OpenAI Launches GPT-5 with Healthcare Focus as Altman Champions Medical Applications

OpenAI unveiled GPT-5 yesterday, positioning the model as a breakthrough tool for healthcare applications. CEO Sam Altman described the new model as "a legitimate Ph.D. expert" during the announcement, emphasizing its potential to transform how individuals understand and navigate their healthcare journeys.

"It can help you understand your healthcare and make decisions on your journey," Altman said during the announcement. "Anyone, pretty soon, will be able to do more than anyone in history could." The CEO noted that health remains one of ChatGPT's primary use cases across its user base.

The company's performance metrics support these claims. OpenAI reported that GPT-5 achieved exceptional results on health-related evaluations, marking it as their most reliable healthcare model to date. "GPT-5 is the best model ever for health," Altman said. "[GPT-5] scores higher than any previous model on HealthBench, an evaluation that we created with 250 physicians on real-world tasks."

Early adopters from the healthcare sector have validated the model's capabilities. Biotechnology company Amgen, which develops and manufactures therapeutics, was among the first organizations to test GPT-5, applying it to drug design challenges. "What Amgen scientists found is that GPT-5 is particularly good at deep reasoning with complex data," Olivier Godement, head of product and platform at OpenAI, said during the announcement. "Think analyzing scientific literature or clinical data."

Oscar Health, the New York-based health insurance company, also participated in early testing and determined GPT-5 was "the best model for clinical reasoning." Godement explained this includes applications like "mapping complex medical policy to patient conditions."

The launch includes three model variants: GPT-5, GPT-5 mini, and GPT-5 nano, all available immediately. OpenAI also announced adoption of GPT-5 across the entire U.S. federal workforce.

"If history is a teacher, and we've seen it with GPT-4, we are going to see many use cases emerge over the coming weeks and months that all of us cannot even imagine," Godement said.

This development follows OpenAI's May introduction of HealthBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate AI models in healthcare using real-world applicability and physician judgment. The benchmark comprises 5,000 conversations simulating interactions between AI models and users or clinicians.

However, industry experts continue to highlight both opportunities and risks. Harjinder Sandhu, CTO of health platforms and solutions at Microsoft, recently discussed AI's dual nature in healthcare settings. "One of the things that AI systems can do is summarize patients in various contexts depending on who is asking the question and for what purpose," Sandhu said. "The problem with that is that if the AI system hallucinates information, it makes up information about that patient, or it omits important information that can lead to catastrophic consequences for that patient. That's an example of a really high-value but also high-risk use case."

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