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.
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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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Music Credit: MusicLM
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