Google testing medical AI chatbot in hospitals
Google’s Med-PaLM 2 is a large language model (LLM) designed to answer medical questions, and it has been in testing at several hospitals since April 2023, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The tech giant launched Med-PaLM 2 at its I/O event in May 2023, and it is a variant of Google’s PaLM 2 — the LLM powering Google Bard.
Google trained Med-PaLM 2 on a specific set of medical demonstrations, which the company said will make it better at providing medical information than generalised alternatives like Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT.
According to the Wall Street Journal, an internal email revealed that Google believes Med-PaLM 2 can be particularly helpful in countries with “more limited access to doctors.”
It also mentioned research that Google made public in May 2023, highlighting some of the inaccuracy issues plaguing Med-PaLM 2.
The study revealed that physicians noted more inaccuracies and irrelevant information in answers provided by Google’s Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM 2 than those provided by other doctors.
However, every other metric showed that Med-PaLM 2 performed almost equivalently to the other doctors.
Customers testing Med-PaLM 2 will control their data, which is encrypted and won’t be accessible to Google.
Google’s senior research director Greg Corrado told the Wall Street Journal that Med-PaLM 2 is still in the early stages, adding that he wouldn’t want it to be a part of his own family’s healthcare journey.
However, Corrado believes Med-PaLM 2 “takes the places in healthcare where AI can be beneficial and expands them by 10-fold”.
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