OpenAI's Latest Hardware Push And HealthBench Work Will Accelerate Healthcare AI Capabilities
OpenAI's latest push into hardware has opened up an entirely new realm of possibilities for the ... More company.
OpenAI, the famed company behind ChatGPT, released HealthBench, a new standard to measure AI outputs specifically for healthcare use cases. The company indicates that creation of the standard involved the partnership of 262 physicians across 60 countries to develop 5,000 conversations with customized 'rubrics' for each to determine the efficacy and quality of responses from models.
The company announced that their vision for the benchmark is to ultimately ensure that healthcare models should be:
Furthermore, the company also announced last week that it would be acquiring Jony Ive's startup IO for $6.5 billion to make its inroads into the world of hardware and devices. Ive is most famous for his contributions to and design of the original iPhone and other flagship products in Apple's early days of moving into the world of mobile. This move signals OpenAI's formal commitment to build a device that could potentially integrate its AI work; very little is known about what the device may be, but many are speculating that it will be 'unobtrusive [and] fully aware of a user's life and surroundings.'
Why is all of this important?
The intersection of healthcare and AI is rapidly growing across the ecosystem, especially as technology companies and large hyper-scalers are investing billions of dollars to ramp up models specifically for healthcare use-cases. Additionally, new hardware and devices add an entirely new layer to this phenomenon, as users will be able to better use these devices to interact with their surroundings, track their day-to-day health metrics further and have a true 'intelligent companion'-- almost akin to having a live concierge clinician with them at all times.
Take for example Meta, which has created one of the most successful open-source models with Llama. Earlier this month, the company released a seminal case study which examined how a major health system (MHS) utilized the Llama 3.1 8B model to generate clinical documentation and ease workflows. Specifically, the model was used to 'reduce time spent abstracting data from electronic health records (EHRs) while maintaining patient confidentiality' and alleviate manual clinical annotation tasks and chart review. The study ultimately found that the use of the platform resulted in nearly 70-80% less manual annotations, creating the potential for nearly $176 in savings per patient record. Scaled across large healthcare systems over the course of multiple years, this could lead to potentially billions of dollars saved and thousands of hours recovered from clinical staff. Additionally, their much anticipated Orion glasses product line has massive potential to augment human health capabilities.
Another great example is Google's Med-PaLM large language model. The original version of the model was incredibly successful, having received more than a 60% score on the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam (USMLE). Since then, the company has made significant progress and Med-PaLM 2 scored 86.5% on medical benchmark tests. Last week, Google also introduced its latest MedGemma model, which has even higher comprehension capabilities for medical text and images. Google has worked with numerous healthcare organizations and systems to deploy its models across a variety of use cases, ranging from clinical documentation and workflow optimization to agentic uses and task automation. Google also announced its own upcoming line of AI powered glasses, Android XR.
Indeed, the landscape as a whole is growing immensely. A paper that was published in Nature in 2023 describes the impact that the growth of medically tuned large language models will have in medicine: 'LLMs have the potential to improve patient care by augmenting core medical competencies such as factual knowledge or interpersonal communication skills.' Specifically, the paper documents a variety of areas which are already capturing significant value from the development of these advanced models, including augmenting communication with patients, creating opportunities for better transmission of complex medical information, collating and summarizing data from a variety of data sources and formats, and even in medical research, which often requires large swaths of data to be analyzed to generate meaningful and concise insights.
OpenAI's push with HealthBench, and the larger industry push towards creating broader device ecosystems, will inevitably advance healthcare and societal health outcomes, if done in a safe, well-tested and patient centered manner.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
16 minutes ago
- Yahoo
AI startups revolutionize coding industry, leading to sky-high valuations
By Anna Tong and Krystal Hu SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, return on investment in generative AI has been elusive, but one area stands out: software development. So-called code generation or 'code-gen' startups are commanding sky-high valuations as corporate boardrooms look to use AI to aid, and sometimes to replace, expensive human software engineers. Cursor, a code generation startup based in San Francisco that can suggest and complete lines of code and write whole sections of code autonomously, raised $900 million at a $10 billion valuation in May from a who's who list of tech investors, including Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. Windsurf, a Mountain View-based startup behind the popular AI coding tool Codeium, attracted the attention of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which is now in talks to acquire the company for $3 billion, sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. Its tool is known for translating plain English commands into code, sometimes called 'vibe coding,' which allows people with no knowledge of computer languages to write software. OpenAI and Windsurf declined to comment on the acquisition. 'AI has automated all the repetitive, tedious work,' said Scott Wu, CEO of code gen startup Cognition. 'The software engineer's role has already changed dramatically. It's not about memorizing esoteric syntax anymore.' Founders of code-gen startups and their investors believe they are in a land grab situation, with a shrinking window to gain a critical mass of users and establish their AI coding tool as the industry standard. But because most are built on AI foundation models developed elsewhere, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or DeepSeek, their costs per query are also growing, and none are yet profitable. They're also at risk of being disrupted by Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, which all announced new code-gen products in May, and Anthropic is also working on one as well, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The rapid growth of these startups is coming despite competing on big tech's home turf. Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, launched in 2021 and considered code-gen's dominant player, grew to over $500 million in revenue last year, according to a source familiar with the matter. Microsoft declined to comment on GitHub Copilot's revenue. On Microsoft's earnings call in April, the company said the product has over 15 million users. LEARN TO CODE? As AI revolutionizes the industry, many jobs - particularly entry-level coding positions that are more basic and involve repetition - may be eliminated. Signalfire, a VC firm that tracks tech hiring, found that new hires with less than a year of experience fell 24% in 2024, a drop it attributes to tasks once assigned to entry-level software engineers are now being fulfilled in part with AI. Google's CEO also said in April that 'well over 30%' of Google's code is now AI-generated, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said last year the company had saved 'the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years' by using AI. Google and Amazon declined to comment. In May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at a conference that approximately 20 to 30% of their code is now AI-generated. The same month, the company announced layoffs of 6,000 workers globally, with over 40% of those being software developers in Microsoft's home state, Washington. 'We're focused on creating AI that empowers developers to be more productive, creative, and save time,' a Microsoft spokesperson said. 'This means some roles will change with the revolution of AI, but human intelligence remains at the center of the software development life cycle.' MOUNTING LOSSES Some 'vibe-coding' platforms already boast substantial annualized revenues. Cursor, with just 60 employees, went from zero to $100 million in recurring revenue by January 2025, less than two years since its launch. Windsurf, founded in 2021, launched its code generation product in November 2024 and is already bringing in $50 million in annualized revenue, according to a source familiar with the company. But both startups operate with negative gross margins, meaning they spend more than they make, according to four investor sources familiar with their operations. 'The prices people are paying for coding assistants are going to get more expensive,' Quinn Slack, CEO at coding startup Sourcegraph, told Reuters. Both Cursor and Windsurf are led by recent MIT graduates in their twenties, and exemplify the gold rush era of the AI startup scene. 'I haven't seen people working this hard since the first Internet boom,' said Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in Anysphere, the company behind Cursor. What's less clear is whether the dozen or so code-gen companies will be able to hang on to their customers as big tech moves in. 'In many cases, it's less about who's got the best technology -- it's about who is going to make the best use of that technology, and who's going to be able to sell their products better than others,' said Scott Raney, managing director at Redpoint Ventures, whose firm invested in Sourcegraph and Poolside, a software development startup that's building its own AI foundation model. CUSTOM AI MODELS Most of the AI coding startups currently rely on the Claude AI model from Anthropic, which crossed $3 billion in annualized revenue in May in part due to fees paid by code-gen companies. But some startups are attempting to build their own models. In May, Windsurf announced its first in-house AI models that are optimized for software engineering in a bid to control the user experience. Cursor has also hired a team of researchers to pre-train its own large frontier-level models, which could enable the company to not have to pay foundation model companies so much money, according to two sources familiar with the matter. Startups looking to train their own AI coding models face an uphill battle as it could easily cost millions to buy or rent the computing capacity needed to train a large language model. Replit earlier dropped plans to train its own model. Poolside, which has raised more than $600 million to make a coding-specific model, has announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services and is testing with customers, but hasn't made any product generally available yet. Another code gen startup Magic Dev, which raised nearly $500 million since 2023, told investors a frontier-level coding model was coming in summer 2024 but hasn't yet launched a product. Poolside declined to comment. Magic Dev did not respond to a request for comment.
CNN
16 minutes ago
- CNN
‘It is a whole different environment': Republicans revisit key Biden investigations with new momentum
The House Judiciary Committee is expected to interview former Hunter Biden special counsel David Weiss behind closed doors on Friday, two sources familiar with the interview told CNN, as part of a broader Republican effort to revisit previous probes into the Biden family that stalled last Congress but are gaining new momentum now that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House. The scheduled interview, which could still be moved, would be the second time the Republican-led panel will interview Weiss about his work as Republicans continue to probe whether the investigation was hampered by political interference. Weiss has still never testified publicly about his six-year criminal probe into the president's son, which included three convictions, but was ultimately short-circuited as a result of the former president's unconditional pardon of his son. House Judiciary Republicans have long wanted to call Weiss, the Trump-appointed US attorney, back for questioning after his first closed-door interview in 2023. Committee Republicans were also able to finally secure interviews with two Department of Justice tax division prosecutors involved in the Hunter Biden probe who they had been aggressively pursuing for months, one of the sources familiar told CNN. The Justice Department is working with Weiss to provide access to documents he may need for his interview, a person briefed on the matter said. Any delays in getting access to documents would be a scheduling issue and the ability to have personnel who can oversee it, the person briefed on the matter said. It's not the only Biden investigation Republicans are reexamining that leans into a fresh political appetite with GOP control of Washington. House Oversight Chair James Comer is returning to his probe of the former president's mental fitness in an entirely new landscape after a recent book by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson put Joe Biden's physical and mental decline back in the spotlight. Comer told CNN he is in the process of scheduling key interviews with Biden's White House physician, Dr. Kevin O'Connor, and other senior aides who had all rebuffed his efforts last Congress. Beyond the five initial interviews from Biden's orbit, the Republican Chairman told CNN he wants to look at the executive orders Biden signed in his last six months in office and use of the autopen. In the weeks immediately after Biden's disastrous 2024 debate performance that unraveled his presidential campaign and upended the Democratic party, Comer requested to interview Biden's doctor and subpoenaed three senior Biden aides to discuss their roles in the Biden White House, which never materialized. Now, Comer said in an interview with CNN, 'it is a whole different environment.' At the time of his 2024 interview requests, Comer's impeachment inquiry into the Biden family's business dealings had fallen apart and the Biden administration felt no incentive to comply with the House Oversight Committee. Probing Biden's decline now, Comer says, will be a lot easier than trying to convince his colleagues of an alleged Biden family foreign influence peddling scheme, which even Comer conceded was difficult to do, particularly in a minute or less on Fox News. Republicans failed to uncover evidence to support their core allegations against the president, and lacked the votes in their divided, narrow majority last Congress to impeach the president. 'The money laundering and the shell companies, the average American couldn't understand that. I mean, that was hard to understand,' Comer told CNN. 'You know, I did not do a good job explaining that.' But with his investigation into Biden's mental and physical decline, Comer said, 'people see a president that clearly is in decline. They saw it in the debate.' Democrats sought to dismantle the Republican-led 11 month impeachment inquiry into Biden last Congress at every turn. Comer told CNN that although those Democrats aren't jumping at the opportunity to cooperate now, he does not see them as being obstructive either. 'I take that as a step in the right direction,' he told CNN. Tapper and Thompson's book documents how Biden, his closest aides and his family forged ahead with the former president's doomed 2024 reelection bid despite signs of his physical and mental decline. In a previous statement to CNN, a Biden spokesman criticized the book, saying that evidence shows that 'he was a very effective president.' Former Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips, who launched a long-shot challenge to Biden and was outspoken about his concerns over the former president's age, told CNN he did not think there needed to be an investigation on Capitol Hill at this point into Biden's fitness as president. 'This case already went to trial, the jury of American voters convicted the party of the accused, and handed out the harshest political punishment possible-losing the single most consequential election in modern history,' Phillips told CNN. Instead, Phillips called on Biden to authorize his physician to disclose his health file and condition under oath. 'Only if the former president refuses, or if questioning uncovers possible criminal activity, should an investigation be initiated,' Phillips added. Biden was recently diagnosed with an 'aggressive form' of prostate cancer.
Bloomberg
21 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
Trump Revokes Biden-Era Rule on Emergency Abortions in Hospitals
The Trump administration rescinded guidance put in place by former President Joe Biden that directed US hospitals to provide abortions on an emergency basis when they're medically necessary to stabilize patients. The guideline was established in July 2022 under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, just weeks after the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v. Wade decision that protected national abortion rights. It was enacted under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after women reported being turned away from hospitals while facing serious pregnancy complications, including severe bleeding.
