Medical AI Chatbots Needs Standards—but Not From Google

Since the release of ChatGPT, there have been a lot of concerns about the dangers it poses. Some are justified, but most of them are so ridiculous that you wonder how we got this far as a species in the first place.

One very legitimate concern, however, was how these large language models (LLMs) would be used in places like hospitals and doctor’s offices. The stakes can be a matter of life and death, which means you might not want chatbots that are known to get things wrong—a lot of the time—to be making big decisions about your health. The risks haven’t stopped people from trying to build one, launching a race involving everyone from pharma bros to the Tech Giants.

That includes Google. Meet Med-PaLM 2, an LLM the company previously announced in May as a chatbot dedicated to answering medical questions. AI researchers at the company published a paper Wednesday in Nature detailing more about how Med-PaLM 2 works, and they also introduced a set of benchmarks that the researchers say can help evaluate AI chatbots for their efficacy and accuracy in the medical setting. The authors say that these metrics can help prevent or at least cut down on instances of bias and harm caused by LLMs.

Read more at The Daily Beast.