Google testing medical AI chatbot Med-PaLM 2, to expertly answer questions

Google is testing an artificial intelligence (AI) programme to expertly answer questions about medical information, the media reported.

According to The Verge, Google's AI tool -- Med-PaLM 2 (a variant of PaLM 2), has been in testing at the Mayo Clinic (a non-profit organisation based in the US) research hospital, among others, since April.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.

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PaLM 2 is the language model underpinning Google's Bard.

According to the report, the tech giant believes that its improved model will be especially useful in places with "more limited access to doctors".

Google believes Med-PaLM 2 will be better at healthcare conversations than generalised chatbots such as Bard, Bing, and ChatGPT because it was trained on a curated set of medical expert demonstrations.

Moreover, the report mentioned that the customers testing Med-PaLM 2 will control their data, which will be encrypted, and Google won't have access to it.

As per Google's senior research director Greg Corrado, Med-PaLM 2 is still in its early stages.

Corrado stated that, while he would not want it to be a part of his own family's "healthcare journey", he believes Med-PaLM 2 "takes the places in healthcare where AI can be beneficial and expands them by 10-fold".

Meanwhile, Google has updated its privacy policy, stating that it can use publicly available data to help train its artificial intelligence (AI) models.

The tech giant changed the wording of its policy over the weekend and switched "AI models" for "language models".