Bytes: Week in Review - Meta joins the AI assistant race
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Taking the pulse on health tech investment in an uncertain market. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCurdy Carino. Earlier this week marked 100 days of President Donald Trump's second term. And we're checking in with various parts of the tech world to see how all the changes are affecting business. On today's Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review, the state of health tech investment.

Plus, a massive data leak put California Blue Shield members' most sensitive medical details at risk. But first, Meta is launching a dedicated AI app that could go head-to-head with the likes of ChatGPT. The announcement came during a big week for big tech, with Meta and several other companies reporting earnings. Meta also hosted an AI developers conference it called Lomacon, named for its large language models.

To discuss all that, we're joined by Christina Farr, Managing Director at Manat Health.

Meta is getting very into the AI craze, as is every big tech company. It's funny, every time I read about llamas these days, I think of Llama Needs a Haircut, which is the new fun children's book I have to read every single night. But I was reading about this kind of new AI assistant, which is really fueled by voice. You can talk to it, you can ask it about what you should do that day, the weather, the traffic.

And it just reminded me so much of that movie, Her. It really feels like we're moving in that direction where we wake up in the morning and we don't turn around and speak to our spouse. We talk to Meta and the AI assistant that it's building. It feels more like a companion than anything I've seen before. Yeah.

That is interesting because one thing that sets Meta apart from a lot of the other sort of companies that are playing in the space is that it has, you know, this deep history in social media. It has collected a lot of personal data about the, you know, the people that use its various social media platforms. It is the biggest social media company in the world. And I wonder what that might mean for, you know, how this AI assistant might be different.

It's absolutely right. I mean, social, having that aspect of social, I think gives Meta an obvious path to do something like this. And as you see Facebook becoming less relevant to Gen Z, less relevant to millennials, and just kind of feeling like the platform that maybe our parents use increasingly, they need to find new angles with this audience. And I think that explains a lot of why they're

they're doing this in an AI context. I do wonder how this might be used with that same population I mentioned, the senior population in the context of loneliness.

And I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook thinking about that, especially given just all of this research that's come out about how loneliness is essentially the new smoking, just because of how it's linked to such negative health care consequences. So I could see that being an interesting angle there for Meta. All right. Well, we want to dig into a little bit more health tech.

Earlier this month, the insurance giant Blue Shield of California notified millions of customers of a potential data breach. Now, I know we all get these notifications all the time these days. This one was a little different. This wasn't, you know, a malicious message.

actor getting access to data was actually Blue Shield itself discovered it had sort of inadvertently shared protected health information of about almost five million members in California with Google through its use of Google's analytics platform. Christina, why is this so important?

Yeah, it really, in my mind, speaks to the need for us as a country to be thinking much more deeply around this issue of health data and privacy in the world that we live in. A lot of the rules were written at a time before insurance companies and other healthcare companies were really using a lot of social media platforms to reach their target population. And that brings up questions around what information should be protected

What information now is just already out there to the extent that consumers don't feel as much of a need for it to be held as private as it is? And then how do you balance all of that with user experience? So to me, this is important news, but I think it also brings up questions around how might we design privacy policy related to our health information in the time that we're living in.

Right, because one of the big concerns here is that Google, through its ad business, could have been using some of this very sensitive health data, you know, as granular as, you know, what kinds of claims were being filed, you know, for individual members specifically.

to then turn around and use that data for advertising, very targeted advertising to those folks. I mean, we reached out to Google and Blue Shield for comment on this. Google said, businesses, not Google, manage the data they collect and must inform users about its collection and use.

By default, any data sent to Google Analytics for measurement does not identify individuals, and we have strict policies against collecting private health information or advertising based on sensitive information. Basically, Blue Shield owns the data, and Google said it would delete it at any time if Blue Shield asked. Blue Shield has said that it severed this connection with Google Analytics and Google Ads and

in January of 2024 and has asked Google to stop using this member data. But Christina, I mean, this isn't the first time something like this has happened in digital health. And I'm guessing it might not be the last time until, you know, policies like the ones you're talking about come into play. Yeah, I mean, I think back to a time when there was a big blow up related to Google's partnership with the health system Ascension.

again, related to this issue of patient health information and the lack of just clear privacy rules and policies that really are relevant to the time that we live in. There's been issues with the social media platforms and

this kind of you know healthcare related advertising people are going online and searching for a related just symptom such it's just one of the most common ways in which people use the internet is to find out information about their health and increasingly they're using ai for this and so what are the right steps that need to be taken to protect people so

You know, in the old days, like you used to get penalized for having pre-existing conditions. That's no longer the case. But I think people still have a lot of fears that this information shouldn't end up in the wrong hands, whether it's life insurance, whether it's your employer or any other area in which, you know, you don't want health information spilling out. And so I do think that we need to, like I said, modernize and just rethink some of the rules to protect people because it's very haphazard right now.

So interesting what you mentioned about using AI in that fashion now. I mean, many people, you know, have been uploading even radiology reports, you know, to kind of have the chatbot break down in layman's terms what they're seeing. You know, Elon Musk on X was...

explicitly telling users to do this. So it does open up, I think, a very big gray area in terms of what is going to happen to that data. And people are collecting data all the time using wearable devices as well. I mean, there's a constant explosion now of just consumer-generated health information. How protected is that? If it's your choice to generate that information, what rights do you then have?

And that, to me, that's a very gray, gray area. We'll be right back. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Christina Farr, Managing Director at Manat Health.

All right, now we want to zoom out a bit to take a look at the landscape for health tech innovation in general and have you kind of take the pulse on how venture capital firms and startups have been responding to some of the developments over the first hundred days of the Trump administration. Of course, we have the tariffs. That's probably been the biggest factor. But how have those been affecting your world?

Well, as with anything, it depends. It's a very mixed bag. If you're in the world of biotech or medical device, it's very possible that the tariffs have been a very

a very negative impact for your business because of all the overseas manufacturing that you do. In theory, a lot of healthcare services, health systems, a lot of the healthcare industry is inherently a very domestic industry. So I've also spoken to economists who said, actually, healthcare is a pretty decent bet at this moment in time, just on a macro level. And then there's the area that I invest in, which is really the intersection of health and technology

emerging companies. And I think for those companies, it's mostly been a very difficult hundred days. If venture capital firms can't raise the same amount of money as they could a few years ago when the economy felt like it was booming, then of course that has a residual knock-on effect for startups who find it more difficult to raise money and therefore really just challenging to grow and scale. There's also been this massive surge

of funding for scientific research. There's been immigration crackdowns on international students.

important is, you know, the health of that kind of university research pipeline to innovation, to the startup world? It couldn't be more important. I mean, so much of the innovation that I see every day and have been fortunate enough to invest in has come out of university labs that just require grant funding. You know, I've heard it kind of likened to a potential brain drain. I

I'm talking to people in the scientific and medical community every day who are just terrified about their future prospects. I've read surveys that indicate that those sorts of people are looking to move to other countries, you know, even beyond funding cuts. I think we've all been reading about eroding trust in science and in expertise.

And I think that is something that, again, is just having that impact. The public doesn't recognize the importance as much as it used to of this kind of innovation. That was Christina Farr at Manat Health. You can find the full video of this episode of Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review on our YouTube channel, Marketplace APM. And subscribe if you haven't already to watch us every Friday.

Daniel Shin produced this episode. Jesus Alvarado also produces our show. Gary O'Keefe is our engineer. Daisy Palacios is the senior producer. Kelly Silvera is our executive producer. I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM. If there's one thing we know about social media, it's that misinformation is everywhere, especially when it comes to personal finance.

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