OpenAI buys local-first, plus Claude and MedGemma health updates
trust is hard to win, easy to lose, and expensive to acquire.
One week after launching ChatGPT Health, OpenAI dropped $100M on Torch, a 4-person team with a pre-release product. Torch’s whole thing? Pulling data from various sources and keeping your health records completely on-device. techcrunch
That’s a fascinating move. ChatGPT Health asks users to upload medical records to OpenAI’s servers. Torch was building the opposite: AI that never sees your data leave your phone.
So why pay $100M for a pre-launch company doing the thing you just chose not to do? A few theories:
Talent acqui-hire. Four people who figured out local health AI are probably worth a lot right now. This is the team that did Forward Health, the ZIRP-era teched-up doctor offices. They were a thing when we were doing uber for doctor house calls at Heal. Our Beverly Hills patients used to thank us for seeing their families at home because we kept them from doing the “sick walk of shame” down to Forward Health at the Century City mall.
Hedging their bets. Maybe OpenAI knows that “trust us with your medical records” is a hard sell for a lot of people.
Future pivot. On-device inference is getting better fast. Maybe ChatGPT Health v2 looks very different (see MedGemma 1.5 below)
Whatever the reason, the timing is notable. OpenAI is clearly thinking hard about the privacy question in health AI.
Anthropic releases healthcare offerings. I tried them.
One week after ChatGPT Health, Anthropic rolls out their own h.c. and life sciences features. announcement / h.c. page
Two things that matter here:
Health evals. Anthropic finally published performance on MedCalc Bench and MedAgentBench. Up to this point, I couldn’t find any official health-related eval for their models. I’m going to cover these benchmarks in depth in an upcoming Evals part 2 post.
Healthcare MCPs. Connectors to CMS Coverage determinations, ICD-10 codes, NPI registry, and PubMed. And they’re publicly available! This is genuinely useful for building health tools.
But here’s the thing: I tried HealthEx to connect my actual health records to Claude. It didn’t find any of them. The chat experience was... just a Claude chat. Nothing felt different.
The announcements are impressive. The reality, at least for now, is a work-in-progress. We’re still in the “promise vs. product” phase for consumer health AI.
Google releases MedGemma 1.5 4B
Meanwhile, Google quietly dropped an open medical imaging model. MedGemma excels at interpreting CT scans and MRIs, with strong scores on EHRQA and MedQA. I covered MedQA in my previous evals post and will include EHRQA in the next one.
The interesting bit: it’s open-source and fine-tunable in Vertex AI. For builders, that’s more useful than another closed API. Especially since these models are small enough to run on device. g research
