Google's medical AI chatbot is already being tested in hospitals

Google has been testing a chatbot based on the Med-PaLM 2 language model at the Mayo Clinic research hospital since April 2023.

Here's What We Know

Med-PaLM 2 is a variant of PaLM 2, which was announced at Google I/O in May 2023. According to the developers, the updated model could be particularly useful in countries with "more limited access to doctors".

Med-PaLM 2 has been trained on a set of medical expert demonstrations. This allows it to have better conversations about healthcare than generalised chatbots such as Bard, Bing and ChatGPT, Google believes.

The article also mentions a study published by Google in May. It found that Med-PaLM 2 still suffers from some accuracy problems: the model is more likely to make mistakes than a professional doctor.

However, on almost all other measures, such as presence of reasoning, consensus support for answers or lack of evidence of misunderstanding, the language model performed better than real doctors.

Source: The Verge