Comment by simianwords
5 hours ago
I came across this company called OpenEvidence. They seem to be offering semantic search on medical research. Founded in 2021.
How could it possibly keep up with LLM based search?
5 hours ago
I came across this company called OpenEvidence. They seem to be offering semantic search on medical research. Founded in 2021.
How could it possibly keep up with LLM based search?
It is a little more than semantic search. Their value prop is curation of trusted medical sources and network effects--selling directly to doctors.
I believe frontier labs have no option but to go into verticals (because models are getting commoditized and capability overhang is real and hard to overcome at scale), however, they can only go into so many verticals.
> Their value prop is curation of trusted medical sources
Interesting. Why wouldn't an LLM based search provide the same thing? Just ask it to "use only trusted sources".
They're building a moat with data. They're building their own datasets of trusted sources, using their own teams of physicians and researchers. They've got hundreds of thousands of physicians asking millions of questions everyday. None of the labs have this sort of data coming in or this sort of focus on such a valuable niche
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I don't think you can use an LLM for that. For the same reason you can't just ask it to "Make the app secure and fast"
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Yes, they can. We have gotten better at grounding LLMs to specific sources and providing accurate citations. Those go some distance in establishing trust.
There is trust and then there is accountability.
At the end of the day, a business/practice needs to hold someone/entity accountable. Until the day we can hold an LLM accountable we need businesses like OpenEvidence and Harvey. Not to say Anthropic/OpenAI/Google cannot do this but there is more to this business than grounding LLMs and finding relevant answers.
> Why wouldn't an LLM based search provide the same thing? Just ask it to "use only trusted sources".
Is that sarcasm?
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Much of the scientific medical literature is behind paywalls. They have tapped into that datasource (whereas ChatGPT doesn't have access to that data). I suspect that were the medical journals to make a deal with OpenAI to open up the access to their articles/data etc, that open evidence would rely on the existing customers and stickiness of the product, but in that circumstance, they'd be pretty screwed.
For example, only 7% of pharmaceutical research is publicly accessible without paying. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7048123/
Do you think maybe ~10B USD to should cover all of them? For both indexing and training? Seems highly valuable.
Edit: seems like it is ~10M USD.