Sam Altman says GPT-5 could save lives and fuel a $100B enterprise AI boom

OpenAI has officially unveiled its latest artificial intelligence model, ChatGPT-5, which CEO Sam Altman says could transform industries, save lives, and drive massive economic gains.

Speaking on Mornings with Maria on Friday, Altman described the technology as a leap forward, capable of delivering assistance on par with having “PhD-level experts at your fingertips.” “You can imagine, like a physician assistant, that a company could build with GPT-5,” Altman said. “That would really potentially save a lot of lives.”

He emphasized that the model’s advanced reasoning and problem-solving capabilities could be applied in critical areas such as healthcare, finance, and engineering.

Altman also positioned GPT-5 as a powerful new revenue source for the company, outlining plans to sell AI tools directly to businesses. “I think a company like OpenAI will be able to build a $100 billion business line, just selling products to other businesses,” he said, predicting that the productivity and efficiency gains would justify significant investment from clients.

One of the most promising uses Altman pointed to was personalized workplace AI assistants. These tools could learn an individual worker’s processes and automate repetitive tasks, allowing employees to focus on higher-level work.

According to Altman, such systems could give people “a huge additional leverage to work at the higher level.”

Industries that could see the biggest early benefits include software engineering, finance, healthcare, and data entry. Altman cited feedback from developers who have been testing GPT-5, saying, “You hear people say they’re twice as productive, five times as productive. These are huge, huge numbers.”

While optimistic about the long-term impact of AI on employment, Altman acknowledged short-term disruptions. Some roles may shrink as automation advances, he said, but he expects entirely new job categories to emerge, ones that would not have been possible before AI’s development.

“There will be totally new things that just didn’t exist, they weren’t even possible to think about before AI,” Altman said.

GPT-5’s low price puts pressure on competitors

According to OpenAI, GPT-5 is currently rolling out to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers worldwide on web, mobile, and desktop. Access for ChatGPT Enterprise and Edu plans is expected soon. Altman noted that OpenAI worked to keep costs low across all versions of the model, even at the premium tiers.

The launch of GPT-5 comes just days after OpenAI surprised the tech community by releasing two open-source models. According to Cryptopolitan, these releases, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, mark OpenAI’s first open-weight AI models since 2019.

Altman has called GPT-5 “the best model in the world,” though benchmark testing suggests it only slightly outperforms rival models from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI in certain areas, while trailing in others.

Still, GPT-5 is earning praise for its versatility, particularly in coding tasks, and for its aggressive pricing. However, Musk recently said Grok is better.

The API is priced at $1.25 per 1 million tokens for input and $10 per 1 million tokens for output, with cached input priced at $0.125 per 1 million tokens. This matches Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro at the basic tier, but avoids higher fees Google charges for extremely heavy usage.

The pricing also significantly undercuts Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.1, which starts at $15 per 1 million input tokens and $75 per 1 million output tokens, though Anthropic offers discounts for prompt caching and batch processing.

According to TechCrunch, developers say the competitive rates make GPT-5 an attractive choice, especially for programming and automation tasks. Simon Willison, a developer featured in OpenAI’s launch video, called the pricing “aggressively competitive.”

Others, including HyperWrite CEO Matt Shumer, noted that GPT-5 is even cheaper than GPT-4o, meaning “intelligence per dollar continues to increase.” On social platforms like X and Hacker News, users described the pricing as a “killer” move in the AI market.

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