The Tesla Motors Inc. logo.

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Tesla is now training a new Full Self-Driving model boasting “big” video improvements and size upgrades, CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday on social media.

“Tesla is training a new FSD model with ~10X params and a big improvement to video compression loss. Probably ready for public release end of next month if testing goes well,” the tech billionaire said in an update on the X social media platform.

FSD is a partially automated driving system that seeks to enable Tesla vehicles to navigate and maneuver in driving situations with minimal driver assistance. Owners must keep their hands on the wheel, and remain ready to take over steering or braking at any time. It also serves as an upgrade to the company’s Autopilot driver assistant, which is already available in Europe and China.

The system is based on an artificial intelligence model that helps the car’s cameras and sensors perceive the world around it. Musk’s comment on “10X params” refers to a larger parameter size. In the case of AI models, that usually means it is a bigger model that is trained on more data and is more capable.

FSD has been a central pillar of Musk’s strategy for Tesla’s revenue growth and tech advancement in the increasingly competitive electric vehicle market, where Chinese automakers have stepped up to the plate.

Tesla bulls expect the company’s future will be in autonomy as Musk’s automaker focuses on ramping up its offering of self-driving features.

Tesla launched its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, this year.

But right now, the market is focused on how Tesla’s core business of selling cars is doing. And it has been challenging. Tesla most recently reported a 16% decline in automotive revenue in the second quarter and has also been notching steep declines in its European sales.

The company’s stock has taken a bruising this year that has been exacerbated by reputational damage from Musk’s now-severed relationship with the White House administration. Tesla shares were down 23.55% this year as of Wednesday morning.

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Dr. Priti Patel, CMIO at John Muir Health, uses Ambience before starting a patient encounter.

Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare

Artificial intelligence startup Ambience Healthcare on Tuesday announced a new medical coding model that outperforms doctors by 27%.

Ambience uses AI to draft clinical notes in real-time as doctors consensually record their visits with patients. The company used tools from OpenAI to build the new model.

The startup is part of a fiercely competitive market that has taken off as health-care executives search for solutions to help reduce staff burnout and daunting administrative workloads. 

The company’s new model can listen to patient encounters and identify ICD-10 codes, which are internationally standardized classifications for different diseases and conditions. There are about 70,000 ICD-10 codes that are regularly updated and used to facilitate billing and other reporting processes in health care. 

Ambience said its new ICD-10 model can reduce billing mistakes and help clinicians and professional coders work more efficiently. The model notched a “27% relative improvement over physician benchmarks,” according to a release on Tuesday.  

“We’re not replacing doctors or coders,” Brendan Fortuner, Ambience’s head of engineering, told CNBC in an interview. “What we’re doing is we’re liberating them from administration, and we’re fixing mistakes that help make health care better, safer, more cost-effective.”

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Documenting ICD-10 codes has traditionally been a labor-intensive task in health care, but it’s a crucial way to track outcomes, mortalities and morbidities in a standardized way, said Dr. Will Morris, the chief medical officer of Ambience.

“If you think about it from a data perspective, it’s how you can compare and contrast clinician A to B, or health system A to B,” Morris said in an interview. “It’s the cornerstone for quality.”

Ambience’s technology is used at more than 40 health-care organizations, like Cleveland Clinic and UCSF Health. It has raised more than $100 million, according to PitchBook, from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Andreessen Horowitz and the OpenAI Startup Fund. 

The company is reportedly seeking fresh capital at a valuation of over $1 billion, according to a report from The Information. Ambience declined to comment on the report. 

Ambience trained its new AI model using OpenAI’s reinforcement fine-tuning technology. This technology allows companies to tune OpenAI’s best reasoning models for very specific domains, like health care. 

To validate the model, Ambience tested it against a “gold panel” set of labels, the company said. The labels were established by a group of expert clinicians who evaluated complex clinical cases and came to an agreement on what the right codes were. 

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Ambience’s AI platform for compliant documentation, CDI, and coding.

Courtesy of Ambience Healthcare

The company then recruited 18 different board-certified doctors and compared their performance on ICD-10 coding accuracy to the model’s performance. That comparison showed the Ambience technology performed 27% better than the physician baseline. 

“It shows for the first time that an AI system can actually surpass clinician experts at a very, very important administrative task, especially in coding,” Fortuner said. 

Ambience already has similar capabilities available for other medical codes like Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes, and Fortuner said it’s exploring how to tackle other areas like prior authorizations, utilization management and clinical trial matching. 

The company’s new ICD-10 model will roll out to customers over the summer.

“Getting it right at the point of care is a fundamental change,” Morris said.

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Google DeepMind co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis gives a conference during the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the telecom industry’s biggest annual gathering, in Barcelona on February 26, 2024.

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PARIS — Deepseek’s AI model “is probably the best work” out of China, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google DeepMind said on Sunday, but added that the company didn’t show any new scientific advances.

Last month, China’s Deepseek released a research paper that rattled global markets after claiming its AI model was trained at a fraction of the cost of leading AI players and on less-advanced Nvidia chips.

Deepseek’s announcement sparked an aggressive stock sell-off and sparked considerable debate over whether large tech firms are spending too much on AI infrastructure.

Hassabis praised Deepseek’s model as “an impressive piece of work.”

“I think its probably the best work I’ve seen come out of China,” Hassabis said at a Google-hosted event in Paris ahead of the AI Action Summit that is being hosted by the city.

The DeepMind CEO said the AI model shows that Deepseek can do “extremely good engineering” and that it “changes things on a geopolitical scale.”

However, from a technology point of view, Hassabis said it was not a big change.

“Despite the hype, there’s no actual new scientific advance … it’s using known techniques [in AI],” he said, adding that the hype around Deepseek has been “exaggerated a little bit.”

The DeepMind CEO said that the company’s Gemini 2.0 Flash models, which Google this week released to everyone, are more efficient than DeepMind’s model.

Deepseek’s claims around its low cost and the chips it uses have been questioned by experts, who think the cost of development for the Chinese firm’s models is higher.

AGI five years away

The AI world has been debating for years when the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, will happen. AGI broadly refers to AI that is smarter than humans.

Hassabis said that the AI industry is “on the path towards AGI,” which he describes as “a system that exhibits all the cognitive capabilities humans have.”

“I think we’re close now, you know, maybe we are only, you know, perhaps 5 years or something away from a system like that which would be pretty extraordinary,” Hassabis said.

“And I think society needs to get ready for that and what implications that will have. And, you know, make sure that we derive the benefits from that and the whole society benefits from that, but also we mitigate some of the risks, too.”

Hassabis’ comments mirror those of others in the industry who have suggested that AGI could be closer to reality.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman this year said that he is “confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.”

Still, many in the industry have also flagged multiple risks associated with AGI. One of the biggest concerns is that humans will lose control of the systems they created, a view shared by prominent AI scientists Max Tegmark and Yoshua Bengio, who recently shared their concerns with CNBC over this form of AI.

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Tesla launched a revamped version of its Model Y in China.

Tesla

Tesla on Friday announced a revamped version of its popular Model Y in China, as the U.S. electric car giant looks to fend off challenges from domestic rivals.

The Model Y will start at 263,500 Chinese yuan ($35,935), with deliveries set to begin in March. That is 5.4% more expensive than the starting price of the previous Model Y.

A spokesperson for Tesla China said that the new Model Y is only open for pre-sale in the Chinese market, rather than being launched globally.

Tesla’s Model Y refresh comes after the auto giant this month reported its first ever annual decline in overall deliveries for 2024.

Elon Musk’s electric vehicle firm is facing heightened competition around the world, from startups and traditional carmakers in Europe. In China, the company continues to face an onslaught of rivals from BYD to newer players like Xpeng and Nio.

Jason Low, principal analyst at Canalys, notes that the Tesla Model Y was the best-selling EV in China in 2024 and that the popularity of the car “remains high.” However, he noted that the competition in the sports utility vehicle (SUV) segment with vehicles priced between 250,000 yuan and 350,000 yuan “has been fierce.”

“Tesla must showcase compelling smart features, particularly a unique but well localized cockpit and services ecosystem,” as well as “effective” semi-autonomous driver assistance features “to ensure its competitiveness in the market,” Low added.

Tesla is offering a number of incentives for customers to buy the Model Y including a five-year 0% interest financing plan.

The new Model Y can accelerate from 0 kilometers per hour to 100 kilometers per hour in 4.3 seconds, Tesla said, exceeding the speed capabilities of the previous vehicle. The Model Y Long Range has a further driving range on a single charge versus its predecessor.

Tesla has not introduced a new model since it began delivering the Cybertruck in late 2023, which starts at nearly $80,000.

Investors have been yearning for a new mass-market model to reinvigorate sales. Tesla has previously hinted that that a new affordable model could be launched in the first half of 2025.

Despite Tesla’s headwinds, the company’s stock is up nearly 70% over the last 12 months, partly due to CEO Musk’s close relationship with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang speaks during Computex 2024 in Taipei on June 4, 2024. 

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Nvidia on Thursday announced a slew of partnerships with major Indian firms and launched a Hindi language model, as the American chip company looks to ramp up business in one of the world’s biggest technology markets.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke about the firm’s tech and efforts in India at its AI Summit in Mumbai — an event that featured Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar and India’s richest person Mukesh Ambani, the chair of Reliance Industries.

Amid the flurry of partnerships announced on the occasion was a deal between Reliance and Nvidia to build AI infrastructure in India. Huang said that Nvidia is working with companies including Yotta and Tata Communications to also build computing infrastructure. Huang said that by the end of the year, India will have “20 times more compute” than just over a year ago, referring to the country’s computing power.

“India used to be a country that produced software. [India] exported software. In the future, India is going to export AI,” Huang said.

Nvidia also announced Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi 4B — a small language model in Hindi, the widest-spoken of India’s multitude of languages. Companies running Nvidia hardware can deploy this language model, while Indian IT consultancy Tech Mahindra is using Nvidia’s model to launch its own Hindi AI model, Project Indus 2.0.

Small language models are trained on much more compact and specific datasets compared to large language models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4. 

Nvidia is also collaborating with other major Indian IT companies like Infosys, Wipro and TCS to train around 500,000 developers in creating and implementing AI agents with its software.

Nvidia’s ramp-up in India takes place as the company looks to find new regions to boost business, while the breakneck speed growth it has experienced over the last year and a half begins to slow down.

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been looking to lure in major foreign technology companies, particularly in the semiconductor industry, to increase investment in the country.

India aims to establish itself as a major player in the semiconductor industry, as it strives for self-sufficiency in manufacturing. Modi has outlined various objectives to advance the semiconductor sector, setting a significant target to grow the country’s electronics industry from its current value of around $155 billion to $500 billion by 2030.

“India is very, very dear to the world’s computer industry, central to the IT industry,” Huang said.

Ambani’s presence at the Nvidia event also highlighted his conglomerate’s ambition to become a leading AI player in India. Reliance Jio, the telecommunications firm under Ambani’s Reliance Industries and an upstart less than a decade ago, is now India’s biggest mobile provider.

“Jio aims to build large scale AI infrastructure to democratize AI leveraging data emanating from almost a billion Internet users in next few years. With this planned investments and scale, Jio aims to be the flag bearer of proliferating AI adoption from consumers to enterprises to government,” Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

This “unlocks significant opportunity” for Nvidia and other companies, Shah added.

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