New in Nature: Google Agents Beat Human Doctors, Make Scientific Discoveries – With Vivek Natarajan and Anil Palepu
In this episode, Nathan Labenz speaks with Vivek Natarajan and Anil Palepu from Google DeepMind about their groundbreaking work on AMIE (Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer) and Co-Scientist. The conversation reveals how these AI systems are already outperforming human physicians in diagnostic accuracy and treatment recommendations, with AMIE now entering clinical trials at a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital. Even more remarkably, the Co-Scientist system demonstrates genuine scientific discovery capabilities, independently proposing the exact same mechanism for bacterial drug resistance that human scientists had recently discovered but not yet published—signaling a threshold moment where AI is becoming a legitimate thought partner in humanity's most complex intellectual endeavors.
SPONSORS:
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI): Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers next-generation cloud solutions that cut costs and boost performance. With OCI, you can run AI projects and applications faster and more securely for less. New U.S. customers can save 50% on compute, 70% on storage, and 80% on networking by switching to OCI before May 31, 2024. See if you qualify at https://oracle.com/cognitive
Shopify: Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, handling 10% of U.S. e-commerce. With hundreds of templates, AI tools for product descriptions, and seamless marketing campaign creation, it's like having a design studio and marketing team in one. Start your $1/month trial today at https://shopify.com/cognitive
NetSuite: Over 41,000 businesses trust NetSuite by Oracle, the #1 cloud ERP, to future-proof their operations. With a unified platform for accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR, NetSuite provides real-time insights and forecasting to help you make quick, informed decisions. Whether you're earning millions or hundreds of millions, NetSuite empowers you to tackle challenges and seize opportunities. Download the free CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at https://netsuite.com/cognitive
PRODUCED BY:
https://aipodcast.ing
CHAPTERS:
(00:00) About the Episode
(06:26) Introduction and Welcome
(07:49) AMY Medical Intelligence Overview
(11:29) Chat-Based Medical Interactions
(13:59) Specialized Medicine Results
(18:17) Co-Scientist System Headlines (Part 1)
(18:21) Sponsors: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) | Shopify
(21:36) Co-Scientist System Headlines (Part 2)
(26:32) Bacterial Drug Resistance Discovery
(31:41) AI Scientific Discovery Process
(35:35) Hallucinations vs. Creativity (Part 1)
(35:37) Sponsors: NetSuite
(37:10) Hallucinations vs. Creativity (Part 2)
(42:04) Agent Design Architecture
(49:17) Long Context Benefits
(55:35) Computational Requirements
(01:01:10) Specialist Models Integration
(01:07:01) Future Model Integration
(01:12:31) Tournament Evaluation Methods
(01:19:09) AI Question Generation
(01:22:42) Real-World Deployment Plans
(01:25:58) Outro
The AI Doctor Can See You Now, with Vivek Natarajan and Khaled Saab from Google
Dive into the future of medicine with Google researchers Khaled Saab and Vivek Natarajan, discussing the breakthroughs in AI for healthcare. Discover how AI doctors may soon provide high-quality medical advice, enhancing global access to healthcare. Learn about the innovative use of large language models in medical applications and the potential for AI to outperform human doctors. Listen as we explore the significance of AI's role in healthcare and its implications for future medical practices, featuring insights from leaders in AI research.
SPONSORS:
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds; offers one consistent price, and nobody does data better than Oracle. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive of OCI at https://oracle.com/cognitive
The Brave search API can be used to assemble a data set to train your AI models and help with retrieval augmentation at the time of inference. All while remaining affordable with developer first pricing, integrating the Brave search API into your workflow translates to more ethical data sourcing and more human representative data sets. Try the Brave search API for free for up to 2000 queries per month at https://bit.ly/BraveTCR
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off https://www.omneky.com/
Head to Squad to access global engineering without the headache and at a fraction of the cost: head to https://choosesquad.com/ and mention “Turpentine” to skip the waitlist.
RECOMMENDED PODCAST:
Byrne Hobart, the writer of The Diff, is revered in Silicon Valley. You can get an hour with him each week. See for yourself how his thinking can upgrade yours.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6rANlV54GCARLgMOtpkzKt
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-riff-with-byrne-hobart-and-erik-torenberg/id1716646486
CHAPTERS:
(00:00:00) About the Show
(00:04:34) Introduction
(00:06:35) Flamingo
(00:11:50) Importance of data quality
(00:13:29) Amy: AI doctor
(00:18:44) Simulation Learning Environment
(00:23:26) Sponsors: Oracle | Brave
(00:25:34) Training the Agents
(00:27:29) Tens of thousands of data points
(00:30:35) How to incorporate new knowledge
(00:33:21) MedGemini
(00:34:51) Sponsors: Omneky | Squad
(00:36:38) Uncertainty guided search
(00:39:29) Generalist models
(00:41:16) MedGemini, Gemini, multimodal, medical images
(00:44:57) Future work, integration, consolidation
(00:46:00) Cost of AI
(00:52:38) When will AI Doctors be Deployed?
(00:58:22) The Speed of Trust
(00:59:58) Societal Acceptance of AI Doctors
(01:02:06) Uncertainty-Guided Search
(01:06:02) Med-Gemini: Chest X-Rays and CT Scans
(01:17:38) AI Scientist
(01:20:01) What are the principles at play?
(01:22:58) What should we do about AI?
(01:28:24) LLM for democratizing access to care
(01:34:22) Final Message
(01:35:38) Closing
(01:36:45) Outro
E55: Google’s Multimodal Med-PaLM with Vivek Natarajan and Tao Tu
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Vivek Natarajan and Tao Tu of Google’s Med-PaLM, diving into how they used one of the world’s largest medical datasets ever compiled to develop Med-PaLM M, an AI agent specialized in medical tasks. In this episode, they discuss: Med-PaLM M's “clinically superhuman” abilities and limitations, the rigorous testing and validation that went into the model, and their vision for AI to take over repetitive clerical tasks and allow doctors to focus on patients.
We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Episode Preview
(00:00:56) Introducing Vivek Natarajan and Tao Tu
(00:04:18) The story of Google’s Medical AI research progress
(00:07:11) Multi-modal Med-PaLM
(00:10:32) Genomic data - how do you represent it?
(00:11:13) Google’s Deep Variant
(00:14:44) The successes and failures behind the incredible pace of progress
(00:15:02) Sponsors: Netsuite | Omneky
(00:21:54) Google’s research culture and assembling an interdisciplinary team
(00:31:36) Google’s Pathways
(00:33:40) Med-PaLM M's architecture
(00:37:28) Working with 3 different model sizes and what you learn
(00:46:56) Data and compute required for Med-PaLM M
(00:49:38) Med-PaLM M's cycle time
(00:54:56) Is a bridge or adapter structure worth implementing?
(01:00:09) Can we create an AI doctor?
(01:02:39) Emergent capabilities like identifying tuberculosis
(01:09:37) Reactions to these emergent capabilities
(01:11:13) Moving towards clinical trials and real-world testing
(01:13:01) Regulatory and safety considerations
(01:15:03) AI safety in the healthcare domain
(01:17:00) Potential to transform healthcare access worldwide
LINKS:
Med-PaLM: https://sites.research.google/med-palm/
Med-PaLM M paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14334
Our earlier conversation with Vivek Natarajan on Med-PaLM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPBd7i5tnEE
X/TWITTER:
@vivnat (Vivek)
@taotu831 (Tao)
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg
@CogRev_Podcast
SPONSORS: NetSuite | Omneky
Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive
NetSuite has 25 years of providing financial software for all your business needs. More than 36,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, gaining visibility and control over their financials, inventory, HR, eCommerce, and more. If you're looking for an ERP platform ✅ head to NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/cognitive and download your own customized KPI checklist.
Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
E27: “Google’s Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM2 with Vivek Natarajan”
Nathan sits down with Vivek Natarajan, research scientist at Google Health. Vivek leads the Google Brain moonshot behind Med-PaLM, Google’s flagship medical large language model, featured in The Economist, The Scientific American, CNBC, and Forbes. In this episode, they discuss the foundational models that Vivek and team built before Med-PaLM, the techniques used to develop Med-PaLM which will be of interest to anyone developing AI systems for high-stakes use cases, and the capabilities for Med-PaLM to equalize access to medical knowledge and care.
This episode is part of a series centered on talking to the people at the cutting edge of building AI-driven solutions in medicine.
We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.
LINKS:
https://sites.research.google/med-palm/
FEEDBACK / COLLABORATE WITH NATHAN:
Email: TCR@turpentine.co
TIMESTAMPS:
(00:00) Episode preview
(03:43) The story of how Med-PaLM came to be
(09:41) Building Med-PaLM’s infrastructure
(13:10) The US medical licensing exam as a measure of AI progress
(15:23) Sponsor: Omneky
(18:17) Practicality of benchmarking in real-world usage
(21:39) Overcoming the shortfalls of Flan-PaLM with Med-PaLM
(25:08) Choosing to use soft prompting over few shot prompting
(30:36) The process of training Flan-PaLM
(37:31) A curriculum approach to soft-prompting
(38:43) Layperson vs expert interactions with LLMs
(43:54) How did the Google team facilitate user exploration of the model’s capabilities?
(46:58) Shift in techniques from Med-PaLM to Med-PaLM2
(50:21) Using different prompting strategies with Med-PaLM2
(57:33) Is Med-PaLM 2 preferred over clinicians?
(01:02:28) Will there be a multimodal version of Med-PaLM?
(01:04:52) Breakthroughs required for AI to further advance human potential
(01:10:23) The Med-PaLM business plan
(01:12:08) Is there a vision for a consumer product?
(01:15:46) The pros and cons of pre-training a model
(01:19:45) Vivek’s favorite AI products
(01:21:01) Would Vivek get a Neuralink implant?
(01:23:08) AI hopes and fears
TWITTER:
@CogRev_Podcast
@vivnat (Vivek)
@labenz (Nathan)
@eriktorenberg (Erik)
SPONSORS:
Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of ALL eCommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries.From their all-in-one e-commerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. With free Shopify Magic, sell more with less effort by whipping up captivating content that converts – from blog posts to product descriptions using AI. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/cognitive
Thank you Omneky for sponsoring The Cognitive Revolution. Omneky is an omnichannel creative generation platform that lets you launch hundreds of thousands of ad iterations that actually work, customized across all platforms, with a click of a button. Omneky combines generative AI and real-time advertising data. Mention "Cog Rev" for 10% off.
This show is produced by Turpentine: a network of podcasts, newsletters, and more, covering technology, business, and culture — all from the perspective of industry insiders and experts. We’re launching new shows every week, and we’re looking for industry-leading sponsors — if you think that might be you and your company, email us at erik@turpentine.co.
Music Credit: MusicLM
More show notes and reading material released in our Substack: https://cognitiverevolution.substack.com/