Google’s medical chatbot technology, Med-PaLM 2, an AI tool designed to answer questions about medical information, has been in testing at the Mayo Clinic research hospital since April, reported The Wall Street Journal.
Clearly, there will be a clash of the titans between Google’s Med-PaLM 2 and Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, released in November last year, which set off a frenzied use of generative AI in daily tasks from writing to coding.
ChatGPT was developed by San Francisco-based startup OpenAI co-founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman and is backed in billions from Microsoft.
Google is betting that Med-PaLM 2 will be better at holding conversations on healthcare issues than “more general-purpose algorithms” because it has been fed questions and answers from medical licensing exams.
The healthcare industry is a lucrative battleground for big tech companies to win customers with AI offerings, though past efforts such as IBM’s Watson Health initiative have sometimes struggled to translate the technology into lasting profits.
Google is hoping to change all that with its Med-PaLM 2, which can be used to generate responses to medical questions and perform tasks such as summarizing documents or organizing reams of health data.
However, the business daily was quick to point out that generative AI tools present a “new set of risks” because they can be used to produce authoritative-sounding responses to medical questions, potentially influencing patients in ways that doctors wouldn’t necessarily want.
Physicians who reviewed answers provided by Med-PaLM 2 to over 1,000 consumer medical questions preferred the system’s responses to those produced by doctors along eight out of nine categories for evaluation defined by Google, according to research the company made public in May.
However, the doctors found Med-PaLM 2 included more inaccurate or irrelevant content in its responses than those of their peers, showing the program shares similar accuracy issues with other chatbots that have a tendency to confidently generate false statements. Clearly, therein lies the rub.
Still, in almost every other metric, such as showing evidence of reasoning or showing no sign of incorrect comprehension, Med-PaLM 2 performed more or less as well as the actual doctors.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is not sitting on its hands. The largest investor in OpenAI and its closest business partner, in April teamed up with the health software company Epic to build tools that can automatically draft messages to patients using the algorithms behind ChatGPT.
Contact the author Uttara Choudhury at uttara@proactiveinvestors.com
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