While PaLM 2 cannot replace doctors, it is going to be hard to work without one – AI in healthcare will improve work efficiency, the quality of diagnoses and treatment outcomes, and automate specific care processes.
At Alphabet's annual Google I/O conference, the big tech company unveiled a new large language model (LLM) to compete with ChatGPT. Called Bard, it supports more than 100 languages and gets A's on language and medical tests. It will soon be integrated into platforms like Gmail to write emails autonomously.
What does this mean for healthcare?
PaLM 2, the Pathways Language Model, is more critical than Bard for medicine. With 540 billion parameters, it draws knowledge from scientific papers and websites, can reason logically, and perform complex mathematical calculations.
Google plans to release 25 new products and features based on PaLM 2. One of them is for doctors – during the event, Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, demonstrated how AI could describe X-rays. You just need to ask the AI system the right question like "What is on this picture" or "Can you write me a report analyzing this chest x-ray?".
Doctors to learn prompts
Later this summer, Med-PaLM 2 will be made available to a select group of customers using Google's Cloud. They will have the opportunity to test the model, and their feedback should then be used to further improve it. The company aims to synthesize data from images and electronic medical records to improve patient outcomes in the future.
This development highlights the importance of physicians mastering the ability to formulate commands (prompts) to communicate seamlessly with artificial intelligence. Prompts refer to the AI language that allows us to ask AI to perform specific tasks, such as describing a mammogram or generating a creative image in a chosen style.
The first hospitals are hiring AI engineers to test ChatGPT and LLMs
Boston Children's Hospital posted a job listing for an "AI Prompt Engineer" – a specialist in AI query handling. Candidates must have experience in AI and machine learning. Their task will be to test the use of ChatGPT in healthcare and hospital activities.
Using Large Language Models (LLMs) requires specific skills, particularly in formulating queries (i.e., prompts). The accuracy of the algorithms' responses depends on this. Is learning the use of an AI language soon to be included in medical school and continuing education curricula? It is pretty likely.
The job advertisement published by Boston Children's Hospital offers insights into the necessary knowledge and experience. The AI Query Creation Engineer will be responsible for the following:
- Designing and developing AI queries using large language models (e.g., ChatGPT) and other solutions emerging from healthcare research and clinical practice;
- Collaborating with researchers and clinicians to understand their needs and to design AI queries for data collection;
- Implementing machine learning models for data analysis;
- Refining language models;
- Testing and evaluating AI query performance;
- Optimizing existing query libraries and machine learning best practices;
- Helping other team members build AI queries;
- Tracking the progress of AI in healthcare.
