OpenAI has closed its latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital, sharing plans to use the funding toward the next phase of at-scale AI, and in the development of an AI “superapp”.
Referring to its success in generating $2 billion in revenue per month, the company states: “This is commercial scale, and it is mission scale. The fastest way to widen the benefits of AI is to put useful intelligence in people’s hands early and let that access compound globally. AI is driving productivity gains, accelerating scientific discovery, and expanding what people and organisations can build. This funding gives us the resources to continue to lead at the scale this moment demands.”
OpenAI notes recent progress including the launch of GPT‑5.4 “with meaningful gains in intelligence and workflow performance”, the development of Codex into a flagship coding agent, and expansion into areas like health and commerce. Acknowledging the importance of compute in meeting increasing demand, it points to the broadening of its infrastructure strategy “beyond a small number of core providers to meet the scale and reliability requirements of global AI deployment”, and efforts to build out across multiple cloud partners, chip platforms, and co-design.
“The OpenAI flywheel is simple,” it states. “More compute drives more intelligent models. More intelligent models drive better products. Better products drive faster adoption, more revenue and more cashflow. That gives us the ability to reinvest and deliver intelligence more efficiently to consumers, enterprises, and builders around the world.”
Next steps include building an AI superapp, according to OpenAI, in order to improve usability and bring together ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and agentic capabilities into a single experience. The capital raised here will help build the infrastructure layer for the intelligence, it continues.
Earlier this year, OpenAI acquired Torch, a health data startup, for a sum of $100m+. According to the Torch website, the startup is focused on connecting health data from a wide range of sources and offering answers to common health questions using AI. It also announced the launch of ChatGPT Health, the result of work with more than 260 physicians across 60 countries and multiple specialities, designed to help support 230 million people who seek health and wellness guidance every week.
Wider trend: AI in health and care
We were joined for a practical HTN Now webinar taking a deep dive into AI in health and care by expert panellists Peter Thomas, chief clinical information officer and director of digital development at Moorfields Eye Hospital; Sally Mole, senior digital programme manager – digital portfolio delivery team at The Dudley Group; and Ananya Datta, associate director of primary care digital delivery, South East London ICS. The session shared approaches, best practices, challenges, successes and learnings for the practical implementation of AI technologies across health and care, with our panel offering insight into current work, future plans, and ongoing collaborations in areas such as Ambient AI.
The Scottish Government has published its five-year AI strategy to 2031 alongside an “AI Stack” detailing areas where action should be taken to ensure an effective response to AI as an emerging technology. By the end of the strategy’s lifecycle in 2031, the government hopes to achieve outcomes including equality of access “based on widespread literacy, trust and confidence in engaging with AI”, collective data stewardship and data sharing leadership to promote the safe use of data for good, embedded AI in critical national infrastructure to support public service delivery, and tech clusters and a pipeline of start-ups and scale-ups in national and international markets.
A study exploring informed consent for ambient documentation using generative AI in outpatient care has highlighted nuances including that patients are more likely to self-censor when talking about mental and sexual health or illicit activity during consultations. The study, published in Jama Network Open, was conducted from March to December 2024 in ambulatory practices across specialities in a “large urban academic health centre”, involving 18 clinicians and 103 patients in an operational proof-of-concept.
