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OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

theguardian.com

281–290 of 500 posts

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#281
post #11

I'd be very very hesitant to trust studies like this. It's very easy to mess up these benchmarks. See for example this recent paper where AI managed to beat radiologists on interpreting x-rays... when the AI didn't even have access to the x-rays: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.21687 (on a pre existing "large scale visual question answering benchmark for generalist chest x-ray understanding" that wasn't intentionally mess…

I agree with you on this specific study, however, I can't really wrap my head about the fact that doctors will be better than AI models on the long-run. After all, medicine is all about knowledge, experience and intelligence (maybe "pattern recognition"), all those, we must assume that the best AI models (especially ones focusing solely in the medical field) would largely beat large majority of humans (aka doctors),…

Ah, the classic "let's be objective and ignore key constraint that is inconvenient for SV tech bro hype"

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is the specific capability (or combination of capabilities) that people believe will remain permanently (or at least for decades) where a top medical AI cannot match or exceed the performance of a good human doctor? Let's put liability and ethics aside, let's be purely objective about it. You cannot simply put liability and ethics aside, after all there's Hippocatic oath that's fundamental to the practice physi…

Assume if you know for certain that AI has better senstivity and specificity than your local physician for the particular diagnosis, which likely would be the case now or in few years. Would you purposefully get inferior consultation just because of Hippocatic oath?

This almost the plot of “minority report.”

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on this specific study, however, I can't really wrap my head about the fact that doctors will be better than AI models on the long-run. After all, medicine is all about knowledge, experience and intelligence (maybe "pattern recognition"), all those, we must assume that the best AI models (especially ones focusing solely in the medical field) would largely beat large majority of humans (aka doctors),…

To answer your question: talking to a human. Medicine is so much more than "knowledge, experience, and pattern matching", as any patient ever can attest to. Why is it so hard for some people to understand that humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology?

Yeah... No. I can't possibly disagree with this view more.

I don't need to "talk to a human", I need a problem with my meatbag resolved.

> humans need other humans and human problems can't be solved with technology

WTF are you talking about? Is this bait? You can't possibly mean this. Yes humans are social creatures, but what does that have to do with medicine? Are you talking about a priest, a witch doctor, a therapist? Because if you're not, that sentence is utter BS.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on this specific study, however, I can't really wrap my head about the fact that doctors will be better than AI models on the long-run. After all, medicine is all about knowledge, experience and intelligence (maybe "pattern recognition"), all those, we must assume that the best AI models (especially ones focusing solely in the medical field) would largely beat large majority of humans (aka doctors),…

>What is the specific capability (or combination of capabilities) that people believe will remain permanently (or at least for decades) where a top medical AI cannot match or exceed the performance of a good human doctor? Let's put liability and ethics aside, let's be purely objective about it. You cannot simply put liability and ethics aside, after all there's Hippocatic oath that's fundamental to the practice physi…

What do imperfect, biased and expensive human doctors add to the « liability and ethics » question exactly?

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#285
post #11

I'd be very very hesitant to trust studies like this. It's very easy to mess up these benchmarks. See for example this recent paper where AI managed to beat radiologists on interpreting x-rays... when the AI didn't even have access to the x-rays: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.21687 (on a pre existing "large scale visual question answering benchmark for generalist chest x-ray understanding" that wasn't intentionally mess…

In a study like this, there’s also a difference in motivation. An AI will mechanically “take the study seriously.” I’m not convinced the doctors will.

But when making decisions about a real patient’s care, a doctor will be operating under different motivations.

They can also refer patients to a specialist, defer a diagnosis until they have more information, use external resources, consult with other doctors.

Doctors aren’t chatbots. They are clinical care directors.

Presuming there are no issues with information leakage, it’s genuinely impressive AI can perform this level of success at a specific doctoring skill. That doesn’t make it a replacement for a doctor. It does make it a useful tool for a doctor or a patient, which is exactly what we’re seeing in practice.

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An AI will not pick up on any of that. It will if it trains on data like that. It's all about the training data.

The user will be adversarial and probably learn new tricks to trick the machine, this is not solvable (only) via training data.

We have that expression “garbage in, garbage out.

My sense is that doctors and AI would be doing a lot better if they were just doing medicine, not being a contact surface for failures of housing, mental health and addiction services, and social systems. Drug seeking and the rest should be non-issues, but drug seekers are informed and adaptive adversariesz

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#288
post #49

I'm surprised at both the article and the paper - both seem very hyperbolic. This is LLMs competing against doctors in a way that is heavily weighted in the LLMs favour, which does not represent clinical practice. These reasoning cases are not benchmarks for doctors, they are learning tools. I think it's important to note that diagnosis also relies on accurate description of the patient in the first place, and the in…

At many (otherwise) world-leading facilities even just reviewing the patient history is a slog. There is rarelly any ability to keyword search the records or even filter the records by location, title and occupation of the healthcare professional making it, etc. Especially very ill people will have hundreds and hundreds of recent entries.

And stepping through those entries isn’t like browsing a modern local-first app [1], where you will just scroll through dozens of entries in milliseconds. It’s not like the slightly older and slightly slower Gmail interface. You’re clicking on each record and waiting 400ms-3s for it to load, as if instead of a 25Gb fiber connection you’re on dialup requesting the record from Epic’s headquarters in the US and proxying them via Australia.

[1] https://bugs.rocicorp.dev/p/roci

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is the specific capability (or combination of capabilities) that people believe will remain permanently (or at least for decades) where a top medical AI cannot match or exceed the performance of a good human doctor? Let's put liability and ethics aside, let's be purely objective about it. You cannot simply put liability and ethics aside, after all there's Hippocatic oath that's fundamental to the practice physi…

What do imperfect, biased and expensive human doctors add to the « liability and ethics » question exactly?

You can't hide behind "computer says no".

Re: OpenAI’s o1 correctly diagnosed 67% of ER patients vs. 50-55% by triage doctors

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What is the specific capability (or combination of capabilities) that people believe will remain permanently (or at least for decades) where a top medical AI cannot match or exceed the performance of a good human doctor? Let's put liability and ethics aside, let's be purely objective about it. You cannot simply put liability and ethics aside, after all there's Hippocatic oath that's fundamental to the practice physi…

Assume if you know for certain that AI has better senstivity and specificity than your local physician for the particular diagnosis, which likely would be the case now or in few years. Would you purposefully get inferior consultation just because of Hippocatic oath?

I agree. I think this is some sort of excuse to not use AI because of some vague metaphysical reason like liability.
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