ChatGPT is “a better doctor than 99% of doctors,” billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has claimed. He believes that artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly valuable tool in healthcare despite expected policy resistance to AI-powered medicine. In an interview with the New York Post, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder argued that AI systems can process medical information at a scale that is not possible for individual physicians and said the technology will become more common in patient care.“There are going to be policy efforts to prevent AI or robotic medicine from happening, but the capabilities for sure are going to exist. I mean, Dr ChatGPT is a better doctor than 99% of doctors. Doctors hate it when you say it, but it just is. It really is,” he said.The healthcare comments come weeks after Andreessen argued that AI systems were outperforming humans in software development. During an appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience last month, he said AI coding agents offered practical advantages because they could work continuously and complete tasks without the limitations associated with human workers. At that time, Andreessen also predicted that AI agents would eventually become common across professions, including law, writing and medicine, with human workers increasingly relying on AI systems to assist with their work.
Marc Andreessen on how AI can support doctors
Discussing how AI can support doctors, Andreessen has pointed to an AI-powered medical platform his company has invested in, called OpenEvidence. He said, “We have all these new companies. We have this company Open Evidence. It’s actually the AI medical service that a lot of the doctors use. And it’s sweeping the medical field. And it’s great, by the way.”According to Andreessen, AI should be viewed as a tool that gives doctors quicker access to medical research and clinical information rather than relying entirely on human memory.“So as the patient, you really want this, because you want your doctor to have state of the art AI, only to just have all of the information at their fingertips because no human doctor could possibly read all the medical literature and keep up with it every year. So even just to be able to know what the latest results are,” he added.He also highlighted the challenge of managing multiple medications for patients with several health conditions.“I mean [to] give you an example, like drug conflicts. When people get sick, they don’t know over time, especially older people, they don’t tend to get sick with just one issue. They tend to have three, five, seven, ten different things going on. Then they get three, 7, 10, different kinds of medication that they’re supposed to take. And then there are drug interactions, and it’s quite complicated, but I think just the fact that Dr ChatGPT is just so good out of your pocket, I think it’s going to kind of force the issue,” Andreessen added.However, Andreessen did not cite data to support his claim that ChatGPT outperforms 99% of doctors. The use of AI in the healthcare industry has been analysed in various studies with mixed results. In a 2024 study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, patients rated the AI’s answers as more empathetic and helpful than those of physicians. But medical experts who reviewed the answers found several potentially dangerous responses.Another 2026 study in Nature Medicine tested the health system from OpenAI’s ChatGPT on 60 clinical scenarios. Researchers say the chatbot failed to recommend emergency care in more than half of the true emergency cases included in the study.
