I'd be very very hesitant to trust studies like this. It's very easy to mess up these benchmarks.

See for example this recent paper where AI managed to beat radiologists on interpreting x-rays... when the AI didn't even have access to the x-rays: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.21687 (on a pre existing "large scale visual question answering benchmark for generalist chest x-ray understanding" that wasn't intentionally messed up).

And in interpreting x-ray's human radiologists actually do just look at the x-rays. In the context the article is discussing the human doctors don't just look at the notes to diagnose the ER patient. You're asking them to perform a task that isn't necessary, that they aren't experienced in, or trained in, and then saying "the AI outperforms them". Even if the notes aren't accidentally giving away the answer through some weird side channel, that's not that surprising.

Which isn't to say that I think the study is either definitely wrong, or intentionally deceptive. Just that I wouldn't draw strong conclusions from a single study here.

The paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz4433 (April 30, 2026)

Besides for myself and wife, I've also used LLMs to diagnose my dogs. Convinced there's a huge opportunity for AI based veterinary, especially one which then performs bidding across the local veterinary clinics to perform the care/surgeries. I've noticed that local vets vary in price by more than an order of magnitude. My 80 year old mother and mother inlaw have been regularly scammed by over charging vets, and with their dogs being a major part of their lives, they extremely susceptible to pressure.

I'll repeat my idea on how this MUST be done:

1. AI gets data about the patient and makes a diagnosis. This is NOT shown to doctor yet.

2. Doctor does their stuff, writes down their diagnosis. This diagnosis is locked down and versioned.

3. Doctor sees AI's diagnosis

4. Doctor can adjust their diagnosis, BUT the original stays in the system.

This way the AI stays as the assistant and won't affect the doctor's decision, but they can change their mind after getting the extra data.

Yes, but what was the overlap

I think this is more a commentary on how bad ER diagnosis is.

It is easy to overinterpret this based on the headline, the doctors were actually at a slight disadvantage. This isn't how they normally work, this is a little more like a med school pop quiz:

  An AI and a pair of human doctors were each given the same standard electronic health record to read – typically including vital sign data, demographic information and a few sentences from a nurse about why the patient was there. The AI identified the exact or very close diagnosis in 67% of cases, beating the human doctors, who were right only 50%-55% of the time.... The study only tested humans against AIs looking at patient data that can be communicated via text. The AI’s reading of signals, such as the patient’s level of distress and their visual appearance, were not tested. That means the AI was performing more like a clinician producing a second opinion based on paperwork.

"I don't know, let's run more tests" is also a very important ability of doctors that was apparently not tested here. In addition to all the normal methodological problems with overinterpreting results in AI/LLMs/ML/etc. Sadly I do think part of the problem here is cynical (even maniacal) careerist doctors who really shouldn't be working at hospitals. This means that even though I am generally quite anti-LLM, and really don't like the idea of patients interacting with them directly, I am a little optimistic about these being sanity/laziness checkers for health professionals.

This is a rather new article about an old model...

o1 is several generations old and was released in 2024. Is this some quite old research that took a long time to get published?

would it ever diagnose incorrectly to save more lives? kinda weird an ai would decide who die so others may survive, but i guess whatever.

I’ve had much better luck with diagnosis of my own family’s issues than with doctors. Usually now, I’m feeding them more information to begin with, so that their 30 minute office visits are not wasted, requiring another expensive follow up appointment.

While I’m sure there can be ways in which such studies are wrong, it’s very obvious that AI can accelerate work in many of these areas where we seek out professional help - doctors, lawyers, etc.

Now show me the result of Triage Doctors with aided AI help

Unfortunately, from my understanding Doctors don't necessarily diagnose for accuracy, they often diagnose to limit liability.

They aren't going to take a stab at an uncommon diagnosis even if it occurs to them, if they might get sued if they're wrong.

Edit: I'm not trying to say Doctors deliberately diagnose wrong. Just that if there are two possible diagnoses, one common that matches some of the symptoms and one rare that matches all symptoms, doctors are still much more likely to diagnose the common one. Hoofbeats, horses, zebras, etc

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Humans could not diagnose and treat me correctly. They almost killed me. Curious where I could feed my symptoms and the same data I gave to an ER to an AI to test it.

The Guardian needs to raise their bar on what to report and how to give readers full context on the ongoing NFT AI trust me bro crypto scam and that context would be that it is a mathematical model of human language and not medical expert or replacement for one.

I’d love to see a follow to that radiologist evaluation, where it failed so miserably on the thing it was supposed to be the best at that now there’s a shortage of radiologists.