Gell-Mann Amnesia kicks in hard as soon as the LLM topic changes to a profession other than our own. It’s much easier to believe an LLM can outperform someone else doing their job than to believe that it’s a good idea to replace your own work with an LLM.

The number in the headline isn’t even a good comparison because they asked doctors to make a diagnosis from notes a nurse typed up. Doctors are trained to be conservative with diagnosing from someone else’s notes because it’s their job to ask the patient questions and evaluate the situation, whereas an LLM will happily leap to a conclusion and deliver it with high confidence

When they allowed both humans and doctors access to more information about the case, the difference between groups collapsed into statistical insignificance:

> The diagnosis accuracy of the AI – OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model – rose to 82% when more detail was available, compared with the 70-79% accuracy achieved by the expert humans, though this difference was not statistically significant.

Talking to my medical professional friends, LLMs are becoming a supercharged version of Dr. Google and WebMD that fueled a lot of bad patient self-diagnoses in the past. Now patients are using LLMs to try to diagnose themselves and doing it in a way where they start to learn how to lead the LLM to the diagnosis they want, which they can do for a hundred rounds at home before presenting to the doctor and reciting the script and symptoms that worked best to convince the LLM they had a certain condition.