Google, Microsoft and startups test out generative AI in healthcare

"It's been five months since Microsoft-backed OpenAI released its generative large language model ChatGPT, followed by GPT-4 in March.

Now, tech giants and startups are off to the races to test out the potential for LLMs and generative AI tools in medicine, clinical settings and research.

This week, Google announced it's releasing a version of its medical LLM, called Med-PaLM 2, to a limited group of users. "It will be available in coming weeks to a select group of Google Cloud customers for limited testing, to explore use cases and share feedback as we investigate safe, responsible, and meaningful ways to use this technology," Google Cloud leaders Aashima Gupta and Amy Waldron wrote in a blog post.

The tech giant continues to invest in medical large language model research. LLMs are AI tools that demonstrate capabilities in language understanding and generation. Google developed Med-PaLM 2 late last year as a version of PaLM tuned for the medical domain to more accurately and safely answer medical questions, Google executives said during the company's annual The Check Up event last month.

Google claims that Med-PaLM 2 was the first LLM to perform at an “expert” test-taker level performance on the MedQA data set of US Medical Licensing Examination-style questions, reaching 85%-plus accuracy, and it was the first AI system to reach a passing score on the MedMCQA data set comprising Indian AIIMS and NEET medical examination questions, scoring 72.3%..." Lire la suite