Medical artificial intelligence tool Med-PaLM 2 from Google has been undergoing tests since April, including at the Mayo Clinic research hospital, writes The Wall Street Journal.

Med-PaLM 2 is intended for answering questions on medical topics. It is a variant of PaLM 2, which was announced at the Google I/O conference in May of this year. PaLM 2 is the language model underlying Google Bard.

According to Google’s internal correspondence, the company believes its updated model could be particularly useful in countries with “more limited access to doctors.”

Med-PaLM 2 was trained on a specially selected set of demonstrations by medical experts. According to Google, this will make it better in medical conversations than generalized chatbots like Bard, Bing and ChatGPT.

According to a Google study released in May, Med-PaLM 2 still has some accuracy issues compared to other doctors’ responses. However, in almost every other metric, such as evidence of reasoning or or showing no sign of incorrect comprehension, Med-PaLM 2 performed more or less the same as real doctors.

Customers testing Med-PaLM 2 will be in control of their data and Google will not have access to it. So far this tool is still in its early stages.

It was previously reported that in California and Wisconsin (USA) generative artificial intelligence OpenAI ChatGPT helps doctors prepare answers to online patient questions.