Big quote: We're still waiting for AI to cure cancer, not to mention the many other things we were promised it would bring. But OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman is boldly confident that the technology will one day cure all that ails us – to the point that death could even become a choice.
Speaking at WSJ Tech, Brockman said the huge medical advancements we're still waiting for AI to enable will happen in the next year to year and a half.
"Having cures for diseases is something that's become also a trope in this field, but I think that you're gonna see real delivery and real significant strides and impacts on biology, health, and curing of diseases over the next 12 months, 18 months," he said.
"I think that we all suffer, that the question of even just thinking about death becoming a choice. All of this is possible."
Being OpenAI's president means Brockman is always going to laud AI as potentially allowing us to live forever, while the promise of huge breakthroughs in the next 12 to 18 months has been around since ChatGPT launched.
– Fireside Alpha (@firesidealpha) November 5, 2026
But Brockman isn't alone when it comes to faith in AI's future medical applications. Last month, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar claimed that many AI researchers are so sure the technology will cure cancer one day that they've taken up smoking. He referred to this as a "kind of this mass psychosis social delusion."
Others in the tech industry share similar beliefs. Futurist Peter Diamandis said last year that the key to living much longer is to not die "from something stupid" before 2030, after which point a combination of technologies, with AI the driving force, will help us achieve "longevity escape velocity."
Bryan Johnson, the biohacker millionaire famed for trying to fight off aging, said AI is one of the technologies that could ensure no condition is presumed incurable.
Then there's Elon Musk. He said this year that longevity or semi-immortality is an extremely solvable problem because the body ages in sync. He said nobody has an old left arm and a young right arm, so we are programmed to die, but we could change that programming to live longer.
– Fireside Alpha (@firesidealpha) November 1, 2026
Curing diseases like cancer and making death an option, however, still feels like the stuff of fantasy. But perhaps these sorts of promises will distract people complaining about "compute campuses," or data centers, as they are and always shall be called.
