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The leadership turmoil within OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is triggering calls for stepped-up efforts to establish standards for how generative AI is used across the health care industry, where experts worry that one or two companies could end up with too much control.

Microsoft was already a driving force behind efforts to deploy generative AI in health care when it offered to scoop up Sam Altman and Greg Brockman amid the shakeup at OpenAI. That plan is now moot, since the two executives have agreed to rejoin OpenAI with a reconstituted board. But the spectre of Microsoft’s influence, and commercial ambitions, remains.

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“There is a concern that we’re entering a sort of Coke or Pepsi moment where there will be a few big players in the generative AI…market and their systems will form the backbone of a lot of what is to come,” said Glenn Cohen, director of Harvard Law School’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy.

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