Google is a crucial player in pushing the boundaries of innovation as artificial intelligence technology has been developing quickly across several industries.The beta release of Bard, an outstanding language model capable of producing fresh content and offering conversational responses, seems like it was only the tip of Google’s AI iceberg. The company has now unveiled Med-PaLM 2, an advanced medical chatbot that has the potential to transform the healthcare sector, building on the success of Bard.
Bard has already shown that it is capable of deciphering informal language andhandling math and coding questions, but Google’s new AI tool goes above and beyond these capabilities by concentrating solely on medicine. Med-PaLM 2 is an AI-powered chatbot that is meant to answer your medical questions as if you were having a conversation with a trained professional.
According toThe Wall Street Journal, the Mayo Clinic, among other institutions, began conducting extensive real-world testing of Med-PaLM 2 in April, highlighting its potential impact on the healthcare landscape (viaThe Verge). In addition to answering medical questions, the tool will be used to summarize documents and help parse large amounts of health data.
On the data gathering front, Google has ensured that customers like Mayo Clinic who test Med-PaLM 2 will retain full control of their data and that it will not be accessible to Google. In the future, healthcare companies might be able to deploy customized versions of the AI utility, but that’s not yet possible at this time.
The accuracy of responses and medical guidance will be an important barometer for Med-PaLM 2’s scalability. Even Google’s own Greg Corrado, who worked on Med-PaLM 2, voiced concerns: “I don’t feel that this kind of technology is yet at a place where I would want it in my family’s healthcare journey.” However, Google wants to guarantee the accuracy and dependability of the data produced by Med-PaLM 2 by using carefully vetted sets of medical expert demonstrations.
In response to challenges with its first version of Med-PaLM, Google introduced Med-PaLM 2, an advanced iteration that addressed the shortcomings of its predecessor. Leveraging enhancements from its base language model (PaLM 2) and trained on a database of questions and answers from medical licensing exams, Med-PaLM 2 set a new cutting edge by achieving a score as high as 86.5% on the MedQA dataset,improving on Med-PaLM by over 19%. The impressive performance extends to other critical datasets, including MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and MMLU clinical topics.
The introduction of AI chatbots like Med-PaLM 2 into the healthcare ecosystem can improve accessibility, accuracy, and patient outcomes. Despite potential concerns with the ethics of AI, Med-PaLM 2 could help bridge the gap in healthcare resources, particularly in underserved regions, by generating answers that would otherwise require access to a physician.
