Here’s what’s on our plate today:

• 📰 OpenAI’s risky push into consumer healthcare.

• 🧠 Chad IDE gets real, Grok rewrites history, and Sony upgrades PS5.

• 🧪 Roko’s Pro Tip: Trust is the product, not the feature.

• 🗳️ Monday Poll: Is AI ready for your health data?

Let’s dive in. No floaties needed…

The Laboratory

Inside OpenAI’s healthcare push

Since the 1960s, computer systems have been used to enhance healthcare. In the early days, machines were primarily used for storing patient data and curating information. However, with advancements in tech, they moved beyond storage and into diagnosis.

With further progress in diagnostic tech and miniaturization of devices, the idea of personal fitness trackers was born. This received further impetus during the COVID-19 pandemic, where trackers and technology were used to emulate physical contact between patients and healthcare providers.

Today, the healthcare industry faces another transformation. AI chatbots are reshaping how people seek medical information, even as regulators reconsider how health data should be governed.

OpenAI’s big bet on health care

According to reports, OpenAI is looking to move beyond its area of expertise, which is developing AI models and chatbots. And looking to build consumer health products, including a generative AI-powered personal health assistant.

The news comes close on the heels of the release of HealthBench, an open-source benchmark developed by OpenAI for assessing the capabilities and safety of AI systems in healthcare.

Together, they represent OpenAI's attempts to capture the digital health market, which is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2025-2030) of 6.14%, resulting in a projected market volume of $219.60 billion by 2030.

According to Statista, a large section of the digital health market will be digital treatment and care with a total revenue value of $87.19 billion in 2025.

The company plans to tap into this market by launching tools ranging from a conversational health assistant to data aggregation features.

OpenAI’s strategy has been in the making for some time now. The company hired Nate Gross in June 2025 to lead healthcare strategy. It also hired Ashley Alexander as VP of Health Products, signaling long-term commitment rather than experimental side projects.

At the HLTH 2025 conference, Gross highlighted that a large section of ChatGPT's 800 million weekly active users come to the platform with medical questions, hinting that the company may be working to tap into the healthcare market.

Even before Gross talked about healthcare and chatbots, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had stated that it was one of ChatGPT's top use cases.

As such, for OpenAI, the timing could not have been better. The healthcare industry’s reliance on technology is growing; the company already has a good user base, and other companies do not seem interested in the market, at least not as of now.

Besides, consumer preferences are also shifting. Consumers who once relied solely on Google for health information now increasingly turn to large language models for discovery through conversational processes.

This behavioral shift, where users are already asking ChatGPT health questions at a massive scale, represents an organic entry point that previous attempts lacked.

Additionally, LLMs have become increasingly sophisticated at extracting meaning from complex information, making intuitive health data management more achievable now than when earlier attempts failed.

The conversational nature of ChatGPT aligns with how people naturally ask health questions, eliminating the need to navigate medical jargon or complicated portals.

These could ease OpenAI’s entry into the healthcare industry and even help it avoid the pitfalls that led Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to failure to remain relevant in this specific area.

Learning from big tech’s failures

Google Health launched in 2008 and was shuttered by 2012 due to poor marketing and low traction. According to a survey, only 7% of respondents had ever used a personal health record service. Another 50.6% said they’d never even been exposed to the idea of one.

The fundamental error: expecting patients to manually compile their own records.

Microsoft's HealthVault, launched in 2007, officially shut down in November 2019 after failing to attract widespread adoption. Despite partnerships with major institutions, Microsoft struggled to create a sustainable business model, and integrations with companies like Fitbit were abandoned.

Amazon's consumer health ambitions met similar fates: Amazon wound down its Halo fitness tracker business in 2023 after privacy concerns and market resistance.

The pattern among the three was consistent. Vendors ignored relevance and perceived usefulness when designing personal health records, offering them merely as places to store data with low trust and high perceived risks.

HealthVault focused on traditional health records over dynamic, patient-acquired data, lacked integration with popular wearables, and had limited social sharing capabilities. More damningly, it was not designed for mobile, the final nail in the coffin.

What gives OpenAI an edge

OpenAI, with its conversational chatbots, already has an edge over earlier attempts. Additionally, it knows, based on earlier examples, what not to do, opening up new opportunities for how it wants to manage its business.

Another important thing that may go in OpenAI’s favor is that there is now a robust mechanism for companies to share and access data in the U.S.

Companies like Health Gorilla and Particle Health provide the secure data connectivity needed to make healthcare AI viable.

Similarly, Particle Health connects data from more than 270 million patients through a single API, helping solve the fragmentation that derailed earlier ventures. Analysts say OpenAI could partner with such firms to avoid the legal and technical risks of handling patient records directly.

The consumer healthcare market itself is vast but mature. However, despite the favorable market conditions, a solid strategy and timing, OpenAI has its work cut out.

The real obstacles: regulations, trust, and accuracy

Healthcare poses far tougher challenges for AI companies than most industries. Any system handling patient data must comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), requiring strict encryption, access controls, and legal agreements with hospitals and insurers. OpenAI hasn’t said if it can meet these standards.

But regulation isn’t the only obstacle; trust is. Past failures like Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault weren’t due to bad tech but low user trust and poor physician involvement.

OpenAI faces the same challenge, compounded by concerns about how it might use sensitive data to train its models. Building a system where patients truly control their data will be crucial.

Even with strong technology, engagement remains low. Most people still don’t manage their own health records, and experts doubt they will start now.

Overcoming privacy concerns

Meanwhile, ChatGPT’s medical reliability remains questionable. Studies point out that the information provided by ChatGPT remains comparable to the information that can be found through a Google search. However, they do say that LLMs could become the future standard for patients and health care professionals to gather medical information.

Finally, while large hospitals may be equipped to integrate AI tools, smaller clinics lack the resources or infrastructure to participate. Unless OpenAI can bridge that gap, its healthcare ambitions risk being limited to elite systems, leaving most of the market out of reach.

Regardless of the challenges, OpenAI is expected to launch its consumer health platform as soon as it can address healthcare regulations, form partnerships, and build privacy infrastructure.

Healthcare is not another software frontier to be quickly conquered; it is a heavily regulated ecosystem built on slow trust, intricate compliance, and deeply personal stakes.

The company would need to navigate complex frameworks like HIPAA, establish data-sharing agreements with hospitals and insurers, and design infrastructure that protects patient privacy while enabling seamless access to information.

If OpenAI manages this, it could achieve what earlier attempts, such as Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, could not. That vision, though, remains far from certain.

The odds are stacked against any new entrant, no matter how technically capable. Most consumer health platforms have faltered not because their technology failed, but because people never fully trusted them to handle their most intimate data.

For OpenAI, trust will be the true test. While its vast user base gives it reach, the same data-driven foundation that fuels its AI models may become a liability in a sector where privacy is paramount.

OpenAI’s options in health care

Success would then hinge on building systems that assure users that their health data will never be used to train models or feed monetization pipelines, a promise few companies have convincingly kept.

In the best-case scenario, OpenAI could form strong partnerships with health data intermediaries and regulators, using its natural language capabilities to simplify healthcare access and coordination.

More realistically, it might pivot toward a business-to-business model, selling tools and APIs to hospitals, insurers, and digital health firms rather than to patients directly, a safer path that many tech giants have eventually chosen.

Yet there is also the possibility that this effort, like others before it, could quietly fade once the reality of healthcare’s regulatory, financial, and trust barriers sets in.

Whether this becomes a healthcare revolution or just another chapter in Silicon Valley’s long experiment with digital health will depend not on AI’s intelligence, but on its ability to earn and sustain human confidence.

Roko Pro Tip

Bite-Sized Brains

• YC funds a shitpost IDE: Chad, the chaotic ‘brainrot’ dev environment, is a real Y Combinator-backed product.

• Musk’s AI bot boosts Trump lies: X’s Grok chatbot falsely claimed Trump won in 2020. The incident raises fresh alarm bells about AI hallucinations.

• Sony drops new PS5 hardware: A sleek QHD monitor and DualSense charging station just launched.

Monday Poll

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