Altman wins Axel Springer Award, hails AI for doctors and patients

Sam Altman, boss of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, has received the Axel Springer Award in Berlin, using the occasion to call for a greater role for artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare.

"One of the things we really pushed on with GPT-5 was to make it good at answering health questions," Altman said at the ceremony on Wednesday. "We've seen over the last couple of versions people using ChatGPT more and more to help managing their healthcare journey and it's gotten quite good."

"We wanted to push that hard with GPT-5 and work with physicians. Doctors use it to provide better healthcare, but patients and people use it a lot for questions. So I have no doubt that's going to go much, much further," Altman said.

Asked by Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Döpfner about the global political climate, Altman expressed concern: "I worry that democracy and the associated values like freedom of expression, that make it work, are under increasing attack globally," he said.

Axel Springer is a major German media company known for publishing newspapers, such as Bild, and digital media outlets, like Politico.

The non-monetary award recognizes entrepreneurs who have transformed markets. Altman, 40, is the ninth recipient, with past honorees including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Tesla chief Elon Musk and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

The release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 sparked global interest in artificial intelligence. According to OpenAI, the chatbot now has nearly 700 million weekly users.