[HN Gopher] Meditron: A suite of open-source medical Large Langu...
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Meditron: A suite of open-source medical Large Language Models
Author : birriel
Score : 58 points
Date : 2023-11-28 19:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| gardenfelder wrote:
| Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16079
| 2023throwawayy wrote:
| This is the only part of AI that actually terrifies me.
|
| I've run into people on this very site who use LLMs as a doctor,
| asking it medical questions and following its advice.
|
| The same LLMs that hallucinate court cases when asked about law.
|
| The same LLMs that can't perform basic arithmetic in a reliable
| fashion.
|
| The same LLMs that can't process internally consistent logic.
|
| People are following the medical "advice" that comes out of these
| things. It will lead to deaths, no questions asked.
| rolisz wrote:
| Following the advice of chatgpt without double checking? Bad
| idea.
|
| Using ChatGPT as a starting point? Sounds really good to me,
| been there, done that.
| twayt wrote:
| Yea I think this is the most reasonable take.
|
| You can always check information before believing or acting
| on it.
|
| However it's often super difficult to even get started and
| know what it is that you should be reading more about.
| leetharris wrote:
| The reality is that the majority of things people want to go to
| the doctor for are not serious.
|
| If this can help with that, I am all for it.
| bilsbie wrote:
| On the contrary modern medicine terrifies me. Something like
| this might be our only hope.
| geek_at wrote:
| Chat GPT and that Amazon Healthcare thing will be more
| efficient than the US Healthcare system. Which is kind of
| crazy
| firebot wrote:
| It should. Most medicine is just extracting plant chemicals,
| modifying them, concentrating them, and thereby they can
| patent what nature has provided.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Wait until you hear about search engines ...
| techwizrd wrote:
| I used to work on a healthcare AI chatbot startup before
| traditional LLMs like BERT. We were definitely worried about
| accuracy and reliability of the medical advice then, and we had
| clinicians working closely to make sure the dialog trees were
| trustworthy. I work in aerospace medicine and aviation safety
| now, and I constantly encounter inadvisable use of LLMs and a
| lack of effective evaluation methods (especially for domain-
| specific LLMs).
|
| I appreciate the advisory notice in the README and the
| recommendation against using this in settings that may impact
| people. I sincerely hope that it's used ethically and
| responsibly.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Sure, but we already have 250,000 medical deaths PER YEAR in
| the US due to medical errors
| (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28186008/).
|
| I don't think people should trust LLMs completely, but let's be
| real, they shouldn't trust humans completely either.
| blipmusic wrote:
| Isn't that whataboutism at its best? Those two things are
| completely unrelated.
| mannyv wrote:
| No, it's showing that the risk of errors exists even
| without AI.
|
| AI doesn't necessarily make that risk higher or lower a
| priori.
|
| Plus if you knew how much of current medical practice
| exists without evidence you wouldn't be worrying about AI.
| blipmusic wrote:
| Maybe it's ok to worry about both? Not trusting
| "arbitrary thing A" does not logically make "arbitrary
| thing B" more trustworthy. I do realise that these models
| intend to (incrementally) represent collective knowledge
| and may get there in the future. But if you worry about
| A, why not worry about B which is based on A?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's not whataboutism at its best, no. Just as with self-
| driving cars, medical AIs don't have to be perfect, or even
| to cause zero deaths. They just have to improve the current
| situation.
| davidjade wrote:
| Here's a recent (yesterday) example of a benefit though.
|
| I tried unsuccessfully to search for an ECG analysis term (EAR
| or EA Run) using Google, DDG, etc. There was no magic set of
| quoting, search terms, etc. that could explain what those terms
| were. Ear is just too common for a word.
|
| ChatGPT however was able to take the context of the question I
| had (an ECG analysis) and lead me to the answer right away of
| what EAR meant.
|
| I wasn't seeking medical advice though, just a better search
| engine with context. So there are clearly benefits here too.
| nhinck2 wrote:
| Ectopic Atrial Rhythm?
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| On the other hand, your MD is going to look for the obvious, or
| statistically relevant, or currently prominent disease.
|
| But they could be presented 99% probability for flu, 1% or
| wazalla, and that testing for wazalla means pinching your ear
| tout may actually be correctly diagnosed sometimes.
|
| It is not that MDs are incompetent, it is just that when
| wazalla was briefly mentioned during their studies, they
| happened to be in the toilets and missed it. Flu was mentioned
| 76 times because it is common.
|
| Disclaimer: I know medicine from "House, MD" but also witnessed
| a miraculous diagnosis on my father just because his MD
| happened to read an obscure article
|
| (for the story, he was diagnosed with a worm-induced illness
| that happened one or twice a year in France in the 80's. The
| worm was from a beach in Brazil, and my dad never travelled to
| Americas. He was kindly asked to provide a sample of blood to
| help research in France, which he did. Finally the drug to heal
| him was available in one pharmacy in Paris and in Lyon. We
| expected a hefty cost (though it is all covered in France), it
| costed 5 franks or so. But we were told with my brother to keep
| an eye on him as he may become delusional and try to jump
| through the window. The poor man cold hardly blink before we
| were on him:) Ah, and the pills were 2cm wide, looked like they
| were for an elephant. And he had 5 or so to swallow)
| firebot wrote:
| What's to be terrified about? Humans also hallucinate. Doctors
| are terrible at their jobs.
| 094459 wrote:
| Is this open source? It says the model is the Llama license which
| is NOT open source.
| firebot wrote:
| I like this is a pun of Metatron.
| vessenes wrote:
| Very brief summary of the paper: there aren't any new technical
| ideas here, just finetuning a 70B model on curated medical
| papers, using self-consistency CoT sampling.
|
| Results: @70B: Better than GPT3.5, better than non-fine tuned
| Llama, worse than GPT-4.
|
| 70B gets a human passing score on MedQA. (Passing: 60, Medtron:
| 64.4, GPT-3.5: 47, GPT-4: 78.6).
|
| TLDR: Interesting, not crazy revolutionary, almost certainly
| needs more training, stick with GPT-4 for your free unlicensed
| dangerous AI doctor needs
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(page generated 2023-11-28 23:00 UTC)