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

11/07/2023

Google has been testing its AI tool, Med-PaLM 2, at the Mayo Clinic research hospital since April. Med-PaLM 2 is an updated version of PaLM 2, which is the language model used for Google’s Bard. The tool is designed to answer medical questions and is expected to be particularly useful in countries with limited access to doctors. It was trained on medical expert demonstrations and Google believes it will perform better in healthcare conversations than other chatbots. While Med-PaLM 2 still faces accuracy issues, it will provide users with control over their data, which will be encrypted and inaccessible to Google.

According to Google senior research director Greg Corrado, Med-PaLM 2 is still in its early stages and he believes it can expand the areas where AI can be beneficial in healthcare. The tool showed comparable performance to actual doctors in most metrics, although it had more inaccuracies and irrelevant information. While the Lisa computer is seen as a flop today, it played a significant role in introducing user-friendly computing and its legacy may be fading as new technologies like AR, VR, and AI chatbots emerge.