Alphabet Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google has started deploying its medical AI chatbot that can respond to questions, summarize documents, and more. The chatbot, Med-PaLM 2, is currently being tested by Mayo Clinic.
What Happened: Mayo Clinic, one of the largest hospital chains in the US, is currently testing Google's medical AI chatbot Med-PaLM 2, reported The Wall Street Journal. The chatbot is a variant of the PaLM 2 language model that is specifically tailored for medical institutions.
The PaLM 2 language model was announced at the Google I/O 2023 developer conference held in May this year. It is the same language model that also powers Google Bard, the AI chatbot that is currently available as an experiment to Google users.
Google has trained Med-PaLM 2 on questions and answers from medical licensing exams - given how sensitive the field is, the chatbot needs to be accurate both in terms of detection as well as responses. Google reportedly believes that this could prove to be useful in countries where access to doctors is "limited".
At its developer conference, Google demonstrated Med-PaLM 2's reasoning skills and the ability to generate answers. These answers were preferred by users over those generated by physicians.
Google Is Not Alone: Google is not the only tech major working on an AI chatbot for the healthcare industry. Rival Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) is also working on its own solution based on OpenAI's ChatGPT.