Google in the middle of testing medical AI chatbot in hospitals

Google has launched Med-PaLM 2, which is a large language model (LLM) designed to answer medical questions, and it has been going through tests at various hospitals since April 2023.

The company had Med-PaLM 2 take off at its I/O event in May 2023, and it is a variant of Google’s PaLM 2 — the LLM powering Google Bard.

The trained Med-PaLM 2 by Google works on a specific set of medical demonstrations, which the company said will make it better at providing medical information than generalised alternatives like Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT.

Reports say an internal email revealed that Google believes Med-PaLM 2 can be particularly helpful in countries with “more limited access to doctors.” Under the same breath, the email also mentioned research that Google made public in May 2023, highlighting some of the inaccuracy issues plaguing Med-PaLM 2.

Studies revealed how physicians noted more inaccuracies and irrelevant information in answers provided by Google’s Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM 2 than those provided by other doctors. Even though that’s the case however, every other metric showed that Med-PaLM 2 performed almost equivalently to the other doctors.

Customers that will test Med-PaLM 2 will have control over their data, which is encrypted and won’t be accessible to Google.

Greg Corrado who is Google’s senior research director told the Wall Street Journal that Med-PaLM 2 is still in the early stages, adding that he wouldn’t want it to be a part of his own family’s healthcare journey.

Corrado also believes Med-PaLM 2 “takes the places in healthcare where AI can be beneficial and expands them by 10-fold”.