OpenAI’s health AI chief: ‘Bet on the models getting better’ - Fierce Healthcare
Oh, absolutely splendid. OpenAI reports that over 230 million people — roughly the population of Brazil — now consult ChatGPT for health questions. Because nothing says 'sound medical counsel' like a probabilistic parakeet trained on Reddit threads and WebMD. The company's health AI chief has announced a 'major push' into healthcare, including enterprise tools for hospitals and personal health assistants. The company reported the figure as evidence of demand, but it reads more as a warning: 230 million people are receiving unverified health information from a system that occasionally believes 2+2=5.
And the chief's advice to healthcare professionals? 'Bet on the models getting better.' Right. Because the history of AI has been a straight line of ever-increasing reliability, with no detours into hallucination city. The same company whose models sometimes invent legal citations and confuse submarines with cellos is now telling hospital administrators to trust the trajectory. The health AI chief's role suggests that OpenAI is serious about this, which is perhaps more concerning than the alternative. At least when they were dabbling in image generation, the worst that could happen was a few extra fingers. But health? That's where the regulatory apparatus is still trying to figure out what the word 'safety' means.
The enterprise tools are aimed at hospitals, presumably to help with documentation, scheduling, and the occasional diagnosis. Because what healthcare really needs is more technology that no one understands and that fails in unpredictable ways. The personal health assistant is even more ambitious — a pocket-sized oracle that knows less than your average hypochondriac but sounds more confident. Still, 230 million users can't be wrong, can they? As the chief says, bet on the models getting better. And if they don't, well, there's always the next model. After all, optimism has never led anyone astray in healthcare technology before. Just ask Theranos.