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Comment by SJC_Hacker | Hacker News Reader

As a consumer, if the AI was truly better why would you want to accept substandard care because younger docs need “practice” ?

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If I needed someone to build me a complicated application, I would choose the software developer with 20 years of experience before LLM's were capable of helping software developers that uses LLM's to assist over the software developer with 1 year of experience that never learned to code and just uses LLM's for everything but is clueless as to how any of it works.

Same thing with doctors.

But you’ve arrived at the ER and the attending staff are oversubscribed, so you have interns and residents primarily trying to keep you alive. Sure, if you are a VIP you’ll get extra special care, but most of us aren’t.

Most ER work is urgent but familiar even to junior staff, and a lot of it is not life-threatening either. If they need to 'keep you alive' then they are following established protocols, not asking an LLM for advice.

> If they need to 'keep you alive' then they are following established protocols, not asking an LLM for advice.

Why not ? A bit of glue (or duct tape) should help anybody. /s

1. This a claim from Microsoft not a peer reviewed study on pubmed. So it's a marketing title nothing more

2. Even some ideal frontier model is only as accurate as the inputs given for diagnosis, and will typically bias towards said inputs.

3. Multi-modal can handle images but are terrible at image classification unless using dedicated models for each pathology.

4. The very large majority of traning corpus with these companies is in English. There is zero guarantee that said mythical performance is preserved across languages.

5. The very thought of companies with the moral compass of most AI companies accessing and training on your medical records should make anyone pause.

How do you make corn when you’ve eaten all the seed?

You make more of the artificial one.

other industries by and large have been able to figure out how to separate novice practitioners away from actual public utility until they're ready to participate.

I don't claim to know whether that could be done feasibly for medicine, I only point out that medicine is uncommon in how it educates.

Medicine is uncommon because there are no practice pieces for a lot of things. This isn't about learning stitches, this is about learning how to interact with a human, figure out what is going on, what tests and checks and options to even order.

Which, coincidentally, won't be solved by AI anytime soon. You'd need a full anthropomorphic robot (it needs to look human for a lot of people to interact with it on a sufficient level), and the ability to distinguish bias from experience from prejudice. (A lot of humans suck at that as well, to be fair.)

Any medical AI at this level will only be as good as the human medical professional using it, and it will make preexistent human-caused bias/prejudice problems much worse.

(Largest one I'm aware of: not being male is an appallingly large handicap to getting properly and correctly diagnosed, even in Western countries.)

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