E27: “Google’s Med-PaLM and Med-PaLM2 with Vivek Natarajan”

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)

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Music Credit: MusicLM

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Release date

Lydbog: 21. maj 2023