What Happens When Everyone Has a Health Expert in Their Pocket? | OpenAI’s Karan Singhal

Jay Rughani (0:00)

5.3 plus trillion we spend on health care, if it were its own country, it would be the third largest GDP, and yet we have a ton of scarcity.

Karan Singhal (0:09)

OpenAI's mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity and give people access to trustworthy, abundant, reliable health intelligence. One of the stories that I was most touched by was the story of Nathan LeBenz. He basically had this kind of long saga with his son, where at some point he was suffering a lot of fatigue and irritableness and AI helped them navigate the process. And it turns out he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukaemia.

Jay Rughani (0:30)

Some of the work that you've done around mental health, there's a lot of complexity. How do you help guide a user on that given that could mean so many things?

Karan Singhal (0:37)

We've just been working with a bunch of licensed mental health experts across the world to think about the right ways to define model behavior and a bunch of tricky scenarios and ensure that we can get to a level of consensus where we can actually measure performance.

Jay Rughani (0:49)

Let's talk about trust. A person can be speaking to an LLM, really hoping to hear that everything is okay. But from a medical perspective, they need to hear perhaps something very different. How do you teach an AI to recognize the difference?

SPEAKER_3 (1:03)

More than 300 million people are already using ChatGPT for health and wellness questions every week. What happens when that AI becomes proactive, personalized and increasingly connected to the rest of your health care? In this episode, A16z partner Jay Rughani sits down with Karan Singhal, who leads health AI research at OpenAI to talk about the company's vision for making trustworthy health intelligence widely accessible. Karan explains why OpenAI is training medical expertise into its general purpose models, rather than building a separate health care model, how it works with hundreds of physicians to evaluate those systems, and why the goal isn't to replace doctors. Instead, he sees AI becoming a safety net and a quarterback, helping patients understand their health, helping clinicians catch things they might otherwise miss, and eventually navigating more of the fragmented work between visits.

They also get into what happens as medical intelligence becomes dramatically cheaper, how AI could shorten the years it can take for new medical knowledge to reach clinical practice, and the possibility of a health care move 37, an insight that initially surprises human experts, but ultimately changes how we understand or treat disease.

Jay Rughani (2:14)

Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. I'm Jay Rughani, a partner at a16z, leading investments in health care and biotechnology companies. I'm joined by Karan Singhal of OpenAI. He leads health AI research at OpenAI, and we've got a lot to talk about. Thanks for being here.

Karan Singhal (2:30)

Thanks for having me.

Jay Rughani (2:31)

I want to start with the big question. There was a report earlier this year, you all have talked about it publicly, hundreds of millions of people each week use ChatGPT for health related questions.

What are they asking? What are the kinds of questions they're asking that they're not getting from our main health care system?

Karan Singhal (2:49)

Yeah, let me zoom out and talk a little bit about why we're investing in health in the first place. So OpenAI's mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. And so we see that at a high level happening in three ways. The first is building and deploying AGI. So building capable models, building products around them, deploying them partnerships.

The second is preventing downside safety of various kinds. The third is making upside happen. And so we view health as a really, really concrete way to make upside happen and also work on some of the safety problems that come up in health care along the way.

And so really, we're really invested in making sure basically two things. One is that we can raise the floor of human health and give people access to trustworthy, abundant, reliable health intelligence for free or nearly free and really raise the ceiling as well and make things possible that weren't possible before. And so the best way to see the kind of raising the floor is really to think about how we've been working in the consumer space. And so as we reported, there's more than 300 million people weekly using CHASH GPT for health and wellness types of questions. And we take that as an incredibly important responsibility to get that right. And that's been rapidly growing over time.

I think one of the things that you see is just if you think about the experience of getting health care, even in the US, even in the Bay Area, if you're looking to get a specialist appointment, even here in the Bay Area, sometimes it can take weeks or months. You might spend a lot of time figuring out how to get an appointment and scheduling and all these kinds of things. And after all that time, maybe get 15 minutes with the doctor, where you don't feel adequately prepared and you maybe walk out of it thinking, oh, I had six more questions that I wanted to ask. And our hope is that AI can be part of this care journey with you. And health is not something that is just kind of restricted to these kind of 15-minute intervals. And AI can actually help you navigate your care journey. And so that actually reflects how people are using AI on the consumer side today. Like people are coming in with questions and concerns, information that they'd like to have. They want to figure out how to kind of navigate their care visits or ask questions or figure out how to follow up things that the doctor told them or things like this. And we're finding that in between these visits is when AI can help people most in the consumer side. And we're making similar investments on the clinician side and on the enterprise side as well.