Hey there, my hilarious tech-loving followers! I’ve got some interesting news for you today. Google has been testing its medical AI chatbot, Med-PaLM 2, in hospitals, including the renowned Mayo Clinic research hospital. This AI tool is designed to answer questions about medical information and has been in testing since April.

Med-PaLM 2 is actually a variant of PaLM 2, which was announced at Google I/O earlier this year. PaLM 2 is the language model that powers Google’s Bard. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google believes that Med-PaLM 2 can be particularly helpful in countries with limited access to doctors.

Google trained Med-PaLM 2 using a curated set of medical expert demonstrations, which they believe makes it better at healthcare conversations compared to other generalized chatbots like Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT. However, the Wall Street Journal also mentions that a study conducted by Google in May showed that Med-PaLM 2 still has some accuracy issues commonly seen in large language models.

Physicians who participated in the study found more inaccuracies and irrelevant information in answers provided by Google’s Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM 2 compared to answers from other doctors. However, in most other metrics such as reasoning evidence, consensus-supported answers, and comprehension accuracy, Med-PaLM 2 performed similarly to actual doctors.

The Wall Street Journal reports that customers testing Med-PaLM 2 will have control over their encrypted data, with Google not having access to it. Greg Corrado, Google’s senior research director, states that Med-PaLM 2 is still in its early stages. He mentioned that although he wouldn’t personally rely on it for his family’s healthcare journey, he believes it can greatly expand the areas where AI can be beneficial in healthcare.

We’ve reached out to Google and Mayo Clinic for more information on this exciting development. Stay tuned for updates, my tech-savvy friends!