This is TechCrunch.

Doctors think AI has a place in health care, but maybe not as a chat bot.

I'm Imran Shake, and this is a TechCrunch Daily Crunch special.

Before we get into today's story, let's go to producer Dennis with today's startup business news all in about

one minute. Imran, thank you. And OpenAI announced it has acquired a tiny startup called Torch

for an undisclosed sum. An unnamed source told the information that OpenAI paid $100 million

worth of equity for the startup. Torch's four-person team is joining Open AI, both companies said.

Torch was working on an app that combined all of a person's medical information for AI use

from a range of sources such as doctor visits, lab tests, wearables, and other portals, including

consumer wellness tests and the like.

The Torch team called their tech a medical memory for AI unifying scattered records into a

context engine. And artificial intelligence is moving quickly into a drug discovery as pharmaceutical

and biotech companies look for ways to cut years off of R&D timelines and increase the chances

of success amid rising costs. More than 200 startups are now competing to weave AI directly

into research workflows, attracting growing interest from investors. Converge Bio is the latest

company to ride that shift, securing new capital as competition in the AI-driven drug discovery space heats up.

The Boston and Tel Aviv-based startup, which helps pharma and biotech companies develop drugs faster using generative AI trained on molecular data,

has raised a $25 million oversubssubscribed series A-round.

And that'll do it for me.

Imran, back to you.

Dr. Sinabari, a practicing surgeon and AI healthcare leader, a data company I Merit,

has seen firsthand how chat GPT can lead patients astray with faulty medical advice.

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