Your Next Doctor is a Chatbot? Language Models, Google Researchers, & MedPaLM-2

Large language models are already changing the business of search. But now they’re about to change the practice of medicine. Harry's guests, Vivek Natarajan and Shek Azizi, are both researchers on the Health AI team at Google, where they're pushing the boundaries of what large language models can achieve in specialized domains like  health. This spring their team announced it would start rolling out a new large language model called Med-PaLM 2 that’s designed to answer medical questions with high accuracy. (The model got an 85 percent score on the U.S. Medical License Exam, the test all doctors have to take before they’re allowed to practice.)  It's been clear for a while that consulting with an AI would eventually become an indispensable part of every medical journey—whether you’re a patient searching for information about your symptoms, or a doctor looking for an expert second opinion. And now that such a future is almost here, the work Vivek and Shek are doing at Google feels both exciting and a little bit scary.

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