ChatGPT's Health Answers Improve: Free Model Rivals Top AI

OpenAI states that its free ChatGPT model, GPT-5.5 Instant, now performs comparably to its top Thinking models on health questions. This claim is based on the company's own health evaluations. What's interesting is that OpenAI reports a 71% drop in factuality problems for health responses over two months. They also conducted a comparison where a panel of physicians rated GPT-5.5 Instant's responses higher than physician-written ones across 3,500 reviewed responses, judging on criteria like accuracy and completeness. The company says this model showed fewer failure modes than older models and even the physicians. OpenAI works with over 260 physicians across 60 countries and has reviewed more than 700,000 example responses. The bottom line is that over 230 million people ask ChatGPT health and wellness questions weekly, making it a major use case. This update could mean more people get medical answers directly from ChatGPT, potentially impacting publishers and SEOs in the health sector.