Google's Medical AI Chatbot, Med-PaLM 2 Being Tested In US Hospitals: Report

Google has started testing its medical AI chatbot, Med-PaLM 2, in US hospitals, including the Mayo Clinic research hospital. The chatbot designed to answer medical questions is based on Google's PaLM 2, which was announced at Google I/O in May this year, Wall Street Journal reported. The chatbot is a variant of the PaLM 2 language model that is specifically tailored for medical institutions.

It is the same language model that also powers Google Bard, the AI chatbot that is currently available as an experiment to Google users.

As per the report, the AI chatbot has been in use since April which aims to answer medical queries and facilitate conversations on health-related matters. The chatbot is trained on a curated set of medical expert demonstrations to improve its healthcare conversation capabilities better than generalized chatbots like Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT.

Med-PaLM 2 will collect data from users testing it but it will be encrypted and Google will not have access to it.

According to an internal mail accessed by WSJ, Google believes its updated model can be particularly helpful in countries with ''more limited access to doctors.''

However, physicians found more inaccuracies and irrelevant information in the answers provided by Med-PaLM 2 compared to those provided by other doctors.

A senior researcher who worked on the project was quoted as saying the company is still in the early stages of developing the product. 

Senior research director Greg Corrado, said that while he wouldn't want it to be a part of his own family's ''healthcare journey,'' he believes Med-PaLM 2 ''takes the places in healthcare where AI can be beneficial and expands them by 10-fold.''