Warner Concerned About Google’s AI Healthcare Chatbot
Google needs to be more transparent about its new healthcare AI chatbot, said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., in a letter to CEO Sundar Pichai Tuesday. Warner raised concerns about reports of Med-PaLM 2's inaccuracies. The chatbot is…
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designed to answer healthcare questions, summarize documents and organize data. Warner said, according to reports, senior researchers at Google have reservations about whether the technology is ready for public deployment. “I worry that premature deployment of unproven technology could lead to the erosion of trust in our medical professionals and institutions,” he wrote. Google believes AI “has the potential to transform healthcare and medicine" and is "committed to exploring with safety, equity, evidence and privacy at the core,” the company said Tuesday: Med-PaLM 2 will be available to a “select group of healthcare organizations for limited testing, to explore use cases and share feedback.” This group will retain control of the data, the company said. Google disagreed with the characterization that the tool is a chatbot, saying it’s a “fine-tuned version of our large language model PaLM 2, and designed to encode medical knowledge.”