Google is now testing its AI tool Med-PaLM 2, which is designed to answer medical queries, since April at the Mayo Clinic research hospital.
The Med-PaLM 2 is a variant of PaLM 2, the language model that served as the foundation for Google's AI chatbot Bard.
Dr. Alan Karthikesalingam of Google Health reported an 85.4% performance rate in answering licensing exam-style questions.
What is Med-PaLM 2?
According to Google, PaLM is a language model from Google Research that boasts a 540 billion parameter.
To further test the abilities of Med-PaLM, the team examined and compared the quality of answers between a medical expert and the chatbot.
"Med-PaLM 2 also performed impressively on Indian medical exams, and it's the first AI system to exceed the passing score on those challenging questions," Karthikesalingam shared during The Check Up '23.
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Med-PaLM as the Building Block for Advanced Healthcare
Since the chatbot is still relatively new, Med-PaLM 2 still logs some inaccuracy and less comprehensive answers.
Despite of that, the AI chatbot has "performed more or less as well as the actual doctors," as reported by The Verge.
"The potential here is tremendous, but it's cruciail that real-world application are explored in a responsible and ethical manner," Karthikesalingam emphasized.
Customers who will take part in the testing will have control over their data. Google assured that the data will all be encrypted and the company will not have access to it.
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