Intro

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:

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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/