Tweet author here. First vet was incompetent. Second vet was highly skilled and very professional, I am 100% confident they would have been able to place the correct diagnosis regardless.

If we continued staying with the first vet without getting a second opinion, she definitely would have died. On the other hand, if the first vet had access to specialized AI medical diagnostics tools, she wouldn't have died. I think that's the key takeway here.

I think it's also worth pointing out this was less about GPT placing a certain diagnosis, and more about it swaying me in the right direction (i.e. away from listening to bad doctor's advice, and towards looking for a second/opinion trying something else). When the first vet said "welp, don't know what else to do, we gave her the treatment and there's nothing else it can possibly be, so we're just going to monitor her and see how things go", I stayed up all night asking GP4 various things, and no matter which way I sliced it, it was obvious something didn't add up

People should be getting a 2nd opinion regardless. Too many people don’t shop around with their health care providers enough and the say things like “GPs are useless”, “physiotherapists are useless”.

Some are bad, some burn out, some are over worked, just like all professions.

Question is, would an incompetent, overworked person take the time and humility to actually ask the AI? You did, because you cared. With incompetent or overworked people, the problem is often that they just don’t care, or have no capacity to care. Being able to ask the proper question is almost always 80% of the solution. In your case, the first vet, it seems to me, wasn’t even asking the question.

Indeed, this is a call to fix the process by requiring or strongly encouraging consulting the big electronic brain.

Historically (1800s), doctors did not feel the need to wash their hands between patients, leading to poor outcomes and death. It had to be mandated, leading to improved outcomes. Same thing.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/handwashi...

> Problem arises when People will blindly follow the diagnosis by GPT.

In this case, the problem would have been blindly following the doctor's advice – not ChatGPT's. The medical professional was wrong. Lethally wrong. If there is a lesson here about the trustworthiness of AI, then there is also a lesson about the trustworthiness of the average doctor.

In the future we will need an *ist word for when someone unreasonably privileges the opinion of a human over the output of an equally competent (or better) AI.

We need that word now, considering how GPT-4 is performing at major exams compared to human professionals.

GPT-4 is better than the average human professional today. This isn't some hypothetical future we are talking about.

Better than the average human professional...at taking tests.

Not better at being a useful doctor able to intake a patient and get to the bottom of an unspecified disease. Both doctors and AI are generally poor at doctoring. Only a small fraction of doctors are good at being doctors. No LLM is good at being a doctor.

At a subset of tests the GPT was most suitable for.

I don’t think there is a need to invoke blindspots and such. Many doctors, let alone vets, are just dangerously incompetent and GPT is a godsend.