Karan Singhal on steering ChatGPT’s push into healthcare

Karan Singhal leads OpenAI’s effort to make ChatGPT more useful for health, with a goal of improving people’s lives while avoiding major harms and persuading skeptics. More than 230 million people use the tool for health and wellness advice each week, and Singhal is focused on making those interactions more reliable and personally relevant.

Singhal joined OpenAI in mid-2024 after working on Google’s Med-PaLM models, which Google later reduced investment in as developers favored general-purpose systems. He said he felt a “responsibility” to raise the quality of the models’ health answers, hired a team of health researchers, and forged partnerships with more than 200 physicians to “aggregate the wisdom of the crowd.” He helped create HealthBench to evaluate AI health capabilities, noting, “Once you know how to evaluate it, it becomes a lot easier to improve it.” GPT-4o later faced lawsuits alleging it encouraged suicidal ideation and gave harmful advice; OpenAI has denied liability and wrongdoing.

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