In a high-stakes area like health, trusting companies to evaluate their own products could prove unwise, especially if those evaluations aren’t made available for external expert review. And even if the companies are doing quality, rigorous research—which some, including OpenAI, do seem to be—they might still have blind spots that the broader research community could help to fill.

“To the extent that you always are going to need more health care, I think we should definitely be chasing every route that works,” says Andrew Bean, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute. “It’s entirely plausible to me that these models have reached a point where they’re actually worth rolling out.”

To hear developers tell it, these health products are now being released because large language models have indeed reached a point where they can effectively provide medical advice. Dominic King, the vice president of health at Microsoft AI and a former surgeon, cites AI advancement as a core reason why the company’s health team was formed, and why Copilot Health now exists. “We’ve seen this enormous progress in the capabilities of generative AI to be able to answer health questions and give good responses,” he says.

But that’s only half the story, according to King. The other key factor is demand. Shortly before Copilot Health was launched, Microsoft published a report, and an accompanying blog post, detailing how people used Copilot for health advice. The company says it receives 50 million health questions each day, and health is the most popular discussion topic on the Copilot mobile app.