OpenAI's Health Push: 230M Users Turn to ChatGPT for Medical Advice

OpenAI is deepening its health research as millions of users already rely on ChatGPT for medical guidance. More than 230 million people use the tool for health-related questions each week, the company said, citing internal usage data.

Researcher Karan Singhal is leading the push to improve the accuracy and reliability of ChatGPT's health advice. Singhal, who joined OpenAI from Google Health, focuses on training the model to handle clinical queries with greater precision. The effort comes as regulators and medical professionals scrutinize AI-generated health information.

The company has not disclosed specific accuracy benchmarks or clinical trial plans. OpenAI said it is working with healthcare providers to validate responses, though it did not name partners. The initiative stops short of offering diagnostic or treatment recommendations, the company said.

Singhal's background includes work on Med-PaLM, Google's medical large language model. At OpenAI, he is applying similar methods to ChatGPT's general-purpose architecture. The challenge, he said in a company blog post, is balancing broad utility with domain-specific rigor.

OpenAI faces competition from specialized health AI startups and from Google's own medical models. The company's advantage is scale: ChatGPT's weekly active user base exceeds 200 million, giving it a distribution edge that rivals lack.

Critics argue that general-purpose chatbots are ill-suited for medical advice, citing risks of hallucination and outdated training data. OpenAI said it is investing in real-time fact-checking and source attribution to address those concerns. The company did not provide a timeline for releasing a dedicated health product.

For now, the health push remains a research project, not a commercial offering. OpenAI said it will publish findings and seek external review before expanding the tool's medical capabilities further.