Comment by PollardsRho

It's hard to characterize the entropy of the distribution of potential diseases given a presentation: even if there are in theory many potential diagnoses, in practice a few will be a lot more common.

It doesn't really matter how much better the model is than random chance on a sample size of 5, though. There's a reason medicine is so heavily licensed: people die when they get uninformed advice. Asking o1 if you have skin cancer is gambling with your life.

That's not to say AI can't be useful in medicine: everyone doesn't have a dermatologist friend, after all, and I'm sure for many underserved people basic advice is better than nothing. Tools could make the current medical system more efficient. But you would need to do so much more work than whatever this post did to ascertain whether that would do more good than harm. Can o1 properly direct people to a medical expert if there's a potentially urgent problem that can't be ruled out? Can it effectively disclaim its own advice when asked about something it doesn't know about, the way human doctors refer to specialists?