Microsoft Says Its New AI System Diagnosed Patients 4 Times More Accurately Than Human Doctors

The tech giant poached several top Google researchers to help build a powerful AI tool that can diagnose patients and potentially cut health care costs.

Microsoft has taken “a genuine step towards medical superintelligence,” says Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of the company’s artificial intelligence arm. The tech giant says its powerful new AI tool can diagnose disease four times more accurately and at significantly less cost than a panel of human physicians.

The experiment tested whether the tool could correctly diagnose a patient with an ailment, mimicking work typically done by a human doctor.

The Microsoft team used 304 case studies sourced from the New England Journal of Medicine to devise a test called the Sequential Diagnosis Benchmark (SDBench). A language model broke down each case into a ...