Brockman (OpenAI) foresees AI medical breakthroughs within 12-18 months and that death could become optional

OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman said at the WSJ Tech event that the major medical breakthroughs still expected from artificial intelligence will arrive within the next 12 to 18 months. According to the quote reported by TechSpot: "Having cures for diseases has also become a cliché in this field, but I think you're going to see real delivery and meaningful breakthroughs and real impact in biology, health and curing disease over the next 12 months, 18 months." He added that "we all suffer" and that the idea of death becoming optional is something that, in his view, "is possible."

The TechSpot article takes a skeptical tone. It notes that, given his position, Brockman will always tend to present AI as a path toward a potentially unlimited lifespan, and that the promise of major breakthroughs within 12 to 18 months has been circulating since the launch of ChatGPT. The outlet also points out that we are still waiting for AI to cure cancer, among other earlier promises.

Brockman is not alone in expressing this faith in AI's medical applications. The piece mentions Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who said last month that many AI researchers are so convinced the technology will cure cancer that they have taken up smoking, something he described as a "kind of mass psychosis, societal delusion." It also cites futurist Peter Diamandis, who said last year that the key to living much longer is not dying "of something stupid" before 2030, after which a combination of technologies, with AI as the engine, would make it possible to reach "longevity escape velocity." Bryan Johnson, the biohacking millionaire, argues that AI is one of the technologies that could ensure no disease is considered incurable. And Elon Musk said this year that longevity or semi-immortality is an "extremely solvable" problem because the body ages in a synchronized way: nobody has an old left arm and a young right arm, meaning we are programmed to die, but that programming could be changed.

TechSpot concludes that curing diseases such as cancer and making death optional still looks like the stuff of fantasy, and suggests ironically that these promises could serve to distract critics of data centers, which the industry calls "compute campuses."

These statements are best read for what they are: predictions from figures with a strong commercial interest in the sector, with the article offering no data, trials or concrete milestones to back up the 12-to-18-month timeline. It mentions in passing a link to another story about an AI-developed drug that reportedly made patients biologically younger in a clinical trial, but the content received provides no details on it, so it cannot be assessed.