AI is improving lives right now.

Google's tuberculosis screening AI now reads chest X-rays deep inside a South African gold mine

At the IDWeek conference, Google reported where its chest X-ray model for tuberculosis screening is now in use. Through Nexus AI, a Pretoria company that turned it into a medical device certified under EU rules, it runs in about 40 facilities in South Africa, Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast, with three more countries in progress. More than 90 clinicians there have reviewed over 25,000 X-rays, with results in under 45 seconds instead of weeks. At the Mponeng gold mine, portable X-ray kits screen miners four kilometers underground with no internet connection. Separately, Indonesia's health ministry is tuning Google's open MedGemma and MedSigLIP models on its own X-rays, aiming to screen 50 million people a year.

Google maps the world's forest types at 10-meter detail for the EU deforestation law

Google DeepMind and Google Research, with the World Resources Institute and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, released Forest Typology, a global map sorting every 10-meter patch of land into primary forest, naturally regenerating forest, planted forest, plantations, tree crops or other land. Checked against more than 9,000 expert-reviewed sites, it named the right forest type 90 percent of the time. It is built as the 2020 baseline for the EU deforestation regulation, which bars coffee, cocoa, palm oil and wood grown on land cleared after that year. The map, plus an early time series running from 2017 through 2025, is free on Google Earth Engine under an open license.

Microsoft's open-source tool sharpens weather forecasts two to six weeks out

Microsoft researchers, with MIT and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, published a method in Nature that uses machine learning to correct the systematic errors in existing forecast models rather than replacing them. Called Probabilistic Bias Correction, it improved the European Centre's physics model on 98 percent of precipitation targets and 92 percent of temperature targets, and doubled the accuracy of its newer AI forecasting system in the study. It runs on ordinary processors and is open source, and the nonprofit Rhiza Research is testing it with Kenya's national weather service ahead of a strong El Niño rainy season.

Google's AMIE chatbot interviewed real urgent-care patients, and doctors found it useful

A study in The Lancet, led by Google and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, tested Google's AMIE diagnostic chatbot with 98 real patients, who chatted with it from home before an urgent primary care visit while physicians watched in real time. No conversation had to be stopped under the study's safety rules. AMIE's list of possible diagnoses included the doctors' final diagnosis in 90 percent of cases, and clinicians said its summaries helped them prepare for three in four visits. AMIE made no treatment decisions, and the authors say larger trials are needed before patient-facing AI is used at scale.

Google's Guided Vision describes the world aloud for blind and low-vision Android users

Google has launched Guided Vision in Gemini Live on compatible Android phones. It gives spoken, real-time descriptions of whatever the camera sees, from small print and expiration dates to a dropped object, and answers follow-up questions. It is built for people who are blind or have low vision, opens from Google's TalkBack screen reader or an accessibility shortcut, and gives audio cues to help line up a shot. Google warns against using it for navigation or obstacle detection, or in place of a cane.

Alibaba open-sources a CT model that beat 23 of 26 radiologists

Alibaba's DAMO Academy published RADAR in the journal Science and released it: a vision-language model trained on more than 400,000 contrast-enhanced abdominal CT exams paired with their clinical reports, with no manual annotation. It flags 146 findings across 18 organs in a single pass, including pancreatic and liver cancers, and averaged an area under the curve of 0.913 across nearly 40,000 real-world exams. Against 26 radiologists it outperformed 23, and radiologists working with it raised detection sensitivity by 10 percent while taking 30 percent less time. The code is Apache 2.0, but the model weights on Hugging Face carry a non-commercial Creative Commons license.