Several hospitals, including the Mayo Clinic, have begun test-driving Google’s Med-PaLM 2, an AI chatbot that is widely expected to shake up the healthcare industry.
Med-PaLM 2 is an updated model of PaLM2, which the tech giant announced at Google I/O earlier this year. PaLM 2 is the language model underpinning Google’s AI tool, Bard.
Per internal emails obtained by The Wall Street Journal, Google is anticipating that Med-PaLM 2 will offer better medical advice because it has been fed questions and answers from medical licensing exams.
People familiar with the matter told the paper that Google has been testing the new system with different hospitals, including the research hospital Mayo Clinic, since April.
The Google logo as displayed at one of their offices. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant / AP Newsroom)
Google reportedly told employees around that time that quoted a researcher on the project as saying a model, trusted as a medical assistant could "be of tremendous value in countries that have more limited access to doctors."
It remains unclear when the program will be adopted more widely by hospitals and medical research institutions. A senior researcher who worked on the project was quoted as saying the company is still in the early stages of developing the product.