This doesn't really surprise me given my experience with doctors. If it's a common problem then doctors do fine. As soon as you're not the common case or have something somewhat rare, it becomes a bit of a crap shoot, at least in the UK when you deal primarily with your GP (general practitioner).<p>I have a friend with Crohn's who was feeling low energy. I was a gym bro at the time and convinced him to take a testosterone test (because all problems re caused by low T when you're a gym bro).<p>His doctor wouldn't even entertain the idea, saying he's a young man and it's very unlikely that he'd have low T. He did the test privately and his T is significantly below normal. If you Google, there are actually many papers showing correlation between Crohn's and low T. I bet an AI would find it.<p>Similarly, doctors missed my mum's recent cancer diagnosis. She also had factors that would make her more susceptible to breast cancer, googling finds many papers that show causation.<p>The problem is that those things aren't extremely common and haven't made their way to NICE guidelines or whatever GPs use.<p>Not that I'm blaming doctors, they have 10 minute appointments and don't have time to do anything. I'm sure AI would recommend significantly more lab tests which would put even more pressure on the NHS.
If it's not already obvious, LLMs are going to be doing most of the mental work currently performed by doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.<p>I have already nearly stopped using Google search for anything, in favor of GPT-4.<p>GPT-4 has helped me very quickly prototype things that I normally would have had to spend hours researching.<p>GPT-4 has also created custom curriculum for me to help me learn various things for which I have struggled to find good books/tutorials online.<p>There will always be many areas in which a solid human intellect and well-honed human judgment is still useful, but much of the less critical work will yield to LLMs.<p>If we call the difference between GPT-3 and GPT4 1x, then I would expect to see a 2x-5x improvement in LLM capability within the next few years just based on how much great work has recently gone into shrinking really big models so they can run on smaller hardware.<p>LLMs are not digital human minds, they are simply very good information synthesizers. Information synthesis happens to be what most white collar professionals get paid to do with their brains.
We are doing similar work at GenHealth.ai and getting sota results on some evals (not yet published). Our approach is very different from LLMs in that we are using a medical coding vocabulary and we are training transformers on actual patient histories. We have an API if anyone here wants to build on it. Oh and we are hiring
In poor countries there aren't enough doctors. Billions of people don't have access to healthcare and that won't change until the country becomes wealthier. Public healthcare that covers everyone <i>can't</i> happen because the reality of poverty makes it impossible. For these billions of people, the valid comparison isn't human doctor vs AI, it's no treatment vs AI. I am extremely optimistic about the positive role of AI in medicine for this reason.
Differential diagnosis >
Machine differential diagnosis: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_diagnosis" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_diagnosis</a><p>CDSS: Clinical Decision Support System: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_decision_support_system" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_decision_support_syst...</a><p>Treatment decision support:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_decision_support" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatment_decision_support</a> :<p>> <i>Treatment decision support consists of the tools and processes used to enhance medical patients’ healthcare decision-making. The term differs from clinical decision support, in that clinical decision support tools are aimed at medical professionals, while treatment decision support tools empower the people who will receive the treatments</i><p>AI in healthcare:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_healthcare" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence_in_hea...</a>