Google boosts healthcare tools as Mistral and xAI expand capabilities

Major tech developments are shaping the AI landscape as Google enhances its healthcare capabilities, xAI expands into video generation through acquisition, and Mistral releases a more accessible model for broader applications. These parallel developments highlight how AI continues to penetrate critical sectors like healthcare while companies simultaneously work to make sophisticated AI technology more widely available through strategic acquisitions and resource-efficient models.

The big picture: Google’s health-focused AI updates target both consumers and medical professionals, showcasing AI’s growing role in healthcare accessibility and research.

• Google expanded its AI-powered health knowledge panels to support Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese queries while adding a “What People Suggest” feature to provide peer insights from similar medical experiences.
• The company launched new APIs for its Health Connect platform, enabling apps to read and write medical record information across more than 50 data types.
• Google announced several research tools including AI Co-Scientist (based on Gemini 2.0), TxGemma for drug discovery, and Capricorn AI Tool to help physicians identify personalized cancer treatments.

Meanwhile: xAI is expanding its capabilities through strategic acquisition, positioning itself for growth in the competitive GenAI video market.

• Elon Musk‘s xAI acquired Hotshot, a startup specializing in AI-powered video generation.
• Hotshot will continue developing video models using xAI’s Colossus supercluster, though existing customers must download their videos by March 30.

On the accessibility front: Mistral AI’s new small model demonstrates the ongoing trend toward more resource-efficient AI systems.

• Mistral Small 3.1 is an open-source model with 24 billion parameters that can process both text and images.
• The model runs on more modest hardware, including a single RTX 4090 GPU or a Mac with 32GB RAM, processing information at 150 tokens per second.
• This development makes sophisticated AI capabilities more accessible for both enterprise and consumer applications.