Google Tests its AI Doctor Bot in Hospitals

Med-PaLM 2 is a new AI chatbot developed by Google Corporation. Its main purpose is to provide users with requested medical information, summarize documents, and compile health data packages. Since April of this year, this service has been tested at one of the largest research medical centers in the world, the Mayo Clinic (USA).

Chatbot Med-PaLM 2 was created based on the generative language model PaLM 2, presented at the large-scale Google I/O web developers conference held this year. For training Med-PaLM 2, specialists used content painstakingly gathered from health care experts. Google developers are convinced that the narrow "specialization" of the bot will improve the quality of its health-related answers compared to its AI peers, Bard, ChatGPT, and Bing.

During the study, the results of which became known in May, Med-PaLM 2 had issues with answer accuracy, common to many large language models. In terms of the accuracy and relevance of the information provided, this chatbot fell behind the doctors. However, on almost all other criteria (argumentation with evidence, consensus confirmation, correct understanding of the essence of the question), Med-PaLM 2 quite decently competed with its real-life colleagues.

Greg Corrado, Google's senior research director, emphasized that the development of Med-PaLM 2 is currently at an early stage, so there is no need to fear that this chatbot will replace doctors tomorrow. However, he stressed that such a service expands the capabilities and ways of using AI in the health care sector tenfold.

Google specialists are confident that their new development can be particularly useful for countries where residents face serious difficulties accessing doctors. However, nothing is yet known about the launch timeline of the medical chatbot or its release for public access.