“We had a speaker, a very senior person within the AI industry, suggest to us that within five years we would have a cure for 90 per cent of the cases within the world’s major diseases, including cancer.”

Many of you know I tend to use this column to warn of the consequences of what ails us—geo-politically, financially, economically, from a policy perspective or otherwise. I am therefore delighted to warn, in advance, this piece will be both optimistic in tone and encouraging in content.

One of our greatest single problems as a country and as a society is the burgeoning cost of healthcare: how to provide timely access and how to continuously improve the quality of outcomes and service. Help is on the way. I recently attended a conference, actually a multi-day retreat, focused on the intersection of AI and healthcare. All of the participants had relevant expertise in both areas far beyond my knowledge of either. I was there to learn. And learn I did.

There were two startling—at least to me—points I learned about the evolution of AI which some of you may already know but which I do not believe is widely understood. The first is the power of the latest versions of algorithms to reason. I had always understood the power of the Large Language Models (LLMs) was to aggregate huge amounts of data and then use that data to answer queries. Now the latest models are being programmed to interpret that data, to analyze and assess enormous amounts of relevant information so as to come to decisions, decisions which can be argued based on the interpretation of all this data. Think of a giant brain, equivalent to multiple Einsteins, to which you input vast amounts of information and then ask that brain what it means. Holy cow!

 

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