The Information · Tech & AI
TIER 4 Thu, 28 Aug 2025 17:32:50 +0000 (UTC)
It was easy to miss last week’s announcement that a 12-year veteran of Facebook and Instagram is becoming vice president of health products at OpenAI with the goal of improving “healthcare outcomes and access.” But it’s not hard to see where this is going.͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | | | Aug 28, 2025 ---|--- | # Applied AI --- | | By Amir Efrati ---|--- | | | | Supported by | ---|--- | | _Hi! If you’re finding value in our Applied AI newsletter, I encourage you to consider subscribing to The Information. It contains exclusive reporting on the most important stories in tech, like_this one revealing how public software companies define net retention rates in highly questionable ways _.Save up to $250 on your first year of access.___It was easy to miss last week’s announcement that Ashley Alexander, a 12-year veteran of Facebook and Instagram, is becoming vice president of health products at**OpenAI** , with the goal of improving “healthcare outcomes and access.” Alexander’s LinkedIn post didn’t give clues about exactly what products she will oversee, but it’s not hard to see where this is going.People use ChatGPT for a multitude of health-related reasons. I’ve heard of a parent who fed the chatbot a bevy of health research papers on rare illnesses in order to help figure out a diagnosis for their child. I know lots of people who use the chatbot to develop health regimens, from food to exercise and muscle-building. Still others share their bloodwork with ChatGPT to spot problems. For instance, the chatbot can sometimes figure out that the medication or supplements people take are aggravating certain conditions noted in their blood labs.ChatGPT can do these things because the models powering it were trained in part on health information and have been reviewed by physicians as part of the post-training process, to improve the way it answers health questions. Plus, the mounds of health documents people have willingly uploaded to the chatbot also could help it train new models.While there’s no credible talk of ChatGPT replacing a human doctor, there’s overwhelming anecdotal evidence that the chatbot is a font of ideas for improving health and can spot trends or patterns in health data that individual doctors might not recognize—or even know how to recognize. I’ve seen this with close friends and family, whose doctors agreed with some of the recommendations that ChatGPT gave them. Surely OpenAI has noticed the rise of its partial namesake, **OpenEvidence** , an AI tool physicians use to find answers to their questions or to analyze peer-reviewed studies. The answers provide full citations of where the medical information is coming from—the New England Journal of Medicine and other specialty journals, for starters. OpenEvidence said earlier this year that the models it developed scored perfectly on the U.S. medical licensing exam. Notably, one of OpenEvidence’s co-founders told Fierce Healthcare that OpenAI‘s ChatGPT-5 got 97% of answers right, based on OpenEvidence’s own evaluation.The four-year-old OpenEvidence has raised hundreds of millions of dollars this year alone, most recently at a $3.5 billion private valuation, from the likes of **Sequoia Capital** and **Kleiner Perkins**.We can’t say for sure that OpenAI will license all the best medical journals and pursue a similar product, but it seems likely that the company will play to ChatGPT’s strengths in the biggest possible markets. Medical diagnosis and analysis for both consumers and physicians is a big market. (A lot of medical research sources are free, by the way, so AI firms are free to analyze them.)You can be sure Alexander has a broad mandate to develop such products, given that her soon-to-be boss, the incoming chief of applications, Fidji Simo, said herself that she was joining OpenAI because of its potential to solve health problems._In other news…_ The hiring comes as the “AI medical scribe” field is also heating up. Last week, the largest electronic health records firm, **Epic** , said it would bake audio transcription tools from **Microsoft’s Nuance** into its new “AI charting” system, Fierce reported. These tools allow doctors to record their conversations with patients and organize the information writing, saving doctors the trouble of doing it themselves. (I checked with an executive at a large San Francisco Bay Area healthcare system, who confirmed that AI scribes are valuable because they save physicians precious time.)One of Nuance’s key competitors, startup **Abridge** , has passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, according to The Information’s Generative AI database. Abridge is part of a group of 19 AI native applications whose revenues we tallied in our Tuesday column.That column generated comments from subscribers about the value and efficacy of AI in the enterprise, so we would be remiss not to mention my colleague Aaron’s report yesterday on AI in cybersecurity. He cited a specific example of a technology firm cutting 40 people in its cybersecurity group because AI was automating much of their work._Lastly…_ While **Nvidia’s** latest quarterly report, which showed incredibly strong sales of AI chips, isn’t necessarily correlated with strong revenue from AI applications, it’s not nothing, either. The results included a revenue growth projection of 54% in the current fiscal quarter to $54 billion, which means that the major cloud providers who power the world’s AI apps are insatiably hungry for more data center capacity. Surely that means there’s demand for it! (Read more analysis about the results here.) | | A message from Google Cloud --- ### Beyond Search. Beyond Automation. Meet the AI Agent. The most powerful AI doesn't just give you an answer. It takes the next step for you. AI agents aren’t just reinventing work; they're redefining what’s possible in a workday. 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