AMD's Helios takes on Nvidia; ChatGPT Health opens to all US adults

AMD used its Advancing AI event to launch Helios, its first full rack-scale system aimed squarely at Nvidia's grip on AI data centers. Each rack packs 72 of AMD's new Instinct MI455X GPUs with sixth-generation EPYC processors and Pensando networking, delivering up to 2.9 exaflops of inference performance. Microsoft will run Helios on Azure and Anthropic plans to install up to two gigawatts of the chips, with OpenAI and Meta also signed on. Systems ship in the second half of the year.

OpenAI made ChatGPT Health available to every US adult across its free and paid tiers, letting users connect Apple Health data and medical records from systems like Epic and Oracle Health for personalized guidance. The company says more than 300 million people now ask ChatGPT health questions each week, up from 230 million in January. The wider rollout lands a day after a Florida pastor sued OpenAI, alleging the chatbot gave a near-fatal suggestion to skip a doctor — a reminder of the stakes as general-purpose models move into medical advice.

The European Commission fined Google 890 million euros — about $1 billion — for breaking the Digital Markets Act, its first penalty against the company under the landmark competition law. Regulators split the fine in two: one part for ranking Google's own services above rivals in search, the other for blocking app developers from steering Google Play users toward cheaper offers elsewhere. Google has 60 days to change the practices or face further penalties, and says it is in "constructive" talks with Brussels.

Nearly 200 venture-backed startups, organized by the newly formed Little Tech Association, sent a letter urging the Trump administration not to ban US access to Chinese open-weight AI models. Signatories including Y Combinator and Proton argue that cheap open models from Moonshot AI and Alibaba are a lifeline for small companies, and that a broad prohibition would raise costs and hand even more power to a few dominant US labs. They asked for "targeted safeguards" rather than a blanket cutoff.

Feeding that same debate, AI researchers pushed back hard on the White House claim that Moonshot's Kimi K3 reached the frontier by secretly distilling Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. Skeptics point to the timeline — Fable 5 went public on July 1 and Kimi K3 shipped just 14 days later — and note that no logs or forensic evidence have been released. Others argue model outputs are not copyrightable in the first place, undercutting the administration's framing of distillation as technology theft.

Etched, a startup building chips hardwired specifically for the transformer models behind today's chatbots, raised $300 million, led by Sequoia, more than doubling its valuation to $10.3 billion. Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, and backers including Peter Thiel and Andrej Karpathy joined the round. Founded by three Harvard dropouts, Etched says it has already booked $1 billion in orders and is shipping its first systems — a bet that purpose-built silicon can undercut Nvidia's general-purpose GPUs on inference cost.

Anthropic upgraded Claude's voice mode so it now runs on the company's more capable Opus and Sonnet models, not just the lightweight Haiku that powered it before. Voice mode now defaults to whichever model you last used in text chat and can carry longer, more complex conversations. Paid users also get cross-app automation, letting voice commands reach into Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, Canva, and Notion. The update supports ten languages and rolls out across the Claude apps.