of next-generation AI, particularly to “expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion in Asia and Europe,” according to a release.

Read more CNBC reporting on AI

In December, Anthropic’s revenue hit an annualized $1 billion, which was an increase of roughly 10x year over year, a source told CNBC at the time. The company’s revenue comes primarily from enterprise sales, and its clients currently include startups like Cursor, Codeium and Replit, as well as larger businesses like Zoom, Snowflake, Pfizer, Thomson Reuters and Novo Nordisk, the company behind Ozempic, according to a release.

Anthropic also spotlighted in its release about the funding round that its technology now fuels Amazon’s Alexa+, “bringing Claude to millions of households and Prime members.”

Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO, said in a release that the latest investment “fuels our development of more intelligent and capable AI systems that expand what humans can achieve” and that “continued advances in scaling across all aspects of model training are powering breakthroughs in intelligence and expertise.”

News of the latest funding round after Google in January agreed to a new investment of more than $1 billion in Anthropic, a source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC at the time. The fresh funding built on Google’s past investments of $2 billion in Anthropic and 10% ownership stake in the startup, as well as a large cloud contract between the two companies. Anthropic is most well known for its Claude AI chatbot.

The generative AI market, which includes Anthropic and OpenAI as well as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, is predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade. Amazon and Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s principal investor, are backing generative AI startups with hefty investments as well as developing their own technologies.

Amazon announced that it would invest an additional $4 billion in Anthropic in November. That brought Amazon’s total investment in the startup to $8 billion. Amazon remains a minority investor, Anthropic confirmed to CNBC at the time, and does not have a board seat.

As part of the November investment, Amazon Web Services became Anthropic’s “primary cloud and training partner.” Anthropic has used Amazon Web Services’ Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and deploy its largest AI models since then.

Anthropic ramped up its technology development throughout last year, and in October, the startup said that its AI agents were able to use computers like humans can to complete complex tasks. Anthropic’s Computer Use capability allows its technology to interpret what’s on a computer screen, select buttons, enter text, navigate websites and execute tasks through any software and real-time internet browsing, the startup said.

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