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Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, speaks on artificial intelligence during a Bruegel think tank conference in Brussels, Belgium, on Jan. 20, 2020.

Yves Herman | Reuters

Google on Wednesday announced MedLM, a suite of new health-care-specific artificial intelligence models designed to help clinicians and researchers carry out complex studies, summarize doctor-patient interactions and more.

The move marks Google’s latest attempt to monetize health-care industry AI tools, as competition for market share remains fierce between competitors like Amazon and Microsoft. CNBC spoke with companies that have been testing Google’s technology, like HCA Healthcare, and experts say the potential for impact is real, though they are taking steps to implement it carefully.

The MedLM suite includes a large and a medium-sized AI model, both built on Med-PaLM 2, a large language model trained on medical data that Google first announced in March. It is generally available to eligible Google Cloud customers in the U.S. starting Wednesday, and Google said while the cost of the AI suite varies depending on how companies use the different models, the medium-sized model is less expensive to run. 

Google said it also plans to introduce health-care-specific versions of Gemini, the company’s newest and “most capable” AI model, to MedLM in the future.

Aashima Gupta, Google Cloud’s global director of health-care strategy and solutions, said the company found that different medically tuned AI models can carry out certain tasks better than others. That’s why Google decided to introduce a suite of models instead of trying to build a “one-size-fits-all” solution. 

For instance, Google said its larger MedLM model is better for carrying out complicated tasks that require deep knowledge and lots of compute power, such as conducting a study using data from a health-care organization’s entire patient population. But if companies need a more agile model that can be optimized for specific or real-time functions, such as summarizing an interaction between a doctor and patient, the medium-sized model should work better, according to Gupta.

Real-world use cases

A Google Cloud logo at the Hannover Messe industrial technology fair in Hanover, Germany, on Thursday, April 20, 2023.

Krisztian Bocsi | Bloomberg | Getty Images

When Google announced Med-PaLM 2 in March, the company initially said it could be used to answer questions like “What are the first warning signs of pneumonia?” and “Can incontinence be cured?” But as the company has tested the technology with customers, the use cases have changed, according to Greg Corrado, head of Google’s health AI. 

Corrado said clinicians don’t often need help with “accessible” questions about the nature of a disease, so Google hasn’t seen much demand for those capabilities from customers. Instead, health organizations often want AI to help solve more back-office or logistical problems, like managing paperwork.  

“They want something that’s helping them with the real pain points and slowdowns that are in their workflow, that only they know,” Corrado told CNBC. 

For instance, HCA Healthcare, one of the largest health systems in the U.S., has been testing Google’s AI technology since the spring. The company announced an official collaboration with Google Cloud in August that aims to use its generative AI to “improve workflows on time-consuming tasks.” 

Dr. Michael Schlosser, senior vice president of care transformation and innovation at HCA, said the company has been using MedLM to help emergency medicine physicians automatically document their interactions with patients. For instance, HCA uses an ambient speech documentation system from a company called Augmedix to transcribe doctor-patient meetings. Google’s MedLM suite can then take those transcripts and break them up into the components of an ER provider note.

Schlosser said HCA has been using MedLM within emergency rooms at four hospitals, and the company wants to expand use over the next year. By January, Schlosser added, he expects Google’s technology will be able to successfully generate more than half of a note without help from providers. For doctors who can spend up to four hours a day on clerical paperwork, Schlosser said saving that time and effort makes a meaningful difference. 

“That’s been a huge leap forward for us,” Schlosser told CNBC. “We now think we’re going to be at a point where the AI, by itself, can create 60-plus percent of the note correctly on its own before we have the human doing the review and the editing.” 

Schlosser said HCA is also working to use MedLM to develop a handoff tool for nurses. The tool can read through the electronic health record and identify relevant information for nurses to pass along to the next shift. 

Handoffs are “laborious” and a real pain point for nurses, so it would be “powerful” to automate the process, Schlosser said. Nurses across HCA’s hospitals carry out around 400,000 handoffs a week, and two HCA hospitals have been testing the nurse handoff tool. Schlosser said nurses conduct a side-by-side comparison of a traditional handoff and an AI-generated handoff and provide feedback.

With both use cases, though, HCA has found that MedLM is not foolproof.

Schlosser said the fact that AI models can spit out incorrect information is a big challenge, and HCA has been working with Google to come up with best practices to minimize those fabrications. He added that token limits, which restrict the amount of data that can be fed to the model, and managing the AI over time have been additional challenges for HCA. 

“What I would say right now, is that the hype around the current use of these AI models in health care is outstripping the reality,” Schlosser said. “Everyone’s contending with this problem, and no one has really let these models loose in a scaled way in the health-care systems because of that.”

Even so, Schlosser said providers’ initial response to MedLM has been positive, and they recognize that they are not working with the finished product yet. He said HCA is working hard to implement the technology in a responsible way to avoid putting patients at risk.

“We’re being very cautious with how we approach these AI models,” he said. “We’re not using those use cases where the model outputs can somehow affect someone’s diagnosis and treatment.”

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Google also plans to introduce health-care-specific versions of Gemini to MedLM in the future. Its shares popped 5% after Gemini’s launch earlier this month, but Google faced scrutiny over its demonstration video, which was not conducted in real time, the company confirmed to Bloomberg

In a statement, Google told CNBC: “The video is an illustrative depiction of the possibilities of interacting with Gemini, based on real multimodal prompts and outputs from testing. We look forward to seeing what people create when access to Gemini Pro opens on December 13.”

Corrado and Gupta of Google said Gemini is still in early stages, and it needs to be tested and evaluated with customers in controlled health-care settings before the model rolls out through MedLM more broadly. 

“We’ve been testing Med-PaLM 2 with our customers for months, and now we’re comfortable taking that as part of MedLM,” Gupta said. “Gemini will follow the same thing.” 

Schlosser said HCA is “very excited” about Gemini, and the company is already working out plans to test the technology, “We think that may give us an additional level of performance when we get that,” he said.

Another company that has been using MedLM is BenchSci, which aims to use AI to solve problems in drug discovery. Google is an investor in BenchSci, and the company has been testing its MedLM technology for a few months.  

Liran Belenzon, BenchSci’s co-founder and CEO, said the company has merged MedLM’s AI with BenchSci’s own technology to help scientists identify biomarkers, which are key to understanding how a disease progresses and how it can be cured. 

Belenzon said the company spent a lot of time testing and validating the model, including providing Google with feedback about necessary improvements. Now, Belenzon said BenchSci is in the process of bringing the technology to market more broadly.  

“[MedLM] doesn’t work out of the box, but it helps accelerate your specific efforts,” he told CNBC in an interview. 

Corrado said research around MedLM is ongoing, and he thinks Google Cloud’s health-care customers will be able to tune models for multiple different use cases within an organization. He added that Google will continue to develop domain-specific models that are “smaller, cheaper, faster, better.”  

Like BenchSci, Deloitte tested MedLM “over and over” before deploying the technology to health-care clients, said Dr. Kulleni Gebreyes, Deloitte’s U.S. life sciences and health-care consulting leader.

Deloitte is using Google’s technology to help health systems and health plans answer members’ questions about accessing care. If a patient needs a colonoscopy, for instance, they can use MedLM to look for providers based on gender, location or benefit coverage, as well as other qualifiers. 

Gebreyes said clients have found that MedLM is accurate and efficient, but it’s not always great at deciphering a user’s intent. It can be a challenge if patients don’t know the right word or spelling for colonoscopy, or use other colloquial terms, she said. 

“Ultimately, this does not substitute a diagnosis from a trained professional,” Gebreyes told CNBC. “It brings expertise closer and makes it more accessible.”

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CoreWeave is the first cloud provider to deploy Nvidia’s latest AI chips

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CoreWeave is the first cloud provider to deploy Nvidia's latest AI chips

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in Taipei, Taiwan, on June 2, 2024.

Ann Wang | Reuters

Nvidia’s Blackwell Ultra chips, the company’s next-generation graphics processor for artificial intelligence, have been commercially deployed at CoreWeave, the companies announced on Thursday.

CoreWeave has received shipments of Dell-built shipments based around Nvidia’s GB300 NVL72 AI systems, Dell said on Thursday. It’s the first cloud provider to install systems based around Blackwell Ultra.

The Blackwell Ultra is Nvidia’s latest chip, expected to ship in volume during the rest of the year. The systems that CoreWeave is installing are liquid-cooled and include 72 Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 36 Nvidia Grace CPUs. The systems are assembled and tested in the U.S., Dell said.

CoreWeave shares rose 6% during trading on Thursday, Dell shares were up about 2% and Nvidia rose less than 2%.

The announcement is a milestone for Nvidia.

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AI developers still clamor for the latest Nvidia chips, which have improvements that make them better for training and deploying models.

Nvidia said Blackwell Ultra can produce 50 times more AI content than its predecessor, Blackwell.

Investors closely watch how Nvidia manages the transition when it announces new AI chips to see if there are production issues or delays. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in May that Blackwell Ultra shipments would start in the current quarter.

It’s also a win for CoreWeave, a cloud provider that rents access to Nvidia GPUs to other clouds and AI developers. Although CoreWeave is smaller than the cloud services operated by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, its ability to offer Nvidia’s latest chips first give it a way to differentiate itself.

CoreWeave historically has a close relationship with Nvidia, which owns a stake in the cloud provider. CoreWeave went public earlier this year, and the stock price has quadrupled since its IPO.

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IPO market gets boost from Circle’s 500% surge, sparking optimism that drought may be ending

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IPO market gets boost from Circle's 500% surge, sparking optimism that drought may be ending

Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle Internet Group, the issuer of one of the world’s biggest stablecoins, and Circle Internet Group co-founder Sean Neville react as they ring the opening bell, on the day of the company’s IPO, in New York City, U.S., June 5, 2025.

NYSE

For over three years, venture capital firms have been waiting for this moment.

Tech IPOs came to a virtual standstill in early 2022 due to soaring inflation and rising interest rates, while big acquisitions were mostly off the table as increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe turned away potential buyers.

Though it’s too soon to say those days are entirely in the past, the first half of 2025 showed signs of momentum, with June in particular producing much-needed returns for Silicon Valley’s startup financiers. In all, there were five tech IPOs last month, accelerating from a monthly average of two since January, according to data from CB Insights.

Highlighting that group was crypto company Circle, which more than doubled in its New York Stock Exchange debut on June 5, and is now up sixfold from its IPO price for a market cap of $42 billion. The stock got a big boost in mid-June after the Senate passed the GENIUS Act, which would establish a federal framework for U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins.

Venture firms General Catalyst, Breyer Capital and Accel now own a combined $8 billion worth of Circle stock even after selling a fraction of their holdings in the offering. Silicon Valley stalwarts Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital are set to soon profit from Figma’s IPO, after the design software vendor filed its public prospectus on Tuesday. Since its $20 billion acquisition agreement with Adobe was scrapped in late 2023, Figma has been one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in startup land.

It’s “refreshing and something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” said Eric Hippeau, managing partner at early-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau, regarding the exit environment. “I’m not sure that we are confident that this can be a sustained trend yet, but it’s been very encouraging.”

Another positive sign for the industry the past couple months was the performance of artificial infrastructure provider CoreWeave, which went public in late March. The stock was relatively stagnant for its first month on the market but shot up 170% in May and another 47% in June.

The IPO market is coming back, but it won't be linear, says Lazard CEO Peter Orszag

For venture firms, long considered the lifeblood of risky tech startups, IPOs are essential in order to generate profits for the university endowments, foundations and pension funds that allocate a portion of their capital to the asset class. Without handsome returns, there’s little incentive for limited partners to put money into future funds.

After a record year in 2021, which saw 155 U.S. venture-backed IPOs raise $60.4 billion, according to data from University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter, every year since has been relatively dismal. There were 13 such offerings in 2022, followed by 18 in 2023 and 30 last year, collectively raising $13.3 billion, Ritter’s data shows.

The slowdown followed the Federal Reserve’s aggressive rate-hiking campaign in 2022, meant to slow crippling inflation. As the lower-growth environment extended into years two and three, venture firms faced increasing pressure to return cash to investors.

‘Backlog of liquidity’

In its 2024 yearbook, the National Venture Capital Association said that even with a 34% increase in U.S. VC exit value last year to $98 billion, that number is 87% below the 2021 peak and less than half the average for the four years from 2017 through 2020. It’s a troubling dynamic for the 58,000 venture-backed companies that have raised a total of $947 billion from investors, according to the annual report, which is produced by the NVCA and PitchBook.

“This backlog of liquidity drought risks creating a ‘zombie company’ cohort — businesses generating operational cash flow but lacking credible exit prospects,” the report said.

Other than Circle, the latest crop of IPOs mostly consists of smaller and lesser-known brands. Health-tech companies Hinge Health and Omada Health are valued at about $3.5 billion and $1 billion, respectively. Etoro, an online trading platform, has a market cap of just over $5 billion. Online banking provider Chime Financial has a higher profile due largely to a years-long marketing blitz and is valued at close to $11.5 billion.

Meanwhile, the highest valued private companies like SpaceX, Stripe and Databricks remain on the sidelines, and AI highfliers OpenAI and Anthropic continue to raise massive amounts of cash with no intention of going public anytime soon.

Still, venture capitalists told CNBC that there are plenty of companies with the financial metrics to be public, and that more of them are readying for the process.

“The IPO market is starting to open and the VC world is cautiously optimistic,” said Rick Heitzmann, a partner at venture firm FirstMark in New York. “We are preparing companies for the next wave of public offerings.”

There are other ways to make money in the meantime. Secondary sales, a process that involves selling private shares to new investors, are on the rise, allowing early employees and investors to get some liquidity.

And then there’s what Mark Zuckerberg is doing, as he tries to position his company at the center of AI innovation and development.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Last month, Meta announced a $14 billion bet on Scale AI, taking a 49% stake in the AI startup in exchange for poaching founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his top engineers. The deal effectively bought out half of the stock owned by investors, leaving them with the opportunity to make money on the rest of their holdings, should a future acquisition or IPO take place.

The deal is a big win for Accel, which led Scale AI’s Series A round in 2017, and is poised to earn more than $2.5 billion in the transaction. Index Ventures led the Series B in 2018, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund led the Series C the following year at a valuation of over $1 billion.

Investors now hope the Federal Reserve will move toward a rate-cutting campaign, though the central bank hasn’t committed to one. There’s also ongoing optimism that regulators will make going public less burdensome. Last week, Reuters reported, citing sources familiar with the matter, that U.S. stock exchanges and the SEC have discussed loosening regulations to make IPOs more enticing.

Mike Bellin, who heads consulting firm PwC’s U.S. IPO practice, said he anticipates a diversity of IPOs across sectors in the second half of the year. According to data from PwC, pharma and fintech were among the most active sectors for deals through the end of May.

While the recent trend in IPO activity is an encouraging sign for investors, potential roadblocks remain.

Tariffs and geopolitical uncertainty delayed IPO plans from companies including Klarna and StubHub in April. Neither has provided an update on when they plan to debut.

FirstMark’s Heitzmann said the path forward is “not at all clear,” adding that he wants to see a strong quarter of economic stability and growth before confidently saying that the market is wide open.

Additionally, other than CoreWeave and Circle, recent tech IPOs haven’t had big pops. Hinge Health, Chime and eToro have seen relatively modest gains from their offer price, while Omada Health is down.

But virtually any activity beats what VCs were experiencing the last few years. Overall, Hippeau said recent IPO trends are generally encouraging.

“There’s starting to be kind of light at the end of the tunnel,” Hippeau said.

WATCH: Uptick in VC-backed startup deals

Uptick in VC-backed startup deals

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Tripadvisor stock surges 17% as Starboard Value builds sizable stake in online travel company

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Tripadvisor stock surges 17% as Starboard Value builds sizable stake in online travel company

The Tripadvisor logo is displayed on a tablet.

Mateusz Slodkowski | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Tripadvisor stock jumped 17% Thursday after Starboard Value revealed a more than 9% stake in the online travel company, according to a securities filing.

The position was valued at about $160 million as of Wednesday’s close.

Tripadvisor shares have been flat since the start of the year after plummeting more than 30% in 2024. Last year, the travel review and booking company said it created a special committee to explore potential options.

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Starboard Value has gained a reputation for pushing for changes such as new CEOs and cost cuts by acquiring significant shares in companies.

Most recently, the firm settled a proxy fight with Autodesk, where it gained two board seats. It has previously pushed for changes at Tinder parent Match Group, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and Salesforce.

The Wall Street Journal was the first to report the news late Wednesday.

Tripadvisor did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Starboard declined to comment on the news.

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