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: [email protected]

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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