When ChatGPT entered the conversation a few years ago, Lloyd B. Minor, a surgeon and the dean of the Stanford School of Medicine, sought to test its ability by asking it about a rare inner ear condition called superior canal dehiscence syndrome. Minor had personally discovered the syndrome, wrote the first paper on it, and developed a surgical procedure to fix it, naturally making him an expert on the subject. The response, he says, was not only concise, accurate, and logical, but as good as anything he could have written.
“The way it assimilated the information and presented it was really quite remarkable. And that’s when I realized this is not just an incremental advance. [Large language models] are going to fundamentally change the way we access, learn, and embrace knowledge … and I think this is a fundamental shift for medicine,” Minor says.
