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AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors
(www.technologyreview.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2025
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I feel like this is the self driving car thing again.
How often are human doctors wrong in their diagnoses?
How often are LLM doctors wrong in their diagnoses?
I'm pretty sure the former is close to 75%, and the latter substantially less. I've heard of so many people go to doctor after doctor and not get the right diagonsis or treatment for whatever they have going on, and it takes 5+ to find the one who figures it out and gets them treated.
Well, I won’t make up numbers (like you did) but two things
The thing that LLMs are great at is taking a LOT of datapoints and coming to a conclusion based on all of them.
Humans can look at a few but get overwhelmed.
if you feed a ton of diagnostic data including past incidents, blood test, perhaps DNA tests, i'm pretty sure LLMs will be able to better figure out a diagnosis than a doctor using traditional methods.
When users self-diagnose, they're often wrong, because they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Garbage in garbage out regardless of the entity trying to process it.
This study is one that put doctors against a LLM, 90% accuracy for chatgpt, 74% for doctors not using LLM tool. https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2024/12/03/ai-diagnosis-ec
So chatgpt wrong 10% of the time, doctor wrong 26% of the time. 2.6x worse failure rate by real docs... for that one anyway. The better the data for chatgpt, the better it's diagnosis. Humans probably won't get much better, but LLMs? I bet they will.
We're likely to have an intermediary step where HCPs handle the symptoms, testing, etc and then it's fed into a medical focused LLM. The LLM will output potential diagnosis for a doctor to review for sanity, even though the doctor is probably less accurate it will make everyone feel better, and then the doc will slap a diagnosis on their profile.
LLMs will be infinitely better than humans at figuring out drug interactions (it's just a big fucking database), allergies (they can't forget you're allergic to NSAIDs like my wife is, and who routinely has been given them by HCPs who fuck up.) Who knows what else.