alt Hacker NewsAnyone else want their doctor to have access to LLMs? They need to verify, but to just cut them off from something with that much breadth seems insane.
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> They need to verify, but to just cut them off from something with that much breadth seems insane.
...homeboy here is behaving as if there aren't experts in this world who are paid to do and publish research and other experts who are paid to collate, analyze, vet, and publish that research for other domain experts to learn from. [0]
I'm fine with my doctor reading from expert-vetted documents. Hell, I'm more than fine with my doctor going through expert-vetted checklists; most of the time what's wrong with you can be easily figured by going through a few good checklists. I'm not fine with my doctor relying on a lossy-compressed database with a absentminded librarian that has a penchant for people-pleasing bolted on top.
I'm absolutely not against the use of ML systems in safety-critical domains like medicine, but I am absolutely against the use of LLMs in those domains.
[0] One might choose to retort with some variant of "But all that expert work is so expensive!". I would retort: "First, without that work the data fed into the LLM is catastrophically unreliable. Second, have you bothered to look at how much the major LLM manufacturers have spent over the past five years or so? I suspect that it's more money than has been spent on medical research 'meta analysis' over the past fifty years."
I would prefer my doctor to have access to LLMs, just as I would prefer them to have access to google.
What I meant is different though. I fully expect to no longer have access to human doctors in a decade or two. Instead, LLMs will be the doctors. Likely government accredited ones. And my point is that in time, whether the LLM doctor is better or worse will not matter. Same with judges, same with the surveillance camera evaluators and private message examiners. I am saying we no longer have any mechanisms to stop these things from happening.